Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 28

In the beginning, the web was all text, no video, not even pictures. That changed in 1993 when Marc Andreesen and a colleague, Eric Bina, released Mosaic, the first graphical web browser. This was the moment when “several million [people] noticed the web might be better than sex.”²⁸ Mosaic led to Netscape, which attracted people to the web in droves and paved the way for everything from Wi-Fi and smartphones to social media and ebooks. We are all familiar with this evolution: more powerful technologies that allow us to do more powerful things with information.

This chapter has followed another evolution, one not widely known outside of graduate seminars and scientific journals: a new science of mind that gives us a different perspective on how we understand information. This book aims to stitch these two parallel evolutions together. In doing so, we echo the words of the cognitive scientist Don Norman, who wrote “The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained.”²⁹ Precisely.

We don’t just think. We create tools and technologies to help us think better, understand more, and solve bigger problems. Norman reminds us that our ability to understand is limited when we try to do everything in our head, especially when we have lots of information and when the challenges are daunting, say cancer, sustainable energy, or space travel. We need to appreciate the complex interplay between prior associations, things we bring into and manipulate in the world, and how we figure things out by collaborating and cooperating with others.

If we treat sensemaking as brainbound, the cost of understanding will be expensive, perhaps too costly. This is not to say we should never rely on what the brain can do. But when we spread the cost of understanding into the world, we open up incredible possibilities for understanding. Think of the tools that extend our physical abilities, the telescopes that let us see deep into space, or the group of people who, only by working together, could push a car up a hill. In the same way that tools or groups enhance our physical abilities, so, too, can we extend our cognitive abilities. By moving expensive operations into the world, we adjust the cost structure. By creating a map or sharing ideas, by playing with a data visualization or a deck of flashcards, by simply being allowed to point at something, we can reduce time, complexity, and errors. We increase our capacity for understanding when cognition is seen as something that happens in and through the world.

Once we grok these ideas, we have the context for all that follows.