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chapters of text when it takes but a minute
the
Literary review - mention neuroplasticity experiments on monkeys
“If we stop exercising our mental skills,” writes Doidge, “we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.”36
But the brain’s strangely remote quality—the way it seems both part of us and apart from us—still influences our perceptions in subtle ways.
While we know that our brain is an exquisitely sensitive monitor of experience, we want to believe that it lies beyond the influence of experience.
progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know.
Other changes in form and content will be subtle, and they’ll develop slowly. As more readers come to discover books through online text searches, for example, authors will face growing pressures to tailor their words to search engines, the way bloggers and other Web writers routinely do today. Steven Johnson sketches out some of the likely consequences: “Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. Individual paragraphs
...more
Many observers believe it’s only a matter of time before social-networking functions are incorporated into digital readers, turning reading into something like a team sport. We’ll chat and pass virtual notes while scanning electronic text. We’ll subscribe to services that automatically update our e-books with comments and revisions added by fellow readers.
The provisional nature of digital text also promises to influence writing styles. A printed book is a finished object. Once inked onto the page, its words become indelible. The finality of the act of publishing has long instilled in the best and most conscientious writers and editors a desire, even an anxiety, to perfect the works they produce—to write with an eye and an ear toward eternity. Electronic text is impermanent.
As a society, we devote ever less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we do so in the busy shadow of the Internet. “Already,” the literary critic George Steiner wrote in 1997, “the silences, the arts of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which ‘high reading’ depended are largely disposed.” But “these erosions,” he continued, “are nearly insignificant compared with the brave new world of the electronic.”26
permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.
In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us.
when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.
It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.
It also turns
us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.
If we don’t have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, “unconscious thought does not occur.”4
The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.
contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones.
The scans revealed that the brain activity of the experienced Googlers was much broader than that of the novices. In particular, “the computer-savvy subjects used a specific network in the left front part of the brain, known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, [while] the Internet-naïve subjects showed minimal, if any, activity in this area.”
“If our brains are so sensitive to just an hour a day of computer exposure, what happens when we spend more time [online]?” 9
what happens to young kids - with more malleable brains?
It is the very fact that book reading “understimulates the senses” that makes the activity so intellectually rewarding. By allowing us to filter out distractions, to quiet the problem-solving functions of the frontal lobes, deep reading becomes a form of deep thinking.
(Some studies link attention deficit disorder, or ADD, to the overloading of working memory.)
thought, can impede deep learning and thinking. Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.
The test subjects who read the pages linearly actually scored considerably higher on a subsequent comprehension test than those who clicked back and forth between the pages. The links got in the way of learning, the researchers concluded.22
After viewing the presentation, the subjects took a ten-question quiz on the material. The text-only viewers answered an average of 7.04 of the questions correctly, while the multimedia viewers answered just 5.98 correctly—a significant difference, according to the researchers.
could recall the information from the lecture. The surfers, the researchers report, “performed significantly poorer on immediate measures of memory for the to-be-learned content.” It didn’t matter, moreover, whether they surfed information related to the lecture or completely unrelated content—they all performed poorly. When the researchers repeated the experiment with another class, the results were the same.26
The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.
We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.
“vastly overvalue what happens to us right now
“the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics extensively, but at a more superficial level,”
Net is making us smarter, in other words, only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards.
computers,
The people most affected by what he describes are the people who arent gonna be able yo read this book
In fact, while the average math scores held fairly steady during that period, dropping a fraction of a point, from 49.2 to 48.8, scores on the verbal portions of the test declined significantly. The average critical-reading score fell
3.3 percent, from 48.3 to 46.7, and the average writing-skills score dropped an even steeper 6.9 percent, from 49.2 to 45.8.2 Scores on the verbal sections of the SAT tests given to college-bound students have also been dropping. A 2007 report from the U.S. Department of Education showed that twelfth-graders’ scores on tests of three different kinds of reading—for performing a task, for gathering information, and for literary experience—fell between 1992 and 2005. Literary reading aptitude suffered the largest decline, dropping twelve percent.3
less to do with an increase in general intelligence than with a transformation in the way people think about intelligence.
We weren’t more intelligent than they, but we had learnt to apply our intelligence to a new set of problems. We had detached logic from the concrete, we were willing to deal with the hypothetical, and we thought the world was a place to be classified and understood scientifically rather than to be manipulated.” 9
that doesn’t mean we have “better brains.” It just means we have different brains.11
“that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.
the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because, as the cost of information falls, we all spend more time looking at computer screens and the company’s profits go up.
It’s not a library of books. It’s a library of snippets.
The only way to cope is to increase our scanning and our skimming, to rely even more heavily on the wonderfully responsive machines that are the source of the problem.
Today, more information is “available to us than ever before,” writes Levy, “but there is less time to make use of it—and specifically to make use of it with any depth of reflection.”49 Tomorrow, the situation will be worse still.
What’s disturbing about the company’s founders is not their boyish desire to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators, but the pinched conception of the human mind that gives rise to such a desire.
Shakespeare has Hamlet call his memory “the book and volume of my brain.” In worrying that writing would
The shift in our view of memory is yet another manifestation of our acceptance of the metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer.
But there’s a problem with our new, post-Internet conception of human memory. It’s wrong.
Repetition encourages consolidation. When they examined the physiological effects of repetition on individual neurons and synapses, they discovered something amazing. Not only did the concentration of neurotransmitters in synapses change, altering the strength of the existing connections between neurons, but the neurons grew entirely new synaptic terminals.
The fact that, even after a memory is forgotten, the number of synapses remains a bit higher than it had been originally helps explain why it’s easier to learn something a second time.
“The fact that a gene must be switched on to form long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning.”22
