The Shallows Quotes

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

“It’s not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It’s also empathy and compassion.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Jason P. Mitchell, “Watching Minds Interact,” in What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science, ed. Max Brockman (New York: Vintage, 2009), 78–88.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” said the novelist David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005.”
― 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.19”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense “sensuous involvement” with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a “considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.”
― 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”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“We should imitate bees,” Seneca wrote, “and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it is apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“As a group of Northwestern University professors wrote in a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” 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.”20”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“In a renowned 1956 paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” Princeton psychologist George Miller observed that working memory could typically hold just seven pieces, or “elements,” of information.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“In the books inked by scribes, words ran together without any break across every line on every page, in what’s now referred to as scriptura continua.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than “the sex organs of the machine world,”
― 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.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“False news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”31”
― 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. That’s not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It’s also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“That hasn’t happened. Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, 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

“It’s easy, today, to chuckle at Aristotle’s error. But it’s also easy to understand how the great philosopher was led so far astray. 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

“The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“These include all the tools we use to extend or support our mental powers—to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“They would, as Robert Martensen describes in The Brain Takes Shape, fit the visible structure of the brain into their preferred metaphysical metaphor, arranging the organ’s physical parts “so as to portray likeness in their own terms.”2 Writing”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“In one fascinating study, conducted at Washington University’s Dynamic Cognition Laboratory and published in the journal Psychological Science in 2009, researchers used brain scans to examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction. They found that “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

“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

“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.”33”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The book survived the phonograph as it had the newspaper. Listening didn’t replace reading. Edison’s invention came to be used mainly for playing music rather than declaiming poetry and prose. During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing. Today, books remain as commonplace as ever, and there’s every reason to believe that printed works will continue to be produced and read, in some sizable quantity, for years to come.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains