The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “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.

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.” Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research. “Everything distracts them.”

The Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope, and it makes it easy for us to sort through that library—to find, if not exactly what we were looking for, at least something sufficient for our immediate purposes. 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.

A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “us[e] technology to solve problems that have never been solved before,”57 and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it? Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by artificial intelligence is as unsettling as it is revealing. It underscores the firmness and the certainty with which Google holds to its Taylorist belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. “Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made,” the twentieth-century philosopher Günther Anders once observed, and in the pronouncements of Google’s founders we can sense that shame as well as the ambition it engenders.58 In Google’s world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive—and better algorithms to steer the course of its thought. “Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer network...

Yes!

For Dyson, who has spent much of his life speculating about the inner lives of machines, the visit to Google must have been exhilarating. Here, after all, was a company eager to deploy its enormous resources, including many of the brightest computer scientists in the world, to create an artificial brain. But the visit left Dyson troubled. Toward the end of an essay he wrote about the experience, he recalled a solemn warning that Turing had made in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In our attempts to build intelligent machines, the mathematician had written, “we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children.” Dyson then relayed a comment that “an unusually perceptive friend” had made after an earlier visit to the Googleplex: “I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?”60 The reaction, though obviously extreme, is understandable. With its enormous ambition, its immense bankroll, and its imperialistic designs on the world of knowledge, Google is a natural vessel for our fears as well as our hopes. “Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin has acknowledged. “Others say Google is Satan.”

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 findings indicate, van Nimwegen concluded, that 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.”29 A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind.

As I was finishing this book late in 2009, I stumbled on a small story tucked away in the press. Edexcel, the largest educational testing firm in England, had announced it was introducing “artificial intelligence-based, automated marking of exam essays.” The computerized grading system would “read and assess” the essays that British students write as part of a widely used test of language proficiency. A spokesman for Edexcel, which is a subsidiary of the media conglomerate Pearson, explained that the system “produced the accuracy of human markers while eliminating human elements such as tiredness and subjectivity,” according to a report in the Times Education Supplement. A testing expert told the paper that the computerized evaluation of essays would be a mainstay of education in the future: “The uncertainty is ‘when’ not ‘if.’”1 How, I wondered, would the Edexcel software discern those rare students who break from the conventions of writing not because they’re incompetent but because they have a special spark of brilliance? I knew the answer: it wouldn’t. Computers, as Joseph Weizenbaum pointed out, follow rules; they don’t make judgments. In place of subjectivity, they give us formula. The story revealed just how prescient Weizenbaum had been when, decades ago, he warned that as we grow more accustomed to and dependent on our computers we will be tempted to entrust to them “tasks that demand wisdom.” And once we do that, there will be no turning back. The software will b...