Tyler Cowen on the human mind becoming more, rather than less powerful, and on a “change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning:”
The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an information stream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about the world. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not your incoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual.
He ends his otherwise lengthy article with a tweetable version: “Smart people are doing wonderful things.”
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