The Shallows Quotes

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

“Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, [de Forest] grew even gloomier. He believed that 'electron physiologists' would eventually be able to monitor and analyze 'thought or brain waves', allowing 'joy and grief to be measured in define, quantitative unit.' Ultimately, he concluded, 'a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“We’ve reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State’s Joe O’Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn’t read books but that he doesn’t see any particular need to read them.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Although we don't tend to think of libraries as media technologies, they are. The public library is, in fact, one of the most important and influential informational media ever created—and one that proliferated only after the arrival of silent reading and movable-type printing. A community's attitudes and preferences toward information take concrete shape in its library's design and services. [...] The library provides, as well, a powerful symbol of our new media landscape: at the center stands the screen of the Internet-connected computers; the printed word has been pushed to the margins.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“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

“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

“It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“concordances. But here, too, the effects are different. As”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“According to one estimate, the number of books produced in the fifty years following Gutenberg’s invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Ultimately, it’s an invention’s intellectual ethic that has the most profound effect on us. The intellectual ethic is the message that a medium or other tool transmits into the minds and culture of its users.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Google, says its CEO, is more than a mere business; it is a “moral force.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“During the twentieth century, neuroscientists and psychologists also came to more fully appreciate the astounding complexity of the human brain. Inside our skulls, they discovered, are some 100 billion neurons, which take many different shapes and range in length from a few tenths of a millimeter to a few feet.4 A single neuron typically has many dendrites (though only one axon), and dendrites and axons can have a multitude of branches and synaptic terminals. The average neuron makes about a thousand synaptic connections, and some neurons can make a hundred times that number.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“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