The Shallows Quotes

“Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”51”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” The”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one. When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it's a mistake to assume that more is better.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn’t be confused with the libraries we’ve known up until now. It’s not a library of books. It’s a library of snippets.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy down town streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results.
The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“In one recent experiment, Damasio and his colleagues had subjects listen to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain. The subjects were then put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned as they were asked to remember the stories. The experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstrations of physical pain-when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your own brain activate almost instantaneously- the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain "to transcend immediate involvement of the body" and begin to understand and to feel "the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation." (p220)”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“But there is one thing that determinists and instrumentalists can agree on: technological advances often mark turning points in history. New tools for hunting and farming brought changes in patterns of population growth, settlement, and labor.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The brain’s plasticity is not limited to the somatosensory cortex, the area that governs our sense of touch. It’s universal. Virtually all of our neural circuits—whether they’re involved in feeling, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking, learning, perceiving, or remembering—are subject to change. The received wisdom is cast aside.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“One of its major recent thrusts has been to place a greater priority on what it calls the “freshness” of the pages it recommends. Google not only identifies new or revised Web pages much more quickly than it used to—it now checks the most popular sites for updates every few seconds rather than every few days—but for many searches it skews its results to favor newer pages over older ones.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

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

“What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself—our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“When we’re online, we’re often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“La industria prosperó. Lo que se perdió junto con el desorden fue la iniciativa personal, la creatividad, el capricho.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superficiales. ¿Qué está haciendo Internet con nuestras mentes?

“As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“To give up that control is to be left with “the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”38 A mentally troubled man—he would hang himself two and a half years after the speech—Wallace knew with special urgency the stakes involved in how we choose, or fail to choose, to focus our mind. We cede control over our attention at our own peril. Everything that neuroscientists have discovered about the cellular and molecular workings of the human brain underscores that point.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

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

“The results also reinforce something that Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. “How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer: “They don’t.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we're searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole. We don't see the forest when we search the Web. We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium's physical form; it injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“I felt lost without the Delete key, the scrollbar, the cut and paste functions, the Undo command. I had to do all my editing on-screen. In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“THE ADULT BRAIN, it turns out, is not just plastic but, as James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, puts it, “very plastic.”16 Or, as Merzenich himself says, “massively plastic.”17 The plasticity diminishes as we get older—brains do get stuck in their ways—but it never goes away. Our neurons are always breaking old connections and forming new ones, and brand-new nerve cells are always being created.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“As we multitask online, he says, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.” The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove “deadly.”54”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.”33”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Personal memory shapes and sustains the “collective memory” that underpins culture.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“for Google, the real value of a book is not as a self-contained literary work but as another pile of data to be mined.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer: “They don’t.”38”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains