The Shallows Quotes

“In the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it-and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“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.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“When our brain is overtaxed, we find “distractions more distracting.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman, argued that Google “has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to “vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,” as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that “the new is more often trivial than essential.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“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.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot,” he wrote. The content of the medium is just “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” P 4”
― Nicholas Carr, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“But except in rare circumstances, you can train until you’re blue in the face and you’d never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time.” What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.” The Roman philosopher Seneca May have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into “rigid behaviors.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“In 2003, a Dutch clinical psychologist named Christof van Nimwegen began a fascinating study of computer-aided learning that a BBC writer would later call “one of the most interesting examinations of current computer use and the potential downsides of our increasing reliance on screen-based interaction with information systems.”26 Van Nimwegen had two groups of volunteers work through a tricky logic puzzle on a computer. The puzzle involved transferring colored balls between two boxes in accordance with a set of rules governing which balls could be moved at which time. One of the groups used software that had been designed to be as helpful as possible. It offered on-screen assistance during the course of solving the puzzle, providing visual cues, for instance, to highlight permitted moves. The other group used a bare-bones program, which provided no hints or other guidance. In the early stages of solving the puzzle, the group using the helpful software made correct moves more quickly than the other group, as would be expected. But as the test proceeded, the proficiency of the members of the group using the bare-bones software increased more rapidly. In the end, those using the unhelpful program were able to solve the puzzle more quickly and with fewer wrong moves. They also reached fewer impasses—states in which no further moves were possible—than did the people using the helpful software. The findings indicated, as van Nimwegen reported, that those using the unhelpful software were better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tended to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software were found “to aimlessly click around” as they tried to crack the puzzle.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. They are usually so intent on solving a particular problem or untangling some thorny scientific or engineering dilemma that they don't see the broader implications of their work. The users of the technology are also usually oblivious to its ethic. They, too, are concerned with the practical benefits they gain from employing the tool. Our ancestors didn't develop or use maps in order to enhance their capacity for conceptual thinking or to bring the world's hidden structures to light. Nor did they manufacture mechanical clocks to spur the adoption of a more scientific mode of thinking. These were by-products of the technologies. But what by-products! Ultimately, it's an invention's intellectual work ethic that has the most profound effect on us.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“As McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. 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. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. Pascual-Leone observes that “plastic changes may not necessarily represent a behavioral gain for a given subject.” In addition to being “the mechanism for development and learning,” plasticity can be “a cause of pathology.”35 It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Differences in brain activity have even been documented among readers of different alphabetic languages. Readers of English, for instance, have been found to draw more heavily on areas of the brain associated with deciphering visual shapes than do readers of Italian. The difference stems, it’s believed, from the fact that English words often look very different from the way they sound, whereas in Italian words tend to be spelled exactly as they’re spoken.21”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The bond between book reader and book writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization. The words of the writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies. And the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer’s work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory. “All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain,” said Emerson. “They knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.”36”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading. It was the technology of the book that made this “strange anomaly” in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“we program our computers and thereafter they program us. Even”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains