Effetto Poincaré

Tranquilli, il web vi farà più informati, più colti, più intelligenti e più felici... e se la memoria biologica del cervello resta disoccupata, pazienza, vuol dire che abbiamo di meglio.

Ma attenzione alle singolari connessioni tra creatività e memoria! Ne sa qualcosa un uomo dall' intelligenza media come Poincaré che con sua sorpresa si ritrovò ad essere forse il più grande scienziato di sempre (*).

It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory,’... But conscious manipulation of externally stored information is not enough to yield the deepest of creative breakthroughs: this is what the example of Poincaré suggests. Human memory, unlike machine memory, is dynamic. Through some process we only crudely understand – Poincaré himself saw it as the collision and locking together of ideas into stable combinations – novel patterns are unconsciously detected, novel analogies discovered. And this is the process that Google, by seducing us into using it as a memory prosthesis, threatens to subvert.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/jim-holt/smarter-happier-more-productive

(*) e ne sanno qualcosa anche i grandi improvvisatori musicali.