Many of us “of a certain age” recall school as a journey of memorization. Whether it was the table of elements, mathematical formulas, or the dates of historic events, paraphrasing the Nike ad, we “just did it.”
That has changed dramatically and from their earliest days of schooling, today’s kids figure they can just “Google it,” to uncover literally anything they want to know. Can we now just give oer brains a rest? Not so fast.
I was intrigued by an article in the New York Times entitled “You Still Need Your Brain.” Here is part of what it said:
Google is good at finding information, but the brain beats it in two essential ways. Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. Consider vocabulary. Every teacher knows that a sixth grader, armed with a thesaurus, will often submit a paper studded with words used in not-quite-correct ways, like the student who looked up “meticulous,” saw it meant “very careful,” and wrote “I was meticulous when I fell off the cliff.”
With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context. Consider “Trisha spilled her coffee.” When followed by the sentence “Dan jumped up to get a rag,” the brain instantly highlights one aspect of the meaning of “spill” — spills make a mess. Had the second sentence been “Dan jumped up to get her more,” you would have thought instead of the fact that “spill” means Trisha had less of something. Still another aspect of meaning would come to mind had you read, “Dan jumped up, howling in pain.”
