Cognitive Function Inquiry Essay examples

Short term memory is a part of the memory storage system. This is capable of storing information for a very short period of time as the duration that short term memory is limited. This was researched by psychologists Peterson and Peterson in 1959, they conducted a huge

In “Is Google Making us stupid”, Carr explains how the brain is malleable and how the internet might be shaping it by literally rewiring the brains network. Carr gives a brief example of how neurons can be made and broke depending on what things shape the way things are done. By being used to instant searching and internet preferences, the brain reprograms itself in being used that certain way. He thinks by using the internet so much, we will become more and more objective and quick thinkers, and ultimately emotionless computers. He also gives examples of how the clock and typewriter changed our way of thinking in the past. Adapting this way will rewire thought processes and continue to dictate how we act. Carr’s theory may be more obvious as we continue to be reliant on technology. (Carr)

With every passing year, it seems as though humans are becoming more attached to their electronic devices as technology advances at an astounding rate. As a result of this, many people believe that the trade off for having such advanced technology is a decrease in overall brain function, a point that is essentially what Nicholas Carr is arguing is true in his essay Is Google Making Us Stupid?. However, a majority of Carr’s argument lies in the fact that people do not read as much because of the Internet, only want information directly given to them instead of having to read through pages of words, and are becoming dangerously reliant on artificial intelligence. However, based on the recent surge of technological

In Chapter 7 of our What Is Psychology textbook, we learned about the importance, details and strategies of memory techniques. One type of memory is Short Term, which only last up to thirty seconds before forgetting. Whenever has to remember a number or a name, they often repeat the information multiple times so that the Short Term Memory can transition into Long Term Memory. In order for this transition to occur, the information must be constantly repeated, or important enough to be held in the permanent memory, which helps create a “folder” with all retaining information and reminiscing. Another way short term can become long term is using a method called Chunking, this breaks the bigger pictures into smaller ones for the brain to remember,

With new technological advancements occurring more rapidly each year, it is no surprise that there is an extensive conversation about how these new progressions impact the brain’s development and cognition. One trend is evident: there is a universal acknowledgment that technology is indeed changing the way we think. Among the members contributing to this conversation, two strikingly different outlooks on how these changes will affect the future exist. Either we should be terrified, or worrying is premature. Articles written by experts specializing in psychology and the brain, such as Pinker’s “Mind Over Mass Media,” as well as "How Has the Internet Reshaped Human Cognition?" by Kee and Loh, as well as and finally “Children, Wired- for

“We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves (Siegel, 221)”. The brain is a product of its ever-changing environment. As certain linkages between its regions are used more or less frequently, their relative strength fluctuates. Many times, cultural shifts, such as the current transition from a print culture to a digital culture, cause the largest effect on the connections within the brain. Because of the overabundance and simplicity of information on the internet, the brain is becoming more impatient and losing its ability to focus and interact at a deep level. As a result, humans must rely increasingly on the internet.

Most adults can usually store between 5 and 9 items in their short-term memory. This idea was put forward by Miller, and he called it the “magic number 7”. He hypothesized that short term memory could hold 7 (plus or minus 2 items) because it only had a certain number of “slots” in which certain items could be stored. However, Miller did not specify the amount of information that can be held in each slot. This leads into the idea of “chunking”. Chunking refers to the

In the book The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr he argues how the internet is changing our brains or the worse. With the exception of the alphabets and the number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book. Carr explains how powerful the internet is by its ability to change the development of the brain, how people think, and the ability to remember.

There is a strange feeling, tinkering with my brain almost reprogramming my memory. Nicholas Carr explains it better in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Nicholas feels as if his mind isn't going, but changing. The traditional process of thought is being supplied and reshaped by the Internet. The Internet has created a rich store of information, but at what cost? With the Internet obtaining the ability to consume almost all other intellectual technologies, we must learn more to appreciate life before machines.

Quote 1: “Although there is much still to understand about the brain, the impact of the internet has helped us to learn new ways of measuring its organization as a network. It has also begun to show us that the human brain probably does not represent some unique pinnacle of complexity but may have more in common than we might have guessed with many other information-processing networks (Naughton 445).”

The internet can be great source of information, but it has a negative effect on the human brain. In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, he describes how the internet has negatively effected his brain by stating, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr 733). The internet has a huge impact on the thinking process of the human brain and it is completely changing the human ability to concentrate for long periods of time, human reading skills, and the configuration of the brain.

This day in age, technology is more present in our lives than it’s ever been. Every day we constantly check our phones, emails, tablets, and even smart watches. These devices have opened doors that we previously didn't even know existed. They are outlets to unlimited knowledge from all over the world. Although many people, including me, have grown up with these commodities, they are still extremely new. Home computers have only been mainstream for 20 years or so, while smartphones have only been mainstream for about 5 years! What all this leads itself to, is that we are just now able to observe the way this new technology and instant access to knowledge can affect our brain. Author, Nicholas Carr, believes that the world’s largest search engine, Google, has molded our brains to be incapable of deep thought, and that it also even makes us stupid.

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, he argued his view on how he believes the internet has affected peoples’ brain functions. He seems to think that the internet has affected how people now intake information. He begins his reasonings using a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL is being disassembled by the man the machine almost killed. Carr highlights the fact that the computer could feel it’s’ brain being taken away as the man removed its memory circuits.

In the article “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”, Nicholas Carr points out that many people can not sit down for long periods of time and read in today’s world, due to the Internet. Carr states, “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping my neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (Carr, par. 2). That someone, or something just so happens to be the thing that controls our world today, the Internet. Anything you want is just a click away on the Internet. Although the Internet can be a great tool to have, it is indeed changing the way we think.

In the future, we may be able to build a computer that is comparable to the human brain, but not until we truly understand one thing. Lewis Thomas talks about this in his essay, "Computers." He says, "It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close" (Thomas 473). Thomas wrote this essay in 1974, and although we have made many technological advances