This lecture had a basic outline of about the big question about how our brains actually work in relation to the environment around us. The brain is quite an adaptive piece of machinery, its the cross attached to the strings of a puppet, with d-pads, control buttons and triggers from all sorts of video game controllers.
Brains are quite adaptive and experiential machines. They themselves act as a storage system for our internal memory, it records information and replays them back to us in a whole different language from how it actually happend, but even so we would still understand it because its an internal language that's distinctive to and unique to our internal systems.
There are many ways to describing the brain and its relationship with the things around us. Firstly many scholars have mentioned some long standing ideas about long term, short term memories as well as retention spans. These concepts have lived with us our entire life to the point where we don't appreciate the importance of these issues and we simply let our actions speak louder to project our mind into our environment.
We often have feedback in our environment after adopting certain forms of technology and its forms such as television, telephones and now a fusion of all these older machines.
Another concept I found quite interesting in the readings this week is this idea of an extended mind. An extended mind is that our mind could be visualised as a center piece of a jigsaw puzzle. This piece often could be connected with objects and technology that could extend our cognitive function. For example the many ideas I've noticed that scholars mention are stuff like smartphone technology. We also regularly use some tools like memopads, paper, scripted stuff.
The reason I wanted to point this out is that the core theme of this week's idea of the media and the mind is based on some old media ideas by Plato who disliked the use of such external technology and we should simply reinforce our internal memory. There is some truth in this - The loss of such valuable pieces of information which is all recorded in our phones could be easily lost, distributed and sold to others. We could as easily lose our sense of identity recorded in these mediums than gain it. We could easily lose such important details like contacts, messages and valuable personal information. We can delegate tasks to the objects around us, but it has no meaning and no autonomy - which might be what people fear.
We must question whether we're our lives are being governed by such technology or are our technology the ones who are living our lives for us? Is our phones living the life for us in the Matrix or should we pull out and really experience reality? These are important questions.
References
just.Luc 2008, digital photograph, accessed 13 April 2013,
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/9619972@N08/3044490806/>
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