The Shallows Quotes

“If the experience of modern society shows us anything,” observes the political scientist Langdon Winner, “it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect. “If we stop exercising our mental skills,” writes Doidge, “we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.”36 Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s medical school, terms this process “survival of the busiest.”37 The mental skills we sacrifice may be as valuable, or even more valuable, than the ones we gain. 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. That”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“In his 1993 book Technopoly, Neil Postman distilled the main tenets of Taylor’s system of scientific management. Taylorism, he wrote, is founded on six assumptions: “that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”11 What’s remarkable is how well Postman’s summary encapsulates Google’s own intellectual ethic. Only one tweak is required to bring it up to date. Google doesn’t believe that the affairs of citizens are best guided by experts. It believes that those affairs are best guided by software algorithms—which is exactly what Taylor would have believed had powerful digital computers been around in his day.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Noting that the rise in IQ scores “is concentrated in nonverbal IQ performance,” which is “mainly tested through visual tests,” she attributed the Flynn effect to an array of factors, from urbanization to the growth in “societal complexity,” all of which “are part and parcel of the worldwide movement from smaller-scale, low-tech communities with subsistence economies toward large-scale, high-tech societies with commercial economies.” We’re not smarter than our parents or our parents’ parents. We’re just smart in different ways.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Once he had that insight, Flynn recalled in a 2007 interview, “I began to feel that I was bridging the gulf between our minds. We weren’t more intelligent than they, but we had learnt to apply our intelligence to a new set of problems. We had detached logic from the concrete, we were willing to deal with the hypothetical, and we thought the world was a place to be classified and understood scientifically rather than to be manipulated.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“There are plenty of fossilized bodies, but there are no fossilized minds.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“One thing is very clear: 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. It's not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It's that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli--repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive--that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Tal es la esencia de la oscura profecía de Kubrick: al confiar en los ordenadores para intermediar en nuestra comprensión del mundo, nuestra propia inteligencia se aplana y convierte en inteligencia artificial.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superficiales. ¿Qué está haciendo Internet con nuestras mentes?

“In a series of experiments involving hundreds of subjects, Princeton psychologist Diana Tamir and three colleagues examined how people's recording of their experiences, through online comments or digital photographs, influenced memory formation in three different scenarios: watching a lecture on a computer, taking a self-guided tour of a historic building alone, and taking the same tour in the company of another person. "Media use impaired memory for both computer-based and real-world experiences, in both solo and social contexts," the researchers reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. "Creating a hard copy of an experience through media leaves only a diminished copy in our own heads." With social media allowing and encouraging us to upload accounts of pretty much everything we do, this effect is now widespread. A 2017 Frontiers in Psychology survey of peer-reviewed research on how smartphones affect memory concluded that "when we turn to these devices, we generally learn and remember less from our experiences.”
― 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.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Every technology is an expression of human will.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that 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

“But the growing body of evidence makes clear that the memory inside our heads is the product of an extraordinarily complex natural process that is, at every instant, exquisitely tuned to the unique environment in which each of us lives and the unique pattern of experiences that each of us goes through. The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“They are useful. But they also make clear that, 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

“Evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Fully transferring an explicit memory from the hippocampus to the cortex is a gradual process that can take many years.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The words in books didn’t just strengthen people’s ability to think abstractly; they enriched people’s experience of the physical world, the world outside the book.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“But intellectually, our ancestors’ oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Neuroplasticity, argues Pascual-Leone, is one of the most important products of evolution, a trait that enables the nervous system “to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“gained. We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

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

New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read.

By allowing us to filter out distractions, to quiet the problem-solving functions of the frontal lobes, deep reading becomes a form of deep thinking.

People who read linear text comprehend more, remember more and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

Frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory and make us tense and anxious.

Improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.

What we are 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."

After spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Estamos hambrientos de lo nuevo aun cuando sepamos que «suele tener más de trivial que de esencial»[244]. Así que pedimos a Internet que siga interrumpiéndonos, de formas cada vez más numerosas y variadas. Aceptamos de buen grado esta pérdida de concentración y enfoque, la división de nuestra atención y la fragmentación de nuestro pensamiento, a cambio de la información atractiva o al menos divertida que recibimos. Desconectar no es una opción que muchos consideremos.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superficiales. ¿Qué está haciendo Internet con nuestras mentes?

“la Red atrae nuestra atención sólo para dispersarla.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superficiales. ¿Qué está haciendo Internet con nuestras mentes?

“The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“The brain, packed neatly into the bone-crate of the skull, gives us no sensory signal of its existence. We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences.” The brain regions that are activated often “mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.” Deep reading, says the study’s lead researcher, Nicole Speer, “is by no means a passive exercise.”35 The reader becomes the book.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“In 1964, just as the Beatles were launching their invasion of America’s airwaves, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and transformed himself from an obscure academic into a star. Oracular, gnomic, and mind-bending, the book was a perfect product of the sixties, that now-distant decade of acid trips and moon shots, inner and outer voyaging. Understanding Media was at heart a prophecy, and what it prophesied was the dissolution of the linear mind. McLuhan declared that the “electric media” of the twentieth century—telephone, radio, movies, television—were breaking the tyranny of text over our thoughts and senses.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

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

“The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you. Only it turns out it doesn’t feel like that at all. We don’t feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to.”1”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Sam Anderson, “In Defense of Distraction,” New York, May 25, 2009.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains