We might live in the Information Age — but this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve become smarter. Instead, we end up finding ourselves bombarded daily with more information than the human brain can possibly hope to process.
It’s just a matter of checking your smartphone to look things up, as if we no longer have to commit facts to memory, as if our brains need only to remember where we keep the information vaulted up. This sort of thinking comes with a price, however.
I’ve spent perhaps way too much time arguing on Facebook — where I’ve come to observe that the arguments with the most weight are those that document their sources, or at least are worth the trouble of a response.
It’s not necessarily hard to find something to post — a little bit more trouble to read it — but the real challenge comes in deciphering what’s true. While technology and media have somehow been given an equal voice, the same can’t necessarily be said about the quality of the information.
Add to it that as we grow, we tend to form our own selective bias for what’s true and what we want to believe as true, and you’ve got a problem.
Overcoming illiteracy may remain a challenge for much of the developing world, but in the developed world, you’ve still got the issue of making people more info-literate, as cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin describes it. Any election — and really presidential elections often make this even more of a concern — is a time when biased and poorly investigated stories are plentiful in supply — and when the time for fact-checking is often not rapid enough.
In “A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method,” Levitin puts the misinformation into two separate categories:
- Mishandled statistics, which can often be manipulated to mislead arguments in just about any way, given without context, or cherry-picked to fit conclusions; and
- Logical fallacies, which are all too common when arguing online, sometimes simply stirred out of our desire to be right and to best our opponent. The source itself has to be assessed, and most times we need to determine whether or not the messenger is the expert they purport themselves to be.
Levitin offers the scientific method, the basis of critical reasoning as the remedy — with an effective guide to weighing the evidence, something that he argues is always time well-spent. While we may not always be getting the most-accurate information from each other, perhaps these arguments are the inevitable exchanges we most often need in order to learn and allow the brain to grow.
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
More From Brain World
- (Anti-)Social Media: How Social Networks Affect Our Neural Networks
- Future Babble: Why Pundits Are Hedgehogs And Foxes Know Best
- New Doors Opened: Interconnectedness in the Information Age
- Socializing Via Networks: Using Social Media Wisely
- Where and How Often Do Americans Get Their News?
- Why Is Facebook So Hard to Quit?
