Go Analog?

Fast Company wades into the handwriting vs digital debate with a helpful survey ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Martin Heidigger to Neil Gaman before concluding with a link to an article from someone who prefers to abandon analog. Patrick Rhone makes the claim that "Forming letters by strokes, as opposed to selecting each by keys, opens regions of the brain involving thinking, language, and memory that are not opened through typing. Writing, real writing, makes you smarter." The keys in the article seem to be freeing yourself from distraction changing your state of awareness. I'm struck by the similarity of thought to John Edward Huth's Losing Our Way in the World—After a year of this endeavor, something dawned on me: the way I viewed the world had palpably changed. The sun looked different, as did the stars. While the ocean didn’t accommodate my “human” need for meaning, a different sense emerged from the wave patterns that conveyed the presence of winds, shoals, coastlines and distant storms—and I'm inclined to agree.

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The importance of handwriting is displayed as well in Why Productive People Take Better Notes: Active listening--that is, attending to the speaker and jotting down the things that catch your attention--lets us invest our working memory in paying attention to new thing the Facebook founder just said rather than trying to remember that joke he made in the first five minutes.

A posthaven user

This sentence from John Fowles "The Tree," quoted by Akiko Busch in The Times expresses a similar feeling: I like a kind of wandering wood acquaintance, and no more; a dilettante’s, not a virtuoso’s; always the green chaos rather than the printed map.

Mike Schultz

Stephanie Rosenbaum at the New York Times—

The ubiquity of map and navigation apps these days can be a boon, but it also means that pedestrians can easily choose efficiency at the expense of discovery.

There's more from Huth at The New Yorker. Key findings for me

We build cognitive maps in the hippocampus, the same area in which episodic memory and future planning take place. Advanced technologies insure that we use our brains as little as possible. In a series of studies in 2010, a group of researchers at McGill University, in Montreal, reported that exercising spatial memory and way-finding in everyday life increases hippocampal function and gray matter, whereas underuse of these functions in older adults may contribute to cognitive impairment.

“We get philosophical about it—about how knowing where you are helps you know your place in the world,” he said. Whereas the modern stargazer is liable to look up with a sense of existential wonder, if not dread, our ancestors may have seen in that lovely firmament a map of home.

This is the challenge facing the U.S. Navy as it tries to bring back celestial navigation. The Navy stopped training its service members to navigate by the stars about a decade ago, focusing instead on electronic navigational systems. But fears about the security of the Global Positioning System and a desire to return to the basics of naval training are pushing the fleet back toward this ancient method of finding a course across open water.

via NPR's Morning Edition

Dave Pell wrote in Next Draft—

"It's tough to overstate how GPS-dependent the world economy has become since the U.S. Department of Defense started giving the service away to the public in 2000. There are 2 billion GPS receivers in use around the world, a number that Europe's satellite navigation agency estimates will hit 7 billion by 2022. Along with the telecommunications industry, banks, airlines, electric utilities, cloud computing businesses, and TV broadcasters require constantly precise GPS timing. Emergency services do, too, as do military forces. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated 16 sectors of infrastructure as 'critical,' and 14 of them depend on GPS." BloombergBusinessweek: The World Economy Runs on GPS. It Needs a Backup Plan.

A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance . AmazonEncore. Kindle Edition.

M. R. O'Connor takes up the theme at The Washington Post—

But they also affect perception and judgment. When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings. And neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions.

An altogether different take from Marina Koren at The Atlantic—

For most of human history, the stars mattered more than modern-day light polluters can imagine. “It was unthinkable to ignore the stars,” Gene Tracy, a physics professor at the College of William and Mary, wrote in an essay in Aeon in 2015. “They were critical signposts, as prominent and useful as local hills, paths or wells. The gathering-up of stars into constellations imbued with mythological meaning allowed people to remember the sky; knowledge that might save their lives one night and guide them home.” Today, beneath a blanket of satellites telling us what time it is and where to go, we no longer navigate our lives by the stars (although other animals still do). In one way, they have become purely decorative. A futuristic escalation—giving up on the real thing altogether and assembling a simulacrum—doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

From Big Think: GPS is changing your brain (and it's not good)

Garrison Keillor has an opinion, too.

Comedy and compassion are the trademarks of the upcoming generation and good for them. GPS is fine but without it we could always learn to read maps again. Facebook is okay but if it went away, we could learn to sit with people over coffee and conduct conversations. Comedy and compassion are what you need to make your way in the world. My ancestor David Powell, leading a wagon train through the Colorado mountains in 1859, wrote to his wife: “Hard rain & wind storm. Cattle stampede & we had to be on horseback all night. Awful night. Men all tired and want to leave. Horses all gave out & men refused to do anything. Wet all night. Worked all day hard in the river trying to make the cattle swim & did not get one over. Had to turn back sick and discouraged. Have not got the blues but am in a Hell of a fix.” In other words, don’t lose heart.

Garrison Keillor

Science writer Maura O'Connor spent four years traveling the world to better understand how humans navigate their terrain. She writes "getting lost is a uniquely human problem," noting that other species don't have issues navigating. While the book is not anti-technology, O'Connor questions our reliance on GPS and self-driving cars... Add science writer Maura O'Connor to the list of thinkers championing walking. Her new book, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World, isn't about the art of placing one foot in front of another, but about how humans navigate their terrain — and what is lost when we offload our hard-earned navigation skills to GPS.

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