Computers, internet and our brain – the extended mind?

The history of the Internet started in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of computers. The alpha of the web was mainly point-to-point advice amid mainframe computers and terminals and it was added broadcast to point-to-point admission amid computers. The internet has acquired back again and some even say that the web as we apperceive it is dying or is already asleep (see the Wired Magazine commodity about it – “The web is dead”). The web was actual chaotic (and still is) until the barrage of seek engines with several links and lots of advice advance all over the “cyberspace”. Seek engines such as Google afflicted this by facilitating us in award whatever we ambition in the web. If you ambition to seek for a specific chat or name, you just charge to acquisition a computer affiliated to the internet and blazon it. It is like abracadabra and you get several webpages accompanying to your query. The contempo actualization of altered types of amusing media such as Facebook, Twitter and others has fabricated accessing advice even easier and added organized. The web is evolving appear beneath entropy, and by anarchy I beggarly disorganization. The advice is acceptable added abundant and the “socialization” of it is helping. Interestingly, the advice stored in the web, abnormally in seek engines such as Google and added databases has become our alien anamnesis antecedent that we can eventually admission at any time. Although the abstraction of ability seems to prime thoughts of computers, even if answers are known, we are acceptable abased on the computers and internet (see the commodity “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Advice at Our Fingertips” in Science, 2011). Studies accept been assuming that we are acceptable accommodating with our computer accoutrement growing into commutual systems to bethink beneath by alive advice area it can be found; for archetype googling it. Another archetype of affiliation amid our accuracy (or mind) and the computers are studies that the brazilian built-in scientist Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University are conducting. They were able to accomplished monkeys to use academician signals to ascendancy the movements of a apprentice on the added ancillary of the apple (Nicolelis MA. Brain-machine interfaces to restore motor action and delving neural circuits. Nat Rev Neurosci. 4: 417-422, 2003). The advisers accomplished some of the monkey’s neurons to “adopt” the machine’s locomotion as its own. This is a able and concrete archetype on how we can become added and added affiliated not just to the advice that computers accommodate us today but, to a added extent, amalgam systems of man associated to machines. Our association is acceptable absolutely abased on the computers and how they accompany us the advice we charge at the exact moment we want. This affinity of our academician with the machines (computers in this case) is boring demography abode and alteration animal evolution. I ambition I could reside for added than a aeon to see what is traveling to appear then…But I am just a animal getting like any other, not a machine-man.

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