The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

Socrates grants that there are practical benefits to capturing one’s thoughts in writing—“as memorials against the forgetfulness of old age”—but he argues that a dependence on the technology of the alphabet will alter a person’s mind, and not for the better. By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.

In a purely oral culture, thinking is governed by the capacity of human memory. Knowledge is what you recall, and what you recall is limited to what you can hold in your mind.28 Through the millennia of man’s preliterate history, language evolved to aid the storage of complex information in individual memory and to make it easy to exchange that information with others through speech. “Serious thought,” Ong writes, was by necessity “intertwined with memory systems.”29 Diction and syntax became highly rhythmical, tuned to the ear, and information was encoded in common turns of phrase—what we’d today call clichés—to aid memorization. Knowledge was embedded in “poetry,” as Plato defined it, and a specialized class of poet-scholars became the human devices, the flesh-and-blood intellectual technologies, for information storage, retrieval, and transmission. Laws, records, transactions, decisions, traditions—everything that today would be “documented”—in oral cultures had to be, as Havelock says, “composed in formulaic verse” and distributed “by being sung or chanted aloud.”

The scribes didn’t pay much attention to the order of the words in a sentence either. In spoken language, meaning had always been conveyed mainly through inflection, the pattern of stresses a speaker places on syllables, and that oral tradition continued to govern writing. In interpreting the writing in books through the early Middle Ages, readers would not have been able to use word order as a signal of meaning. The rules hadn’t been invented yet.

Readers’ eyes had to move slowly and haltingly across the lines of text, pausing frequently and often backing up to the start of a sentence, as their minds struggled to figure out where one word ended and a new one began and what role each word was playing in the meaning of the sentence. Reading was like working out a puzzle.

By the start of the second millennium, writers had begun to impose rules of word order on their work, fitting words into a predictable, standardized system of syntax. At the same time, beginning in Ireland and England and then spreading throughout the rest of western Europe, scribes started dividing sentences into individual words, separated by spaces. By the thirteenth century, scriptura continua was largely obsolete, for Latin texts as well as those written in the vernacular.

The anatomical alterations in the slug’s relatively simple memory circuits were extensive. In one case, the researchers found that, before a long-term memory was consolidated, a particular sensory neuron had some thirteen hundred synaptic connections to about twenty-five other neurons. Only about forty percent of those connections were active—in other words, sending signals through the production of neurotransmitters. After the long-term memory had been formed, the number of synaptic connections had more than doubled, to about twenty-seven hundred, and the proportion that were active had increased from forty percent to sixty percent. The new synapses remained in place as long as the memory persisted. When the memory was allowed to fade—by discontinuing the repetition of the experience—the number of synapses eventually dropped to about fifteen hundred. 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.

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

“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.”

The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. 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.

Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes. Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic terminals.29 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 very act of remembering, explains clinical psychologist Sheila Crowell in The Neurobiology of Learning, appears to modify the brain in a way that can make it easier to learn ideas and skills in the future.33

In the 1970s, when schools began allowing students to use portable calculators, many parents objected. They worried that a reliance on the machines would weaken their children’s grasp of mathematical concepts. The fears, subsequent studies showed, were largely unwarranted.34 No longer forced to spend a lot of time on routine calculations, many students gained a deeper understanding of the principles underlying their exercises. Today, the story of the calculator is often used to support the argument that our growing dependence on online databases is benign, even liberating. In freeing us from the work of remembering, it’s said, the Web allows us to devote more time to creative thought. 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. As the experience of math students has shown, the calculator made it easier for the brain to transfer ideas from working memory to long-term memory and encode them in the conceptual schemas that are so important to building knowledge. 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.

Personal memory shapes and sustains the “collective memory” that underpins culture. What’s stored in the individual mind—events, facts, concepts, skills—is more than the “representation of distinctive personhood” that constitutes the self, writes the anthropologist Pascal Boyer. It’s also “the crux of cultural transmission.”41 Each of us carries and projects the history of the future. Culture is sustained in our synapses. 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.

Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as “the world’s information.” It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. 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.

In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger observed that the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress.

A 2016 experiment by a University of Virginia psychologist and two colleagues revealed that phone notifications produce symptoms of hyperactivity and absentmindedness similar to those that afflict people with attention deficit disorders.

A 2017 experiment at the University of Arkansas at Monticello examined how phones affected undergraduates’ understanding and retention of information in a large lecture class.11 The researchers found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who had their phones with them. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly. A 2016 survey of nearly a hundred high schools in Britain found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.