The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.

Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind—over and over again.

The new codices, like the tablets and scrolls that preceded them, were almost always read aloud, whether the reader was in a group or alone. In a famous passage in his Confessions, Saint Augustine described the surprise he felt when, around the year AD 380, he saw Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading silently to himself. “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still,” wrote Augustine. “Often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” Baffled by such peculiar behavior, Augustine wondered whether Ambrose “needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse.”

Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,”

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.

The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

The daily use of computers, smartphones, search engines, and other such tools “stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones.”7

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.

But after the multitasking trial, they had a much harder time drawing conclusions about their experience. Switching between the two tasks short-circuited their understanding; they got the job done, but they lost its meaning. “Our results suggest that learning facts and concepts will be worse if you learn them while you’re distracted,” said the lead researcher, UCLA psychologist Russell Poldrack.32 On the Net, where we routinely juggle not just two but several mental tasks, the switching costs are all the higher.

Given our brain’s plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our synapses when we’re not online. We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding.

We’re not smarter than our parents or our parents’ parents. We’re just smart in different ways.

Short-term memories don’t become long-term memories immediately, and the process of their consolidation is delicate. Any disruption, whether a jab to the head or a simple distraction, can sweep the nascent memories from the mind.16

The two types of memory entail different biological processes. Storing long-term memories requires the synthesis of new proteins. Storing short-term memories does not.

When our sleep suffers, studies show, so, too, does our memory.

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

The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.

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