The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

Nicholas Carr, “The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” W.W.Norton, 2010, 224 pp.

We are our brains and due to our neuroplastic brains we are constantly changing and have historically been most influenced by changing technologies.  Technologies like maps, clocks, modes of transportation, and so forth until the present: The Internet. 

Carr’s best argument in the details of modern neuroscience actually is most successful when he sticks to cultural criticism as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly the radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Carr concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic.

My Notes:

Pg. 5f:  The internet has changed the way we think; it has significantly shortened our attention span yet the web has been a godsend to our quest for knowledge and research.  (After Guttenberg, reading also had a profound influence on our thought process).

Pg. 10:  We seemed to have arrived at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking.  We are trading away our old linear thought process.  A calm, focused, undistracted, 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.  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; as brain science continues to advance, the evidence for brain plasticity strengthens.

Pg. 20:   Until recently, most biologists and neurologists continued to believe, as they had for hundreds of years, that the structure of the adult brain never changed.  Our neurons would connect into circuits during childhood, when our brains were malleable, and as we reached maturity the circuitry would become fixed.  Once we hit our twenties, it was held that no new neurons were created, no new circuits forged.  We would of course, continue to store new memories throughout our lives, but the only structural change the brain would go through in adulthood was a slow process of decay.

Pg. 31:  In fact, our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behavior, reworking their circuitry with each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or shift of awareness.  Neuroplasticity is one of the most important products of evolution.  The genius of our brains is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t.  Our ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting, we now know are not entirely determined by our genes.  Nor are they entirely determined by our childhood experiences.  We change them through the way we live and through the tools we use.

Pg. 34:  Neuroplasticity of the brain not only provides an escape from genetic determinism but also provides a path to some bad influences.  As particular circuits in our brain strengthen through the repetition of a physical or mental activity, they begin to transform that activity into a habit.  The chemically triggered synapses that link our neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they’ve formed.  Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones.  Neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to OCD to tinnitus. 

Pg. 43:  The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves.  And like the map, it changed the way we thought.  Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.  We began to see, in all things and phenomena, the pieces that composed the whole, and then we began to see the pieces of which the pieces were made.  Our thinking became Aristotelian in its emphasis on discerning abstract patterns behind the visible surfaces of the visible world.  The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then into the Enlightenment. 

Pg. 44:  Our technologies can be divided into four categories. 

Increase physical strength

Extend the range or sensitivity of our senses

Enable us to reshape nature

Expand our intellectual abilities

One set, which encompasses the plow, the darning needle, and the fighter jet, extends our physical strength, dexterity, or resilience.  A second set, which includes the microscope, the amplifier, and Geiger counter extend the range or the sensitivity of our senses.  A third group, spanning such technologies as the reservoir, the birth control pill, and the genetically modified corn plant enables us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires. The map and the clock belong to the fourth category: intellectual technologies.  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.  The typewriter is an intellectual technology.  So are the abacus and the slide rule, the sextant and the globe, the book and the newspaper, the school and the library, the computer and the Internet. 

 Pg. 48f:  We know that the basic form of the human brain hasn’t changed much in the last forty thousand years.  But we do know that the ways human beings think and act have changed almost beyond recognition through those millennia.  (Examples of London cabbies, blind people and Braille, violin players: all show documented distinct changes to their brain circuitry).

Pg. 51:  Language itself is not a technology.  It’s native to our species.  Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and to hear words, a child learns to talk without instruction.  Because reading and writing have become so central to our identity and culture, it’s easy to assume that they too are innate talents.  But they’re not.  They are unnatural acts, made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many other technologies.  Reading and writing require schooling and practice, the deliberate shaping of the brain.

Pg. 53:  For writing to become a technology to progress beyond the Sumerian and Egyptian models, it had to get a whole lot simpler.  That didn’t happen until around 750 BC—when the Greeks invented the first complete phonetic alphabet which became a model for Western alphabets, including the Roman alphabet that we still use today.  This was a dramatic shift from an oral culture to a literary culture, in which writing became the major medium for expressing thought (at least for those that were literate).  It was a revolution that would eventually change the lives, and the brains of nearly everyone on earth.

Pg. 69:  The number of books produced in the fifty years following Guttenberg’s 1445 invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years.  A virtuous cycle had been set in motion.  The growing availability of books fired the public’s desire for literacy, and the expansion of literacy further stimulated the demand for books.  By the end of the fifteenth century, some 12 million volumes had come off the presses. 

Pg. 77:  Like our forebears during the later years of the Middle Ages, we find ourselves today between two technological worlds as the printing press and its products are being pushed from the center of our intellectual life to its edges.  The electronic revolution is approaching its culmination as the computer—desktop, laptop, handheld—becomes our constant companion and the Internet becomes our medium of choice for storing, processing, and sharing information in all forms, including text.  The world of the screen is a very different place from the world of the page.  A new intellectual ethic is taking hold.  The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted.  The future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDS.  It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light.

Pg. 116:  Knowing what we know now about the brain’s plasticity, if you set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you couldn’t do better than inventing the internet.  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 ever come into general use.  At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book.

Pg. 138:  The ability to skim text is every bit as important as the ability to read deeply.  What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. 

Pg. 141:  Given our brain’s plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our synapses when we’re not online.  We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding.  There are signs that the Flynn effect may be starting to fade even as Web use picks up.

Pg. 151: Taylorism is founded on six assumptions:  That the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that the 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 affair of citizens is best guided by experts.  Remarkably, only one tweak is required to bring this philosophy in line with Google: Google believes citizens affairs are best guided by algorithms, not experts.

Pg. 191:  Those who celebrate the ‘outsourcing’ of memory to the Web overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory.  Memory exists in time, changing as the body changes.  Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic terminals. 

Pg. 208:  Our ability to meld with all manner of tools is one of the qualities that most distinguishes us as a species.  In combination with our superior cognitive skills, it’s what makes us so good at using new technologies.  However, every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities.  The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.  That explains why people, after working with a word processor for a time, begin to lose the facility for writing and editing in longhand.  (This has definitely been my personal experience).