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The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr
IS THE internet a good thing or a harmful thing?
If that seems an odd question, it is probably because you are quite certain that the internet has been an enormous advantage to you in so many ways.
You came across my column as you quickly caught up on the latest news. You probably booked last night’s movie tickets online and searched for the critics' opinion of the movie before booking. You quickly found out everything you wanted to know about “existentialism” in a four-minute ‘Web search and skim’.
The title of the book, The Shallows, is Carr’s conclusion of what the Web is doing to how we think, read and remember. The book is an expansion of an essay he wrote for Atlantic magazine entitled “Is Google making us stupid?”.
Think of how you would have had to find information about existentialism before access to the Web was available.
You probably would have gone to a library to read a book on general philosophy as an introduction to the background out of which existentialism grew. Then, perhaps, something more specifically on the existentialists before finally settling into Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
Consider the difference between these two experiences. Carr suggests that the immediacy of the Web’s answers has turned him (and others) from “ a scuba diver in the sea of words” to someone who rides on the “surface like a guy on a Jet Ski”.
At a meeting at Duke University, Professor Katherine Hayles told Carr: “I cannot get my students to read whole books any more.” The students she is talking of are studying literature!
What makes this book so fascinating is not the observation that we have shorter attention spans but that our brains are being changed to have shorter attention spans. If this is correct, the question that follows is whether this means we are sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply.
My immediate response to this would have been a quick, of course not. I read and think about certain things deeply and others superficially.
Carr takes the reader through a tour of neuroscience and the question of how technologies can change the way your brain works.
Is your brain like your hand? Your hand is limited in the movements it can make. It can only get better at the proscribed movements through practice, or worse through disuse.
There is overwhelming evidence that our experiences and the technologies we use do reconfigure the brain.
In an experiment in the late 1990s, British researchers scanned the brains of 16 London cab drivers. Compared to the scans of the control group from the general public, the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampus was much larger.
This part of the brain stores and manipulates spatial representations of the world. The longer a cab drivers had been on the job, the larger their posterior hippocampus.
They also discovered that the drivers’ anterior hippocampus was smaller than that of the general public, and that the shrinking of the anterior hippocampus could have reduced the cabbies’ aptitude for other memorisation tasks.
Throughout the ages, the latest technologies have changed both how we think about the world and how our brains process information. Carr demonstrates how “tools of the mind” from the alphabet, to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer have all had their effects.
Words were the aural means of communication until we developed the technology of the alphabet and we turned the aural into the visual representing the aural.
The clock changed not only how we thought about time, but how we thought about the world. The change was so wide spread and profound that we even began describing the world in the same mechanical terms.
It changed how we thought about time. It was no longer slowly evolving changes over which we have no control; rather, it was something that could be measured in minutes and seconds, and controlled. With a clock in ever town square and on every church building, our concept of time changed.
We are constantly reminded of time used, time spent, time wasted, and time lost. Our concepts of everything from achievement to productivity changed.
If the printed book forces us to focus our attention and promotes deep and creative thought, what is the effect of Google? Are we becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming? Are we are losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection?
Wired magazines Clive Thompson wrote: “The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking.” What is the price of that boon? The result may be “the shallows” of the title, but that shallows is incredibly wide.
This is a must-read. It is a thought-provoking and fascinating book.
Readability: Light ----+ Serious
Insights: High -+--- Low
Practical: High ----+ Low
- Fin24
*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy. Views expressed are his own.
IS THE internet a good thing or a harmful thing?
If that seems an odd question, it is probably because you are quite certain that the internet has been an enormous advantage to you in so many ways.
You came across my column as you quickly caught up on the latest news. You probably booked last night’s movie tickets online and searched for the critics' opinion of the movie before booking. You quickly found out everything you wanted to know about “existentialism” in a four-minute ‘Web search and skim’.
The title of the book, The Shallows, is Carr’s conclusion of what the Web is doing to how we think, read and remember. The book is an expansion of an essay he wrote for Atlantic magazine entitled “Is Google making us stupid?”.
Think of how you would have had to find information about existentialism before access to the Web was available.
You probably would have gone to a library to read a book on general philosophy as an introduction to the background out of which existentialism grew. Then, perhaps, something more specifically on the existentialists before finally settling into Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
Consider the difference between these two experiences. Carr suggests that the immediacy of the Web’s answers has turned him (and others) from “ a scuba diver in the sea of words” to someone who rides on the “surface like a guy on a Jet Ski”.
At a meeting at Duke University, Professor Katherine Hayles told Carr: “I cannot get my students to read whole books any more.” The students she is talking of are studying literature!
What makes this book so fascinating is not the observation that we have shorter attention spans but that our brains are being changed to have shorter attention spans. If this is correct, the question that follows is whether this means we are sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply.
My immediate response to this would have been a quick, of course not. I read and think about certain things deeply and others superficially.
Carr takes the reader through a tour of neuroscience and the question of how technologies can change the way your brain works.
Is your brain like your hand? Your hand is limited in the movements it can make. It can only get better at the proscribed movements through practice, or worse through disuse.
There is overwhelming evidence that our experiences and the technologies we use do reconfigure the brain.
In an experiment in the late 1990s, British researchers scanned the brains of 16 London cab drivers. Compared to the scans of the control group from the general public, the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampus was much larger.
This part of the brain stores and manipulates spatial representations of the world. The longer a cab drivers had been on the job, the larger their posterior hippocampus.
They also discovered that the drivers’ anterior hippocampus was smaller than that of the general public, and that the shrinking of the anterior hippocampus could have reduced the cabbies’ aptitude for other memorisation tasks.
Throughout the ages, the latest technologies have changed both how we think about the world and how our brains process information. Carr demonstrates how “tools of the mind” from the alphabet, to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer have all had their effects.
Words were the aural means of communication until we developed the technology of the alphabet and we turned the aural into the visual representing the aural.
The clock changed not only how we thought about time, but how we thought about the world. The change was so wide spread and profound that we even began describing the world in the same mechanical terms.
It changed how we thought about time. It was no longer slowly evolving changes over which we have no control; rather, it was something that could be measured in minutes and seconds, and controlled. With a clock in ever town square and on every church building, our concept of time changed.
We are constantly reminded of time used, time spent, time wasted, and time lost. Our concepts of everything from achievement to productivity changed.
If the printed book forces us to focus our attention and promotes deep and creative thought, what is the effect of Google? Are we becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming? Are we are losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection?
Wired magazines Clive Thompson wrote: “The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking.” What is the price of that boon? The result may be “the shallows” of the title, but that shallows is incredibly wide.
This is a must-read. It is a thought-provoking and fascinating book.
Readability: Light ----+ Serious
Insights: High -+--- Low
Practical: High ----+ Low
- Fin24
*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy. Views expressed are his own.
