A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
We use paper documents to store knowledge so we can consult and reconsult it, giving us a type of recall impossible with our unaided minds; we use pencils to scratch down material so we can manipulate it in a fashion… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
When you're an expert in a subject, you can retain new factoids on your favorite topic easily. This only works for the subjects you're… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
Why are online games so addictive? It's mostly the narcotic appeal of 'leveling.' — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
More than any other modern tool, computers are a total mystery to their users. Most people never open them up to fix them or… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
“While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to see what passages other readers had… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
The main message of 'Smarter Than You Think' is an attempt to look at the productively new and interesting ways that we have begun… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
There is something about the ability to externalize our thoughts and compare them with other people in a public way that is really transformative… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won't stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
Transactive memory works best when you have a sense of how your partners' minds work - where they're strong, where they're weak, where their… — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
The amount of writing that people do online is astonishing, and historically unprecedented. — Clive Thompson Copy Share Image
