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To: carranza2 who wrote (66887)	10/6/2010 1:39:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 217832

C2, for years I have had a theory that cyberspace [and other two dimensional screens] are processed in a different way in our brains from 3 dimensional experiences. My first puzzlement was that handwriting, or typing on a manual typewriter, were different cognitive processes from using computers. It seemed difficult to think in computerese compared with manual script on paper. Another observation was that a dead person on tv [an actual image of a real dead person] did not have the impact psychologically of actually seeing an actual dead person. I put it down to the fact that a screen is a 2 dimensional unreal input which is processed more like an idea than reality. Since it isn't actually reality, that seems a reasonable proposition, even though we might believe the image to represent reality just as we accept 3D images going in our eyes and being represented in our brains is accepted as reality. Dreaming seems fully real too and far more real than something on tv. Even though dreams are not real, they certainly seem real at the time. Heck, I have had multiple levels of dreaming where something very frightening is happening and I wake up and thereby realize it wasn't actually real and breathe a sigh of relief. ... But wait, suddenly the same thing is happening again, but this time it really is for real because I have woken up. That really really is frightening because it's real .... But wait, then I really truly actually did wake up and realized I had been tricked by me and in fact I really did wake up, it was part and parcel of the dreaming state. So how the heck can we trick ourselves and although nobody else is in charge of our dreams, we don't know what's going to happen next? For example, if you go and hide something in a cupboard now, you will not be able to tell yourself you don't know where it is. If you walk around the house twice, then go to open the cupboard you won't be surprised to find the thing in there. So yes, reading things in cyberspace might well record in a different way from the same thing written on actual paper. When I mean business with something, I will sometimes print it onto actual paper to read - but that's for big things which will take too long to deal with in cyberspace. I can certainly recall a lot of written things in cyberspace from 16 years ago so it's not that memory can't work. It might be a matter of quantity and filtering. I don't believe reading something from paper makes better memory necessarily. Better memory from paper might result to some extent from not much being read via paper so it has less competition with other words. Reading from cyberspace has lots more cognitive competition. Read all day on paper for two months and read nothing in cyberspace. Then give a sample of writing via both media. Then see how long it sticks. My theory is that reality is stored in 3D in our brains. With 3D input, there are more memory markers with a book than with computerese because the words are physically presented differently each time and the physical presence becomes more part of memory. Mqurice