The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

“I read a lot—or at least I should be reading a lot—only I don’t. I skim. I scroll.

“Digital immersion,” wrote the lead researcher, “has even affected the way they absorb information. They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom.

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.

The conception of the adult brain as an unchanging physical apparatus grew out of, and was buttressed by, an Industrial Age metaphor that represented the brain as a mechanical contraption.

That’s when scientists and philosophers began referring to our brain circuits, and even our behavior, as being “hardwired,”

Descartes may have been wrong about dualism, but he appears to have been correct in believing that our thoughts can exert a physical influence on, or at least cause a physical reaction in, our brains. We become, neurologically, what we think.

the vital paths in our brains become, as Monsieur Dumont understood, the paths of least resistance.

The brain, packed neatly into the bone-crate of the skull, gives us no sensory signal of its existence.

Eventually, in a further intellectual leap, maps came to be used not only to represent vast regions of the earth or heavens in minute detail, but to express ideas—a plan of battle, an analysis of the spread of an epidemic, a forecast of population growth.

What the map did for space—translate a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon—another technology, the mechanical clock, did for time.

The need for tighter scheduling and synchronization of work, transport, devotion, and even leisure provided the impetus for rapid progress in clock technology.

“personalization” of precisely measured time “was a major stimulus to the individualism that was an ever more salient aspect of Western civilization.”

Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.

The intellectual ethic is the message that a medium or other tool transmits into the minds and culture of its users.

“Our ancestors could read tokens because their brains were able to connect their basic visual regions to adjacent regions dedicated to more sophisticated visual and conceptual processing.”

It would never have crossed the minds of the first writers to put blank spaces between words.

By the thirteenth century, scriptura continua was largely obsolete, for Latin texts as well as those written in the vernacular. Punctuation marks, which further eased the work of the reader, began to become common too. Writing, for the first time, was aimed as much at the eye as the ear.

The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness.

Audion.

could also be used to amplify audio transmissions sent and received as radio waves.

All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.

Many producers are chopping up their products to fit the shorter attention spans of online consumers, as well as to raise their profiles on search engines.

According to recent surveys by the American Library Association, ninety-nine percent of U.S. public library branches provide Internet access,

More than three-quarters of branches also offer Wi-fi networks for their patrons’ use.

But as a device for reading, the book retains some compelling advantages over the computer. You can take a book to the beach without worrying about sand getting in its works. You can take it to bed without being nervous about it falling to the floor should you nod off. You can spill coffee on it. You can sit on it. You can put it down on a table, open to the page you’re reading, and when you pick it up a few days later it will still be exactly as you left it. You never have to be concerned about plugging a book into an outlet or having its battery die.

Investing a few hundred dollars in a specialized “digital reader” has seemed silly, given the ease and pleasure of buying and reading old-fashioned books.

People with weak eyes can increase the size of the

type in e-books—something they can’t do with printed books.

The Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz has suggested that easy-to-use, networked readers like the Kindle “can help return to us our attention spans and extend what makes books great: words and their meaning.”

“We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience.

I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation.

The three top-selling Japanese novels in 2007 were all originally written on mobile phones.

“books will literally have discussions inside of them, both live chats and asynchronous exchanges through comments and social annotation.

essayist Caleb Crain describes as “groupiness,”

where people read mainly “for the sake of a feeling of belonging” rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement.

The medium used to present the words obscured the meaning of the words.

Studies on using hypertext show that individuals retain less when reading it as well as read slower.

Every time we shift our attention, our brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources.

Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information.

by the middle of the twentieth century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor.

had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more,” he writes, “but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants—silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.”10

The formation of long-term memories, in other words, involves not only biochemical changes but anatomical ones. That explained, Kandel realized, why memory consolidation requires new proteins.

We don’t constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them.

Nature isn’t our enemy, but neither is it our friend.

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.”

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.