Digital Anesthesia: Why We Don't Feel the Change

The frog in the boiling water story is mostly false. Frogs will jump out when the water gets uncomfortable. But humans? We stay in. We adjust. We stop noticing the temperature entirely.

I've been thinking about this because of something that happened last week. I was having dinner with my parents, and my father pulled out his phone to settle a factual dispute. Twenty years ago, we would have argued about it for an hour, maybe consulted an encyclopedia if we had one, probably just agreed to disagree. Now the answer appears in three seconds. Nobody commented on this. Nobody thought it was remarkable. The argument just dissolved.

That's not a complaint. Settling disputes with evidence is good. But the speed with which we've normalized it is instructive. The most dramatic cognitive enhancement in human history has become boring.

The Gradient Problem

Change that happens gradually doesn't register as change. This is a well-documented phenomenon in psychology: we're excellent at detecting sudden shifts and terrible at perceiving slow drifts. Our attention systems evolved for predators and falling rocks, not for cultural transformations that unfold over decades.

Consider what's happened to memory. Ten years ago, you probably knew dozens of phone numbers. Your own, your parents', your best friends'. Maybe some important addresses. The information lived in your head because it had to. Now almost none of that lives in biological memory.

This isn't news. Everyone knows this has happened. What's strange is how little it bothers us. We've accepted a radical restructuring of how memory works, distributed our recollection across silicon and servers, and mostly shrugged. The transition was so smooth that it felt like nothing at all.

Tell me more about distributed cognition

That smoothness isn't accidental. It's designed. Every technology company has discovered that people adopt tools faster when the adoption feels effortless. Friction is the enemy. Seamlessness is the goal. And seamlessness means you won't notice what you're giving up until it's long gone.

What the Numbness Costs

There's a concept in medicine called "chronic pain adaptation." When pain persists for long enough, the brain stops flagging it as urgent. You don't feel it less, exactly. You just stop noticing it in the same way. It becomes background.

Something similar happens with technological integration. The costs aren't urgent enough to register. They accumulate in the background: a little less patience, a little less tolerance for boredom, a little less capacity for deep concentration. Each individual loss is negligible. The cumulative effect is substantial.

I know people who haven't read a book in years. Not because they're stupid or lazy, but because their attention has been retrained for different rhythms. They can process enormous amounts of information in short bursts. They struggle with anything that requires sustained focus. This represents a fundamental change in cognitive capacity, and most of them haven't noticed it happening.

The numbness isn't always problematic. Sometimes not feeling a change is adaptive. You don't want to be consciously aware of every heartbeat. Some automation is good. But the numbness becomes dangerous when it prevents us from making conscious choices about which changes we actually want.

Divided Cognition

Here's what I think is actually going on. Our cognitive system is now distributed across multiple substrates: biological brain, personal devices, cloud infrastructure. Each component has different properties. The biological brain is slow but flexible, prone to error but capable of insight. The technological components are fast but rigid, accurate but literal.

This divided cognition creates a strange situation. Part of your mind is changing in ways you can perceive, and part is changing in ways you can't. The biological part still ages, still forgets, still experiences the world subjectively. The technological part updates invisibly, accumulates data about you that you never review, makes decisions about what information reaches you without your input.

Tell me more about the cognitive community

The numbness is partly a function of this division. You can't feel what's happening in the cloud because you have no sensory access to it. You only perceive the outputs, the recommendations and suggestions and auto-completions. The process is invisible. So the change is invisible too.

The Convenience Trap

Nobody chooses to become dependent on something overnight. It happens through convenience. Each individual choice makes sense: why memorize a number you can store? Why hold an opinion when you can check? Why maintain a skill when a tool does it better?

The logic is impeccable at each step. The destination is only visible from altitude. And we're not good at altitude. We're good at the next step, the immediate problem, the friction directly in front of us.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's a design philosophy that happens to exploit a cognitive blind spot. Make things easy. Remove obstacles. Reduce friction. These are reasonable goals that, pursued relentlessly, lead to dependency that nobody chose and few can perceive.

I'm not suggesting we should make things harder on purpose. That's just masochism. But I am suggesting that we should notice what convenience costs, and make conscious decisions about when to pay that cost and when to decline.

Feeling the Water

Is there a way to overcome the numbness? To actually feel the temperature of the water we're swimming in?

Some practices help. Periodic disconnection creates contrast, makes visible what's usually invisible. Journaling about how you use technology forces conscious articulation. Talking to older people about what they remember losing gives historical perspective.

But I'm skeptical that any practice can fully solve the gradient problem. We are, fundamentally, poor at perceiving slow change. The best we can do is build systems and habits that flag changes for our attention, even when our attention would naturally slide past them.

This is partly why I write essays like this one. Not because I have answers, but because the act of writing forces me to articulate what I'm perceiving, and articulation makes the invisible visible. At least temporarily.

The Coming Acceleration

Here's what concerns me: the pace is increasing. What took a decade in 2000 took five years in 2010 and two years in 2020. The curve is exponential, which means the gradient is steepening. Which means our already-inadequate capacity to perceive gradual change is becoming even more inadequate.

AI integration is the current frontier. Eighteen months ago, almost nobody used AI assistants for daily tasks. Now millions do. The shift happened faster than previous technological integrations, and it's still accelerating. By the time this essay is a year old, what seems novel now will seem ancient.

The numbness will keep pace. It has to. If we fully felt the rate of change, we'd be overwhelmed. The anesthesia is protective. But protective mechanisms can become prisons when the danger they're protecting against has changed.

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My father's phone knows more about our family history than he does. It has years of photos he's never reviewed, conversations he's forgotten, patterns in his behavior he's never noticed. That repository grows daily. He experiences it as convenience. I experience it as a very slow rewriting of what memory means.

Neither of us feels the water getting warmer. We've adapted. The question is whether adaptation is always the right response, or whether sometimes the right response is to notice the temperature and decide, consciously, whether we want to stay in the pot.

I don't have an answer. But I'm trying to at least ask the question before it becomes unaskable.