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Your brain on digital

Human brains are bad at conceptualizing. If it’s not something we can see or touch, we are bad at understanding it. This makes sense, as when our brains were evolving they was no need for them to understand concepts like large numbers, or the size of the earth, or that digital content is actually real. If you can touch it, see it, or lick it, your brain has a hard time believing in it. That is why a paper book feels like a real object that you really own, whereas word on a kindle screen do not. They are both fundamentally the same thing, but as far as your brain is concerned, one is real and the other is not. The same way you can’t really understand that there are 7 billion people on earth, you can understand that there is a book inside your computer. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I reserve buying physical versions of content for things I really love, not only to save on clutter, but because that way it feels real. Intellectually, I know there is no difference between the comic I own digitally and the one on my bookshelf, but my monkey brain begs to differ. And there is a benefit for large companies to keep us think this way which we will look at next post.

References

Dvorsky, G. (2014, febuary 26). How to Comprehend Incomprehensibly Large Numbers. Retrieved from io9: http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-comprehend-incomprehensibly-large-numbers-1531604757


Comments

  1. Em Ruzé22 April 2017 at 00:20

    You make a really good point! I hadn't considered that digital books not feeling "real" could be playing a part in how differently they are treated from physical copies, but it makes a lot of sense. Perhaps when we train our monkey brains to think of digital books as being just as real as physical books, we will be able to put an end to the different treatment that companies have been giving them.

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