New content for the modern brain

Oded Ilan presenting at Lavacon 2016

In his informative presentation at Lavacon 2016 titled Overcoming the Forgetting Curve: New Content Creation Paradigms, Oded Ilan posited an interesting concept. In a nutshell, Ilan's believes that the human mind didn't make Google, but rather, that Google made the new human mind. He wraps this concept up with the concept of learning curves and, regrettably, forgetting curves and presents data that show that both are real. But if you break it down, none of this is necessarily bad but should be viewed as a shift instead of a regression.

When we think about learning and thinking 20 or 30 years ago, the focus was on memorization and that single task of memorizing was, in fact, a skill. Fast forward to today and the forgetting curve - the speed at which we forget things after learning them - and we see that we are memorizing far less. That skill has been replaced by searching for information digitally, learning to sift and sort information, and then recognizing the information we were looking for. For this skill to be a natural component of our thought process required a three-step evolution, according to Ilan: searching for large datasets and still memorizing small items; then searching for all information we required including simple items; finally using the cloud to store all information - in essence offloading our personal memories to the cloud. It is a bit simplistic but, at the same time, informs the discussion.

So we need to understand the new human brain when we're discussing content models and strategies because, at the very least, we need to recognize that our consuming habits of content must be very different than they were prior to the turn of the century. Whether you're talking about mobile devices, e-books or desktop computer scenarios, the always-searching new human brain must be able to find the information within the content provided: it must be able to search, find, sift, and recognize what it is looking for. And that means every time content is provided, even content that the user has already seen. That content must serve as both the information to, and the memory for, the user.

In a succinct summary, Ilan uses the following phrase: "Content creation should support the human thought process." This is exactly the point of content, adaptive or not. We think, we find data, we learn, we forget - rinse and repeat. Content needs to be more than a collection of words, it must be structured for our new human brains.