“To be everywhere is to be nowhere” – Seneca
I read an excerpt from Nicolas Carr’s book ‘The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way we Think, Read and Remember’ at the weekend. He believes that the internet has reprogrammed our brains, making it harder for us to concentrate on deep reading and long stretches of prose and narrative.
I was relieved, to say the least – I had thought that my lack of concentration was down to years of Sauvignon Blanc abuse!
Here are some fascinating snippets from the article (which I had to read several times in order to retain!)
“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — as far as I can tell — but it’s changing.
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case any more. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as though I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle…
…What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski…
…In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Katherine Hayles, a professor at Duke University, North Carolina, confessed: “I can’t get my students to read whole books any more.” Hayles teaches English; the students she’s talking about are students of literature…
…By choice or necessity, we have embraced the net’s uniquely rapid-fire mode of collecting and dispensing information.
We seem to have arrived at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking. Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts — the faster the better…
…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 that the technology encourages and rewards.
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 only that we tend to use the net regularly, even obsessively. It’s also 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. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has yet come into general use. It’s certainly the most powerful that has come along since the book…
…During the course of a day, most of us with access to the web spend at least a couple of hours online — sometimes much more — and during that time we tend to repeat the same or similar actions over and over again, usually at high speed and often in response to cues delivered through a screen or a loudspeaker. Some of the actions are physical ones. As we go through these motions, the net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory, and auditory cortices. The net engages all our senses — except, so far, those of smell and taste — and it engages them simultaneously.
The net commands our attention with far greater insistency than our television or radio or morning newspaper ever did. Watch a kid texting his friends or a college student looking over the roll of new messages and requests on her Facebook page or a businessman scrolling through his e-mails on his BlackBerry. What you see is a mind consumed by a medium.
When we’re online we’re often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices…
…Our use of the internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the net seizes our attention only to scatter it. We focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli. The net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively…
…Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the director of its Memory and Aging Centre, has been studying the physiological and neurological effects of the use of digital media. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains,” he says. The daily use of computers, smartphones, search engines and other such tools “stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones”…
Book readers have a lot of brain activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing, but they don’t display much activity in the prefrontal regions associated with decision making and problem solving. Experienced net users, by contrast, display extensive activity across all those brain regions when they scan and search web pages. The good news here is that web surfing, because it engages so many brain functions, may help to keep older people’s minds sharp. Searching and browsing seem to “exercise” the brain in a way that is similar to solving crossword puzzles, Small says.
But the extensive activity in the brains of surfers also points to why deep reading and other acts of sustained concentration become so difficult online. The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli, requires constant mental co-ordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information. Our ability to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction remains largely disengaged….
…There are many possible sources of cognitive overload, but two of the most important, according to John Sweller, an Australian educational psychologist, are “extraneous problem-solving” and “divided attention”. Those also happen to be two of the central features of the net as an informational medium. Using the net may, as Small suggests, exercise the brain the way that solving crossword puzzles does. But such intensive exercise, when it becomes our primary mode of thought, can impede deep learning and thinking. Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the internet.
The net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing our attention. Studies of office workers who use computers reveal that they constantly stop what they are doing to read and respond to incoming e-mails. It’s not unusual for them to glance at their inbox 30 or 40 times an hour. Since each glance represents a small interruption of thought, a momentary redeployment of mental resources, the cognitive cost can be high.
…Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we are involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.
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 the Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that “the new is more often trivial than essential”.
And so we ask the internet to keep interrupting us. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information that we receive. Tuning out is not an option that many of us would consider…
…It would be a serious mistake to look narrowly at the net’s benefits and conclude that the technology is making us more intelligent. Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, says that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking but that improving our ability to multitask hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively: “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.
The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best 2,000 years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere…”
The net is making us smarter, in other words, only if we define intelligence by the net’s own standards. If we take a broader and more traditional view of intelligence — if we think about the depth of our thought rather than merely its speed — we have to come to a different and considerably darker conclusion.
Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy”, commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research. “Everything distracts them.” Michael Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment. As we multitask online, he says, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap”. The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove “deadly”.
The mental functions that are losing the “survival of the busiest” brain-cell battle are those that support calm, linear thought — the ones that we use in traversing a lengthy narrative or an involved argument, the ones on which we draw when we reflect on our experiences or contemplate an outward or inward phenomenon. The winners are those functions that help us to speedily locate, categorise and assess disparate bits of information in a variety of forms, that permit us to maintain our mental bearings while being bombarded by stimuli. These functions are, not coincidentally, very similar to the ones performed by computers, which are programmed for the high-speed transfer of data in and out of memory.
The net grants us access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope and makes it easy for us to sort through that library — to find, if not exactly what we were looking for, at least something sufficient for our purposes.
What the net diminishes is the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence.”
Food for thought, I think.
