A while ago, I became aware of a book published last year, authored by Tali Sharot, titled “Look Again”. In an introductory statement to a talk given by the author at Google, the presenter states:
“Look Again” explores all the ways that our brain’s ability to habituate to novel experiences over time affects our behavior, our perception of the world and ourselves.
Somewhere on Youtube (“Talks at Google” episode “Tali Sharot | Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There”)
The fact that Tali gave this talk at Google is not surprising, because many of her findings seem to underpin Google’s ideology, which seems to be very much aligned with the American way of making money by advertising crap.
Much of the theory seems to be based on the basic Pavlovian thinking about stimulus and response. The idea is that new stimuli are viewed as intriguing, until we begin to figure them out and then they gradually keep becoming less and less fascinating until they even become boring, on their way to becoming completely zoned out, at which point our habituation to them may actually become internalized as biases.
I myself am also intrigued with Tali’s ideas, so I decided to reach out to her, but I have not yet recieved any reply from her.
What I find particularly intriguing is the idea that apparently new things seem to fascinate us, until they don’t. Maybe anything shiny and new is far more captivating than something tried and true? This bias seems very contrived to me, perhaps especially because I myself am so much about natural language — which may indeed be the oldest information technology known to humanity. Having evolved over many millennia, natural languages are today as streamlined as the most slippery fish, as aerodynamic as the most acrobatic bird and as able to leap tall buildings in a single bound as Superman itself (at least).
And yet languages also appear to be as old and beat up as that favorite pair of well-worn shoes. We slip into them without thinking, without feeling as if this technology were an add-on that might affect our output. By and large, the natural forces of evolution proves us mostly right. We need to be able to switch out one language for another to become aware of how this “alternative” technology can impact our outlook, our output, and so on.
New designs, software and algorithms are not as evolved as natural languages, so we should expect them to be comparatively clunky and cumbersome. Do we? Or are we more fascinated by them, simply because they are shiny and new?
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