The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

“Short-term memory produces a change in the function of the synapse, strengthening or weakening preexisting connections; long-term memory requires anatomical changes.”

an implicit memory “is recalled directly through performance, without any conscious effort or even awareness that we are drawing on memory.”

Explicit memory encompasses everything that we say we “remember” about the past.

The long-term storage of explicit memories involves all the biochemical and molecular processes of “synaptic consolidation” that play out in storing implicit memories. But it also requires a second form of consolidation, called “system consolidation,” which involves concerted interactions among far-flung areas of the brain.

As well as being the seat of our navigational sense—it’s where London cabbies store their mental maps of the city’s roads—the hippocampus plays an important role in the formation and management of explicit memories.

The hippocampus provides an ideal holding place for new memories because its synapses are able to change very quickly.

Eventually, once the memory is fully consolidated, it appears to be erased from the hippocampus. The cortex becomes its sole holding place. Fully transferring an explicit memory from the hippocampus to the cortex is a gradual process that can take many years.

Neuroscientists also theorize that the hippocampus helps link new memories with older ones, forming the rich mesh of neuronal connections that give memory its flexibility and depth. Many of the connections between memories are likely forged when we’re asleep and the hippocampus is relieved of some of its other cognitive chores.

Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.

While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed.”28 Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not.

Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context.

“the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full.”

Evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper.

The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.

Today, the story of the calculator is often used to support the argument that our growing dependence on online databases is benign, even liberating.

But the parallel is flawed. The pocket calculator relieved the pressure on our working memory, letting us deploy that critical short-term store for more abstract reasoning.

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas. The calculator, a powerful but highly specialized tool, turned out to be an aid to memory. The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.

The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement.

Attention may seem ethereal—a “ghost inside the head,” as the developmental psychologist Bruce McCandliss says36—but it’s a genuine physical state, and it produces material effects throughout the brain.

And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention.

Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the greatest is likely to be the wealth of connections within our own minds.

Psychologists and anthropologists are now discovering that, as Whitman intuited, the influence goes both ways. Personal memory shapes and sustains the “collective memory” that underpins culture.

The offloading of memory to external data banks doesn’t just threaten the depth and distinctiveness of the self. It threatens the depth and distinctiveness of the culture we all share.

To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

the people who “talked” with his program had little interest in making rational, objective judgments about the identity of ELIZA. They wanted to believe that ELIZA was a thinking machine.

In simulating a human being, however clumsily, ELIZA encouraged human beings to think of themselves as simulations of computers.

Such technologies become part of “the very stuff out of which man builds his world.” Once adopted, they can never be abandoned, at least not without plunging society into “great confusion and possibly utter chaos.”

Our ability to meld with all manner of tools is one of the qualities that most distinguishes us as a species. In combination with our superior cognitive skills, it’s what makes us so good at using new technologies. It’s also what makes us so good at inventing them.

Even as our technologies become extensions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies.

Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.

McLuhan wrote that our tools end up “numbing” whatever part of our body they “amplify.”20 When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part and its natural functions.

The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.

Our innate ability for “mind reading,” says Mitchell, has played an important role in the success of our species, allowing us to “coordinate large groups of people to achieve goals that individuals could not.”

The “chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought” can, writes Mitchell, lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in “inanimate objects.”

Our willingness, even eagerness, to enter into what Doidge calls “a single, larger system” with our data-processing devices is an outgrowth not only of the characteristics of the digital computer as an informational medium but of the characteristics of our socially adapted brains.

The subjects using the bare-bones software consistently demonstrated “more focus, more direct and economical solutions, better strategies, and better imprinting of knowledge.” The more that people depended on explicit guidance from software programs, the less engaged they were in the task and the less they ended up learning.

as we “externalize” problem solving and other cognitive chores to our computers, we reduce our brain’s ability “to build stable knowledge structures”—schemas, in other words—that can later “be applied in new situations.”

Internet companies are in fierce competition to make people’s lives easier, to shift the burden of problem solving and other mental labor away from the user and onto the microprocessor.

As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a “narrowing of science and scholarship.”

automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t.

Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashioned library research probably served to widen scholars’ horizons: “By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past.”

After Taylor, the laborer began following a script written by someone else. The machine operator was not expected to understand how the script was constructed or the reasoning behind it; he was simply expected to obey it.

What was lost along with the messiness was personal initiative, creativity, and whim. Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine.

When we search for information through Google or other search engines, we’re following a script. When we look at a product recommended to us by Amazon or Netflix, we’re following a script.

A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition.

The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions.

It’s not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It’s also empathy and compassion.

“For some kinds of thoughts, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,”

Smartphone use has become so “habitual,” the researchers wrote, that “people have little awareness of the frequency with which they check their phone.”

phone notifications produce symptoms of hyperactivity and absentmindedness similar to those that afflict people with attention deficit disorders.