I had never heard of this NPC thing before and I find it very interesting too.
The study mentioned in that SOTT article reminded me of another article I read recently on SOTT about the effects of internet in kids. It might be a bit off-topic, but since there's a discussion on that study, I thought I'd share it here:
A thought-provoking experiment: What happens when children don't have the internet for a whole day? -- Sott.net
Child psychologist Yekaterina Murashova describes an unusual experiment in her book showing what happened when a group of teenagers were deprived of access to the internet and modern technology for a single day. We think it's well worth checking out — you can consider the implications for yourself.
Children and teenagers aged between 12 and 18 years voluntarily spent eight hours alone without access to any means of communication (mobile phones; the internet, etc.). They were also forbidden to turn on the computer, any other electronic gadgets, the radio and the TV. But they were allowed to engage in a number of 'classic' activities by themselves: writing, reading, playing musical instruments, painting, needlework, singing, walking, and so on.
The author of the experiment, a family psychologist, wanted to prove her working hypothesis that the today's generation of young people are too often entertained by things not of their making, are incapable of finding ways to keep themselves busy,
and are completely unfamiliar with the idea of the world of their imagination. According to the rules of the experiment, the children had to explain the next day how they had coped with being alone under such conditions. They were allowed to describe how they felt at the time of the experiment, and keep a record their actions and thoughts. In the case of excessive anxiety, discomfort or stress the project leaders would recommend stopping the experiment immediately, recording the time and the reason for its termination.
The experiment showed some interesting results regarding their dependence to their devices, social media, etc., but this caught my attention:
Almost all the participants tried to sleep at some point, but none were able to due to the unusual thoughts going round and round in their heads.
[...]
All of them, without any exceptions, said that they were extremely surprised by the thoughts that were crossing their minds during the experiment, but they were unable to examine them rationally because of the overall deterioration of their psychological state.
I thought it was interesting because in other articles which deal the subject of hyper-connectivity/internet we read that a very important part of memory and learning is the assimilation and association process in which the internal processing of the information we receive is involved. Basically, the thesis is that when we are hyper-connected we receive too much information which we can't properly process in this manner, so our memory and learning is particularly affected by this way living.
So I related it to the fact that this way of just swallowing lots and lots of unprocessed information shuts down that internal thinking necessary to assimilate it and so when the kids in the experiment where left without their devices for a while, they started thinking! This important assimilation process started working again and they were confused because they weren't used to it of course. It also made me think about what this hyper-connectivity can be doing to the kids, and even to young people in my own generation who had lived most of their teen ages and adult lives with access to this level of connectivity... we could probably say that we're being turned into NPCs by it, although it seems that it might be reversible if the potential for it was there in the first place.
Jean Piaget also talked about assimilation:
Assimilation and Accommodation
Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through:
Assimilation
– Which is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.
Accommodation
– This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.
Equilibration
– This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.
Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).
Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.
Source:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html
This is a very reduced summary, but I think it's interesting because it fits quite well into Damasio's idea of homeostasis driving evolution too, OSIT.
And talking of Piaget, the following comment reminded me of him as well:
In the study, 8 people experienced no unsymbolized thinking over the course of the study. Not sure if it characterizes "OP thinking" or not. I often think symbolically and unsymbolically. I think you can pack a lot of information into an unsymbolized thought. At this point I'm not sure which is more 'advanced'. It's extra work to put unsymbolized thoughts into words, which requires active thinking. But maybe unsymbolized thinking can capture a complex idea that you couldn't catch if you were only thinking in words... I'll have to think about that some more!
For me it was hard to understand what they describe in those terms, but my guess is that it the same or at least related to the concept of abstract thinking in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. I will just paste a short summary from that same site again, for reference:
Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 yrs)
The main achievement during this stage is
object permanence - knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden.
It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.
Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
During this stage,
young children can think about things symbolically.
This is the ability to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something other than itself.
Thinking is still
egocentric, and the infant has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others.
Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)
Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive development because it marks
the beginning of logical or operational thought.
This means the child can work things out internally in their head (rather than physically try things out in the real world).
Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9).
Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes.
Formal Operational Stage (11 years and over)
The formal operational stage begins at approximately age eleven and lasts into adulthood.
During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.
When I studied this at the Uni, I remember learning that Piaget considered that the last stage wasn't "mandatory", meaning that not all people developed until this particular stage, but that it needed to be "impulsed" or "developed". I don't remember where we got that from but I'll search the reference because I always thought that it was very interesting. According to what we learnt back then, most people do pretty well with the operational concrete thought which already implies being able to produce internal thinking, to put that thinking into words, obviously to understand that words relate to things in the world and to have symbolical thinking. The formal operational stage seems to be related to pure abstraction, so to say, and maybe that's what unsymbolized thinking refers to, but I'm not sure either.
Now I want to study this 'formal operational stage' in more depth. I think it's also very interesting in the context of the NPCs and OPs discussed here.
Just some thoughts...
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