I’m a daydreamer

“I’ve long noticed this phenomenon in my own life. I can’t remember a single friend’s email address. Hell, sometimes I have to search my inbox to remember an associate’s last name. Friends of mine space out on lunch dates unless Outlook pings them. And when it comes to cultural trivia — celebrity names, song lyrics — I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything, because I can instantly retrieve the information online.”

“In fact, the line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Often when I’m talking on the phone, I hit Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, harnessing the results to buttress my arguments.”

“My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.”

“You could argue that by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely “human” tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming.”

“Your Outboard Brain Knows All“, by Clive Thompson 

And that is exactly what I am doing. I spend all day, night, and some dreams thinking.  About work, play, dates, girls, ideas, vacations, thesis, culture. I love it. I can’t count how many times a day I have great ideas. There is just something enjoyable about pondering the imponderable, exploring new ideas, conjuring up fun things to do/say, daydreaming the day away…

I love how my cyborg brain has automated many of the mundane tasks  in my life. Remember a 7-10 digit number to speak with someone? Write an address to send something to someone? Ha, my robots do that for me. In fact, they give me a child-like GUI interface too. All I have to do is know the first few letters of the person/thing I want and, bam, there it is. I can’t remember the last time I had to type in Karen’s full name to call her or Sean’s full address to email him.

All of this is fantastic. I can happily forget useless facts and instead focus on how many people are chewing gum right now (guess: under a billion).

Similarily, at work, more and more of the mundane processes are being automated. Manage an inbox? Sit through long-boring meetings? Search for news/info/research?  Not with my cyborg brain. Wikis/blogs/rss/chat all of these tools are taking the boring and droll out of my work life. I also teach others how this works and you would not believe how many people exclaim “I am actually excited about work again”.

So, my cyborg brain allows me to dream all I want, be happier, and enjoy work more?? Still a mystery to me why so many people lament this change…

I guess if you were the best at memorizing your times tables then you are suddenly finding yourself gathering dust next to trivial pursuit. Or, maybe that we are becoming to dependent on machines and we all should spend a week in the woods.

Me, I’ve got my blinders on. I don’t care. Plus, I have a RSS subscription to several survival guides…my cyborg brain will let me know when I need to know something to survive…lol