The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

If working memory is the mind’s scratch pad, then long-term memory is its filing system. The contents of our long-term memory lie mainly outside of our consciousness. In order for us to think about something we’ve previously learned or experienced, our brain has to transfer the memory from long-term memory back into working memory.

But brain scientists have come to realize that long-term memory is actually the seat of understanding. It stores not just facts but complex concepts, or “schemas.” By organizing scattered bits of information into patterns of knowledge, schemas give depth and richness to our thinking.

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schemas.

current evidence suggests that “we can process no more than about two to four elements at any given time with the actual number probably being at the lower [rather] than the higher end of this scale.”

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in transferring information from working memory into long-term memory.

When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by the pace of our reading.

With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next. We’re able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source.

When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information—when the water overflows the thimble—we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory. We can’t translate the new information into schemas. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow.

Experiments indicate that as we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data.

Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on computer screens would be a boon to learning.

Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections among diverse texts.

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm had begun to subside. Research was painting a fuller, and very different, picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext.

Deciphering hypertext substantially increases readers’ cognitive load and hence weakens their ability to comprehend and retain what they’re reading.

A 1990 experiment revealed that hypertext readers often “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

Just as the pioneers of hypertext once believed that links would provide a richer learning experience for readers, many educators also assumed that multimedia, or “rich media,” as it’s sometimes called, would deepen comprehension and strengthen learning.

The division of attention demanded by multimedia further strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our learning and weakening our understanding.

The multimedia technologies so common to the Web, the researchers concluded, “would seem to limit, rather than enhance, information acquisition.”

As we all know from reading illustrated textbooks and manuals, pictures can help clarify and reinforce written explanations. Education researchers have also found that carefully designed presentations that combine audio and visual explanations or instructions can enhance students’ learning.

“Auditory and visual working memory are separate, at least to some extent, and because they are separate, effective working memory may be increased by using both processors rather than one.”

The Internet, however, wasn’t built by educators to optimize learning. It presents information not in a carefully balanced way but as a concentration-fragmenting mishmash.

Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.

In addition to flooding our working memory with information, the juggling imposes what brain scientists call “switching costs” on our cognition.

“the brain takes time to change goals, remember the rules needed for the new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous, still-vivid activity.”

It’s important to emphasize that the Net’s ability to monitor events and automatically send out messages and notifications is one of its great strengths as a communication technology.

The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to “vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,”

We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.

when people read, their eyes don’t sweep across the words in a perfectly fluid way. Their visual focus advances in little jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly at different points along each line.

the pattern of pauses, or “eye fixations,” can vary greatly depending on what’s being read and who’s doing the reading.

Nielsen found that hardly any of the participants read online text in a methodical, line-by-line way, as they’d typically read a page of text in a book. The vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

“It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense,” the authors of the study reported; “indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself—our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts.

Research shows that certain cognitive skills are strengthened, sometimes substantially, by our use of computers and the Net.

after just ten days of playing action games on computers, a group of young people had significantly increased the speed with which they could shift their visual focus among different images and tasks.

As we practice browsing, surfing, scanning, and multitasking, our plastic brains may well become more facile at those tasks.

“Our jobs depend on connectivity” and “our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it.” The practical benefits of Web use are many, which is one of the main reasons we spend so much time online.

“The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.

What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.”50 The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

But our “new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence” go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”

Whereas the infrequent multitaskers exhibited relatively strong “top-down attentional control,” the habitual multitaskers showed “a greater tendency for bottom-up attentional control,” suggesting that “they may be sacrificing performance on the primary task to let in other sources of information.”

As we multitask online, he says, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.” The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove “deadly.”

What the Net diminishes is Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence.

The Flynn effect has been used to defend TV shows, video games, personal computers, and, most recently, the Internet.

The fact that the Internet began to come into widespread use only about ten years ago makes it all the more unlikely that it has been a significant force propelling IQ scores upward.

There are signs, as well, that the Flynn effect may be starting to fade even as Web use picks up.

After mulling over the paradoxes for many years, Flynn came to the conclusion that the gains in IQ scores have less to do with an increase in general intelligence than with a transformation in the way people think about intelligence. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific view of intelligence, with its stress on classification, correlation, and abstract reasoning, remained fairly rare, limited to those who attended or taught at universities.

By breaking down each job into a sequence of small steps and then testing different ways of performing them, he created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work.

Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers.

And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual and social lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.

Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, the company carries out thousands of experiments a day and uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly guide how all of us find information and extract meaning from it.6 What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

Although the design of its Web pages may appear simple, even austere, each element has been subjected to exhaustive statistical and psychological research.