Is the internet bad for our brains? Photo credit: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

Is the internet, with its vast, unchecked hordes of LOL cats and constant influx of information, making us dumber?

How long can we sustainably walk down the paths of our thoughts without the need for a Google cane? What could we do without the social media heroin to calm our relentless need for distraction? Who is still able to read through complex novels or essays in a single sitting?

In his new book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a work based on his famous 2008 Atlantic article entitled “Is Google making us stupid? and that, like the original essay, has people talking, writer Nicholas Carr outlines the cruel paradox of our tech age. In the search for unlimited information and connectivity, we have also provided ourselves with an infinite scope for distraction.

But the essential problem in this may go deeper than distraction: In addition to changing our habits, the internet may also be changing the way we actually think. “What kind of brain is the Web giving us?”, wondered Carr, in a 24 May article in Wired magazine. Mooring his argument on dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators, Carr determined, “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

Carr continued, “We know that the human brain is highly plastic; neurons and synapses change as circumstances change.” The cognitive penalty of permanent sources of distraction can be severe and our constant inundation with electronic stimuli, Carr argues, is actually changing the brains’s wiring. In its review of the book, The Economist noted that Carr surveys current knowledge about the effects on thinking of “hypermedia”—in particular clicking, skipping, skimming—and especially on working and deep memory and draws some chilling inferences. There is evidence, Carr claimed, that digital technology is already damaging the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence. Or, as Carr wrote in his 2008 Atlantic essay, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Business Week, which also reviewed the book, noted that “While Carr believes the Internet is a revolutionary tool for finding information, he also suggests that it may be a dangerously powerful impetus to groupthink.” Relying on a study by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders & Stroke, Carr suggested that “multitasking makes people more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.” Taken to its extreme, Carr’s arguments suggest that geniuses like Tolstoi or Einstein who drew their talent from their capability of achieving a personal and matured work, who “owe their mastery, in part, to the difficulty of achieving it”, are less likely to emerge in the new internet era.

According to Business Week and Ball State University…
8.5 : Number of hours per day Americans spend interacting with a PC, TV, or smartphone
30-40 : Number of times per hour that American office workers check their e-mail
2,272 : Average number of monthly texts sent and received by American teenagers, fourth quarter 2008

As Business Week reminded, “Americans now spend 8.5 hours a day frenetically interacting with their PCs, TVs, or, increasingly, the smartphones that follow them everywhere.” In the process, claimed Carr, we are reverting to our roots as data processors. He concluded, “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.”

But a few critics have pointed out that however honest and thorough Carr’s analysis might be, the writer fails to offer  a prescription for the growing distrtaction of society. Steven Johnson, not entirelyconvinced by Carr’s argument, noted in The New York Times, “We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television. And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.”