Braaaain… I Need my Braaaaain!

Any excuse to repost this pic

A while back I read a book by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (find it here http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/) . It was a fascinating and frankly frightening read. I talked about it at the time on my old blogspot site. I went back over there to find the previous entry… BTW what a nostalgic trip. Also guilt inducing, because it made me painfully aware that I update this blog a lot less often than I did that one.

I am going to do a bit more with this blog in the near future, but that’s a story for another day. Right now I’m trying to get back in touch with what the book The Shallows taught me about my brain. In a nutshell, it’s this:

People who read text studded with links comprehend less than those who read printed pages (did you visit the link to Nicholas Carr’s website or what?).
As media presentations get more complex and visually interesting, less cogent information is ingested by the very people these presentations are meant to engage.
Constant distractions from emails and other short message types has diminished our capacity to concentrate for long periods of time. Our brains are always searching for more stimulation, because we have trained them to expect distractions, to absorb shorter and shorter bursts of information (hello twitter) and as a result only contemplate this information on a shallow level.
And here’s the kicker for the struggling author. People who juggle many tasks are often LESS CREATIVE AND LESS PRODUCTIVE than those who stick to one thing at a time.

Yes you read that right. Less CREATIVE and less PRODUCTIVE, two of the very things I’m trying my hardest to be. I recall back in 2010 when I read the book thinking: I have to change my life. I have to change how I do things or I’m never going to write another book (this was back in my writer’s block days, when after two years of not finishing anything I began to dispair that I never would). Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows made me realise my connection to the Internet was frying my creativity. I disengaged from the Internet immediately, and went on to read Stephen King’s On Writing, which reminded me what creativity was and why I wanted to use mine. After that I got out a notebook and pen (the computer, with its blinking cursor and easy access to the world wide web, had become my enemy). I then wrote the first draft of an 80k novel—Erica’s Choice, which has become my biggest seller and most reviewed book. The hardest thing I ever wrote but the most satisfying because it was the hardest, and because I wrote it entirely from my subconscious, without Internet distractions.

So what’s all this leading up to? You guessed it, I’m going to unplug from the Internet as best I can for a while, because I’ve slipped back into old, bad habits. I’m limiting myself to set times to check and update social media. Haven’t worked out the exact timetable yet, but I have time limits for FB, Twitter, emails and blogging. If I had to set the a timer, I will. I have to find my writing happy place again.

And my brain.

Sami