Current issue #3
Summarized By Allyson McDowell

The Outsourced Brain

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: October 26, 2007


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=3&ex=1351137600&en=0a18e911e776977e&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

When I read this article I immediately thought of “The Giver” by Lois Lowery. David Brooks paints a dismal picture of sameness which is a frightening look at the future. More and more we are beginning to depend on technology to do everything for us. If David is correct in his anthology we will soon become a society dependant on technology to think and do for us.

He calls the externalization of geographic information from his brain to a GPS nirvana by the establishment of a romantic attachment. He continues by saying that the magic of the age of information is becoming mindless.

All memory is now externalized into various silicone memory banks that do everything thereby freeing us to think of nothing.

We now have iTunes for music sampling, Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia for memory Black Berry or Palm Pilot for personal information storage.

Think of it a third of under 30’s cannot remember their own phone number, they are foregoing memory before they have to do so.

Are you thinking yet.