The Shallows Quotes

“when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18% of it.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The experiment suggested a strong correlation “between the number of links and disorientation or cognitive overload,” wrote Zhu.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.   BACK”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“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

“Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking,” he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it’s well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Bruce Friedman, who blogs about the use of computers in medicine, has also described how the Internet is altering his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he says.4 A pathologist on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technologizing the word'; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“The bond between a book reader and a book writer has always been a 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.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“What determines what we remember and what we forget? The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. “For a memory to persist,” writes Kandel, “the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.”35 If we’re unable to attend to the information in our working memory, the information lasts only as long as the neurons that hold it maintain their electric charge—a few seconds at best. Then it’s gone, leaving little or no trace in the mind.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context. As Joseph LeDoux explains, “The brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated.”30 Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.23”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed.40 “Writing and print and the computer,” writes Walter Ong, “are all ways of technologizing the word” and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.41 But the world of the screen, as we’re already coming to understand, is a very different place from the world of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense,” he says. “It’s not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web.” As soon as you learn to be “a skilled hunter” online, he argues, books become superfluous.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

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

“Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The animals’ neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can’t believe what he’s seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he’s been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Google is neither God nor Satan, and if there are shadows in the Googleplex they’re no more than the delusions of grandeur. What’s disturbing about the company’s founders is not their boyish desire to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators, but the pinched conception of the human mind that gives rise to such a desire.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“the inevitability of turning the pages of books into online images should not prevent us from considering the side effects. To make a book discoverable and searchable online is also to dismember it. The cohesion of its text, the linearity of its argument or narrative as it flows through scores of pages, is sacrificed.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Google, as the supplier of the Web’s principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Our modern microscopes, scanners, and sensors have disabused us of most of the old fanciful notions about the brain’s function. But the brain’s strangely remote quality—the way it seems both part of us and apart from us—still influences our perceptions in subtle ways. We have a sense that our brain exists in a state of splendid isolation, that its fundamental nature is impervious to the vagaries of our day-to-day lives. While we know that our brain is an exquisitely sensitive monitor of experience, we want to believe that it lies beyond the influence of experience. We want to believe that the impressions our brain records as sensations and stores as memories leave no physical imprint on its own structure. To believe otherwise would, we feel, call into question the integrity of the self.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

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

“He also suggested that every student and teacher keep a notebook, organized by subject, “so that whenever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.” Transcribing the excerpts in longhand, and rehearsing them regularly, would help ensure that they remained fixed in the mind. The passages were to be viewed as “kinds of flowers,” which, plucked from the pages of books, could be preserved in the pages of memory.3”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.’”55”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

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

“The oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense “sensuous involvement” with the world.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains