The Shallows Quotes

“That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper’s article, that people would come to read “with the eyes shut.” They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an “indispensable,” which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Posibilitatea unor adaptări neuroplastice nedorite există, de asemenea, în funcționarea cotidiană, normală a minților noastre. Experimentele arată că, exact așa cum creierul poate să construiască circuite noi sau mai puternice prin exercițiu fizic sau mental, acele circuite pot slăbi ori se pot dizolva dacă sunt neglijate. „Dacă încetăm să ne exersăm abilitățile mentale”, scrie Doidge, „nu numai că le uităm: spațiul din harta creierului destinat acelor abilități este realocat abilităților pe care le exersăm în locul lor”. Jeffrey Schwartz, profesor de psihiatrie la Facultatea de Medicină de la UCLA, numește acest proces „supraviețuirea celor mai ocupați”. Abilitățile mentale pe care le sacrificăm pot fi la fel de valoroase, ba chiar mai valoroase decât cele pe care le dobândim în loc. În ceea ce privește calitatea gândirii noastre, neuronii și sinapsele noastre sunt întru totul indiferenți. Posibilitatea declinului intelectual este inerentă maleabilității creierilor noștri.
Aceasta nu înseamnă că nu putem, cu eforturi concertate, să ne direcționăm semnalele noastre neuronale și să reconstruim abilitățile pe care le-am pierdut. Înseamnă însă că, după cum a priceput Monsieur Dumont, căile vitale din creierii noștri devin căile minimei rezistențe. Ele sunt căile pe care le vor urma cei mai mulți dintre noi de cele mai multe ori și cu cât le urmăm mai departe, cu atât mai greu este să facem cale întoarsă.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Într-un eseu din 2008 din New York Reviw of Books, Michael Greenberg a descoperit poezia neuroplasticității. El a remarcat că sistemul nostru neurologic, „cu ramurile, transmițătoarele și interstițiile sale ingenios calibrate, posedă o capacitate de improvizație ce pare să oglindească însăși impredictibilitatea gândirii”. Este „un spațiu efemer care se schimbă pe măsură ce se schimbă experiența noastră”. Există multe motive pentru a fi recunoscători că hard diskul nostru mental este capabil să se adapteze experienței atât de prompt, că până și creierii bătrâni pot să învețe trucuri noi. Adaptabilitatea creierului nu a condus numai la noi tratamente și la speranțe noi, pentru aceia care suferă de leziuni sau boli cerebrale. Ea ne furnizează tuturor o flexibilitate mentală și o suplețe intelectuală care ne permit să ne adaptăm la situații noi, să dobândim prin învățare noi abilități și, în general, să ne lărgim orizontul.
Știrea nu este însă în totalitate bună. Deși neuroplasticitatea ne oferă o evadare din determinismul genetic, o portiță de scăpare pentru gândire liberă și liber-arbitru, ea impune totodată comportamentului nostru propria sa formă de determinism. Pe măsură ce anumite circuite particulare din creierul nostru se întăresc prin repetiția unei activități fizice sau mentale, ele încep să transforme acea activitate într-un obicei. Paradoxul neuroplasticității, remarcă Doidge, este acela că, în schimbul întregii flexibilități mentale pe care ne-o acordă, ea poate sfârși prin a ne fereca în „deprinderi rigide”. Sinapsele declanșate chimic, care fac legături între neuronii noștri, ne programează, de fapt, să dorim să păstrăm exercitarea circuitelor pe care le-au format. Odată ce am făcut un nou cablaj de circuite în creierul nostru, scrie Doidge, „tânjim să le menținem activate”. Aceasta este calea pe care creierul face acordajul fin al operațiilor sale. Activitățile de rutină sunt îndeplinite din ce în ce mai rapid și eficient, pe când circuitele neutilizate se scurtează.
Cu alte cuvinte, plastic nu înseamnă elastic. Buclele noastre neuronale nu sar să-și reia forma anterioară ca o bandă de cauciuc; ele se mențin în starea lor modificată. Și nimic nu spune că noua stare trebuie să fie una dezirabilă. Deprinderile rele pot fi sădite în neuronii noștri la fel de ușor ca cele bune. Pascual-Leone observă că „schimbările plastice pot să nu reprezinte în mod necesar un câștig comportamental pentru un subiect dat”. Pe lângă faptul de a fi „mecanismul de dezvoltare și învățare”, plasticitatea poate fi „o cauză de patologie”.
Nu este surprinzător că neuroplasticitatea a fost legată de beteșugurile mentale mergând de la depresie până la tulburările obsesiv-compulsive sau tinitus. Cu cât un om suferind se concentrează asupra simptomelor sale, cu atât mai adânc acele simptome sunt gravate în circuitele sale neuronale. În cel mai rău caz, în esență mintea se antrenează pe sine să fie bolnavă. Multe forme de dependență sunt, de asemenea, consolidate de întărirea căilor plastice din creier. Chiar doze foarte mici de droguri adictive pot să altereze în mod dramatic fluxul de neurotransmițători, precum dopamina, o verișoară producătoare de plăcere a adrenalinei, pare-se că declanșează realmente pornirea sau oprirea unor gene particulare, amplificând și mai mult pofta de drog. Căile vitale devin mortale.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Through our tools, we seek to expand our power and control over our circumstances—over nature, over time and distance, over one another.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Mothers, wrote Bellamy, would no longer have “to make themselves hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of mischief.” The kids would all have their own indispensables.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Knowing what we do about London cabbies, we can posit that as people became more dependent on maps, rather than their own memories, in navigating their surroundings, they almost certainly experienced both anatomical and functional changes in the hippocampus and other brain areas involved in spatial modeling and memory. The circuitry devoted to maintaining representations of space likely shrank, while areas employed in deciphering complex and abstract visual information likely expanded or strengthened. We also now know that the changes in the brain spurred by map use could be deployed for other purposes, which helps explain how abstract thinking in general could be promoted by the spread of the cartographer's craft.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg's printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it's been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday's mind.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“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

“Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine. When”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“those with the helpful software were found “to aimlessly click around” as they tried to crack the puzzle.27”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Christof van Nimwegen began a fascinating study of computer-aided learning that a BBC writer would later call “one of the most interesting examinations”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in “inanimate objects.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The “chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought” can, writes Mitchell,”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“As we’ve entered the computer age, however, our talent for connecting with other minds has had an unintended consequence.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“true enlightenment comes only through contemplation and introspection.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The strip-mining of “relevant content” replaces the slow excavation of meaning.   IT”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“hypertext readers often “could not remember what they had and had not read.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“A 1989 study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly “through pages instead of reading them carefully.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“reading books chronically understimulates the senses.”11”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google,” he said in a 2000 interview, long before his company’s name had become a household word. “We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Between the intellectual and behavioral guardrails set by our genetic code, the”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“And when we hand down our habits of thought to our children, through the examples we set, the schooling we provide, and the media we use, we hand down as well the modifications in the structure of our brains.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-world evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, assembled an enormous database on 34 million scholarly articles published in academic journals from 1945 through 2005. He analyzed the citations included in the articles to see if patterns of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online. Considering how much easier it is to search digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations. But that’s not at all what Evans discovered. As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a “narrowing of science and scholarship.”31 In explaining the counterintuitive findings in a 2008 Science article, Evans noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t. The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to “bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers” would routinely skim as they flipped through the pages of a journal or a book. The quicker that scholars are able to “find prevailing opinion,” wrote Evans, the more likely they are “to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles.” Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashioned library research probably served to widen scholars’ horizons: “By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past.”32 The easy way may not always be the best way, but the easy way is the way our computers and search engines encourage us to take.”
― 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.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains