The Shallows - Nicholas Carr
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Prologue
[q] “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts. [Rather, they alter] patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
- Marshall McLuhan
[bq] “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”
Media directly change us!
[bq] “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”
Hal and Me
Used to be able to read effortlessly for a whole day, now out attention starts to drift after a page, or even a paragraph, looking for something else to do.
Fact that we have all knowledge just a click away is great, but comes at a huge price.
[bq] Brains now expect information “in the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles”.
[q] Pathologist Bruce Friedman: “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print”, his mind having taken on a “staccato” quality.
[bq] “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.”
About being in a library: Never feeling the same kind of anxiety that’s so symptomatic for information overload: “Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.”
Carr’s writing/editing routine changed with advent of computer/internet. Felt lost without delete key or copy/paste.
Online you get something as a writer you don’t get in print: Direct feedback from your readers.
[bq] “Flood of free content turned into a tidal wave.”
Carr started doubting his “info-paradise”. Many of his habits and routines changed and developed strong dependency on the internet.
The Vital Paths
[q] “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Neuron: central core (soma) and connections (axons and dendrites)
When triggered, a pulse travels down axon and releases neurotransmitters.
[bq] “Thoughts, memories, emotions - all emerge from electrochemical interactions of neurons, mediated by synapses”
Old misconception: Adult brain is static. But found that even adult brain is plastic.
[q] “Every action leaves some permanent print upon the nervous tissue”
- J. Z. Young
Each location on body maps to a corresponding part in the cerebral cortex (wrinkled outer layer of the brain)
[q] “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
- James Olds
Hebb’s rule: “Cells that fire together wire together.”
Eric Kandel's Nobel prize winning work shows “synapses can undergo large and enduring changes in strength after only a relatively small amount of training" (p.28)
Plasticity unifies two philosophies
Empiricists: “tabula rasa”, everything is learned through experience
Rationalists: Born with built-in mental templates; nature, not nurture
Truth: Both right to some extent
[q] “When [neurons’] usual input disappears, they start responding to the next best thing”
- Nancy Kanwisher
Early evidence for neuroplasticity from patients with brain injuries.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone: Neuroplasticity is one of the most important products of evolution
Mental activity can change mind too. This implies that e.g. visualizations are very powerful.
Pascal-Leone study: Imagining piano study is almost as effective as actually doing it (p.33)
Bad news: Plasticity creates feedback loops, locking behaviors into habits
And bad habits are just as easy to ingrain as good habits.
The mind can train itself to be sick.
Jeffrey Schwartz about neural circuits: “survival of the busiest”
Neurons don’t care about quality of thought, all they want is to be activated.
[q] “The intellectual process of transforming experience in space to abstraction of space is a revolution in modes of thinking.”
- Vincent Virga
[q] Personal time-keeping, clocks and watches, became both “prod and key to personal achievement and productivity” - David Landes
Tools of the Mind
4 categories of technology
Extends physical capabilities (e.g. plow)
Extends our senses (e.g. microscope)
Allows us to reshape nature (e.g. birth control)
“Intellectual Technologies” (e.g. abacus)
IT most intimate, become an extension of us and change our brain.
Embody “intellectual ethic”, a set of assumption about how the mind works. Intellectual ethic usually ignored by users, they are only interested in practical benefits. IE is what a tool transmit’s to the user’s mind and culture.
Thorstein Veblen: “Technological Determinism”
Over long scale, technology is autonomous force with humans becoming “the sex organ of the machine world” (McLuhan)
[q] "Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Other extreme: Instrumentalists
Downplay power of technology. Mere tools that we use.
[q] “It is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning” - Langdon Winner
[bq] “We adapt ourselves to our tools requirements.”
No fossilized minds, hence hard to estimate impact of technology on brain on historical timescale.
Technology definitely changed metaphors used to describe nature, e.g. clockwork
Language is “primary vessel of conscious thought”
The technologies we use around language (e.g. reading/writing) have huge impact on how our brain works; literate people’s brain processes visual signals differently, etc. Even difference between alphabet based scripts and pictograms, etc.
[q] Maryanne Wolf on the Greek alphabet: “Economy of characters [reduced] the time and attention needed for rapid recognition [and required] fewer perceptual and memory resources”
Huge shift in culture: oral —> literary
Reading/writing initially controversial!
[q] Thamus in Plato’s Phaedrus: “It will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory; a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”
But Plato also saw the huge intellectual benefits.
[bq] “Language evolved to aid the storage of complex information in individual memory.”
The Deepening Page
Medium on which is written is important! First standardized medium: clay tables of Sumerians (cuneiform)
2500BC: Egyptian papyrus
Flexible, portable, easy to store
Next: Wax tablets allowed for erasing and editing
Ancient writing was “scriptura continua”, no breaks between words because they simply transcribed what they heard. Almost always read out loud.
In medieval ages writing spread to merchants and was used for more practical matters
Maryanne Wolf: brains change dramatically as we learn to read. Visual cortex has specialized regions only for written text. Also required our brain to focus on something for a long time which goes counter to evolution, where peripheral distractions were important because they could mean danger.
[q] “Strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development”
- Vaughan Bell
Gutenberg press dramatically reduced cost of distributing written word (1455)
Literary mind became the public/general mind.
[bq] “The ‘quiet’ and the ‘calm’ of the deep reader’s attentiveness becomes ‘part of the meaning’ of the poem."
2009 study from Washington Uni: “Readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
Nicole Speer: “[Deep reading] is by no means a passive exercise.” Reader becomes one with the story.
Books/writing lead to rapid expansion of vocabulary.
Also lead to increased capability of deep thought, long/complex arguments, and silent contemplation.
Today, find ourselves again at transition between two technological worlds, a new technological ethic.
A Medium of the Most General Nature
Turing machine as “universal machine”, and become our universal medium only shortly after Turing’s death
Hundreds of years of media history have suddenly become compressed into a couple of decades.
Net is different to previous media in that it is bidirectional.
Connects us, and is both a personal and commercial broadcasting medium.
Even with dramatically increased net use, TV viewing still steady or even increasing.
Average American spends 8.5h/day staring at a screen.
Decreasing consumption of print media.
History of media used to be fragmented, but once digitized, all forms of media become essentially the same, the internet becoming an all-purpose tool. [Just need to look at newspaper websites. They now embed videos and other stuff in their stories]
Publishing/distribution now a fraction of the cost.
Old technologies still persist for long time (e.g. vinyl) but lose their economic and cultural force.
As the net absorbs a medium, it recreates it in its own image, with hyperlinks and other context.
Changes the way we use, understand and experience content.
Reading is multi-sensory, and the experience of books vs. net is completely different for the brain. This has a direct influence on the degree of attention.
Hyperlinks —> Dip in and out of text rapidly, fragmentation of focus
Also all other software in background competes for our attention. “Ecosystem of interruption technologies” (Cory Doctorow)
Net expands, other media contracts.
Producers restructuring their content to fit shorter attention spans. [People asked me why my first article was so long, couldn’t it have been split into multiple articles. But I like long-form]
[q] “The gray text page, once a magazine staple, has been all but banished”
- Michael Scherer
Magazines and newspapers publish ever shorter stories and summaries.
TV and real world experiences (e.g. theater) are made more and more interactive and linked to the web.
The Very Image of a Book
Book has proofed most resistant. Has compelling advantages such as easy on eyes, easy to browse, durability,…
Also comes with a pleasure of buying/owning books.
But e-books have started to gain popularity.
[bq] “Turns the words of books into hypertext.” Creates something “dynamic to enhance the experience.”
But often get lost in rabbit hole of Wikipedia, Google, etc. Total immersion is compromised.
Changes in reading style will bring changes in writing style, e.g. writers optimize for search engines.
Might have social networking integrated into books [Medium is basically an early form of this]
Book was a finished product with indelible words.
Electronic text can be edited with ease, completely impermanent. —> Writer pays less attention.
[bq] “Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.”
[NFW: Lot’s of “top” Medium writers recommending quantity over quality if you want to become successful as a writer]
In the past, at the advent of both newspaper and phonographs, books were declared dead, but so far survived everything.
[q] “Already the silences, threats of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which 'high reading’ depended are largely disposed.”
- George Steiner
Some academics argue that decline of literary mind is something positive, giving easy justification for distracted thought.
[bq] “In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.”
During meeting at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre where they revealed multi-tasking for the first time (mid 1970s), showing how you could program, quickly respond to an email, and then go back to programming, a scientist in the audience demanded “Why in the world would you want to be interrupted, and distracted, by e-mail while programming.”
Now this question seems crazy.
Living without multi-tasking seems unthinkable now.
The Juggler’s Brain
[bq] “When we go online we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.”
It’s possible to go deep online, but that’s not what the technology promotes.
Delivers exactly the right stimuli, “repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive” that promote neuroplasticity (or make use of it to quickly rewire brain). Keep repeating the same actions/patterns over and over again, triggered by visual and audio stimuli.
Use positive reinforcement to reward both physical and mental actions.
[bq] “[The net] turn us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.” (p.117)
Captures, then scatters our attention.
[bq] “We focus intensively on the medium itself […] but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli” (p.118)
Neurons that are engaged in these new processes are taken from others; we weaken other skills.
Study by Gary Small (UCLA psychiatry professor, p.120) looked at internet veterans and novices doing a Google search in MRI.
Found that for veterans, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex highly engaged, not for novices. But follow up study 6 days later, in which novices were told to use internet for 1 hour per day, showed the same area active.
Only 5 hours of internet use dramatically rewired their brain!
For book readers, language, memory and visual regions are active. For net readers, the same but also problem solving and decision making regions. Good news for e.g. keeping mind healthy in old age, but all those regions being active at the same time make sustained concentration difficult, with decisions like what link to click having to be made constantly. Need to pause and decide every time we encounter a link. [see “attention residue” in first article]
Deep reading, i.e. books, disengages senses and decision making process and allows for deep thinking instead. Calm, not buzzing mind.
More neural activity is not always better.
Everything we are conscious of is stored in working memory (WM). WM can read from or write to long term memory (LTM).
Transition from WM to LTM one of the major bottlenecks of our mind. WM can only hold 2-4 unique “elements” of information at one time, and they disappear quickly.
Book reading allows gradual transfer from WM to LTM. Web reading makes WM “overflow” constantly before transfer can occur.
Cognitive load = rate of information flow into WM.
If cognitive load exceeds capacity to process we can’t transfer to LTM and make connections with previously learned. “We become mindless consumers of data” (p. 125)
John Sweller: Many sources of cognitive overload, but 2 main ones:
“extraneous problem solving”
“Divided attention”
Also central features of the net as a medium.
More and more studies show that reading linear texts provides much higher comprehension than reading hypertext full with links, even for very internet-literate people. (p. 127)
Erping Zhu study: Comprehension decreases with increase in number of links.
[q] “Reading and comprehension require establishing relationships between concepts, drawing inferences, activating prior knowledge, and synthesizing main ideas. Disorientation or cognitive overload may thus interfere with cognitive activities of reading and comprehension”
- Erping Zhu
Review study by DeStefano/LeFevre (p. 129)
2007 study in Media Psychology: Multimedia presentation of information results in both lesser understanding as well as less enjoyment of learning experience. (p. 130)
[q] “The new is more often trivial than essential”
- Christopher Chabris
Eye movement also drastically different on web. Scan text in “F” shape: Skim first few lines, but also quickly jump down in focus. (Jacob Nielsen study p. 134f)
While overall reading time is increasing, the time “spent on in-depth reading and concentrated reading” is decreasing (Ziming Liu study p.137f)
One potential upside: We might be getting more skilled at rapid-fire decision making. [Good for CEO types]
But: [q] “Does optimizing for multi-tasking result in better functioning - that is creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no. The more you multi-task, the less deliberate you become"- Jordan Grafman (head of cognitive neuroscience unit at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke)
Become more likely to rely on conventional wisdom and solutions rather than coming up with your own unique ones [and that is scary and problematic!]
[q] “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
- Seneca
Net increases speed of thought at the cost of depth.
Habitual multi-taskers are “suckers for irrelevancy” (Clifford Nass, Stanford professor, p.142)
Steady increase of IQ scores over last century: Abstract reasoning, the kind measured by IQ tests, became more and more common. Our brains are different than our ancestors, not better.
The Church of Google
Frederick Winslow Taylor, at height of industrialization, started timing and measuring factory workers and introducing optimized system.
[q] “ In the past the man has been first, in the future the system must be first.”
- Frederick Winslow Taylor
Still basis of manufacturing, and now with software/code, also becoming basis of mind.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Google “founded around the science of measurement. [They strive to] systematize everything.”
[q] Director of UX Irene Au: Rely on “cognitive psychology research [for] making people use their computers more efficiently."
Neil Postman in “Technopoly”: Six assumptions of Taylorism
Goal of human labor/thought is efficiency
Technical calculation superior to human judgement
Human judgement plagued by laxity, ambiguity and unnecessary complexity
Subjectivity obstacle to clear thinking
What can’t be measured either doesn’t exist or has no value
Affairs of citizens best guided by experts
If replace experts with algorithms, this is basically the Google philosophy.
[q] “Our goal is to get users in and out really quick. All our design decisions are based on that strategy.”
- Irene Au
Google’s profit tied to speed of information intake. They don’t want slow deep reading, they want your attention and as many clicks as possible.
[bq] “Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction."
Mark Zuckerberg in 2009 in response to Twitter’s rapid growth said they would “continue making the flow of information even faster.”
[NFW] Maybe can contrast this with recent announcement to make newsfeed more personal again.
Google so successful because of its many “complements”, additional services that all feed into the main business of advertising and data acquisition.
[NFW] Google IS useful, couldn’t have written this article without it, but only <5% of the time was spent chasing snippets online, the rest was spent offline, trying to unearth real meaning.
[bq] “When carried into the realm of the intellect, the industrial ideal of efficiency poses, as Hawthorne understood, a potential mortal threat to the pastor idea of meditative thought."
Fast information retrieval great and important but we often are losing the right balance with solitary contemplation.
[q] [NFW] Beauty of transcendentalists writing: Hawthorne describes messing with an anthill and watching “one of the inhabitants [returning from] some public or private business. What surprise, what hurry, what confusion of mind, are expressed in his movement! How inexplicable to him must be the agency which has effected this mischief!” - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Search, Memory
Socrates was worried, and rightly so, that transition from oral to literary culture would diminish memory capability. But as Umberto Eco puts it, books “challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.”
Erasmus also thought. [find quote on Medium about Erasmus’s book buying habit, maybe from Ryan Holiday?]
Erasmus didn’t enjoy memorization for its own sake, but as a first step towards synthesis.
[NFW] I used to be proud and brag about my bad memory and that it’s a waste to know anything that can be looked up. Now I’m worried that if I don’t actually know a variety of things I can’t use them and deep thought and synthesize my own ideas. Never make connections between new things if you don’t know about them.
Erasmus suggested “commonplace book”, a personal notebook of quotes, an aid to memory. Widely used through Renaissance and beyond.
But net seen as a replacement for memory, not an aid to it.
Common conception: Offloading memory to external devices leaves us more mental space for important/human thought. But this turns out to be wrong.
Takes time without distraction or new similar input for short term memories to become long term memories (about 1h).
Different biological process: LTM requires synthesis of new proteins, STM doesn’t.
[bq] “Repetition encourages consolidation."
Both concentration of neurotransmitters increased (STM) as weeks as new synapses formed. LTM involves not only biochemical processes, but also anatomical changes (induced by the proteins).
Kandel studies p. 185
Process of forming LTM: First memory only exists in the sensory cortex (e.g. visual, auditory) responsible for it. Then it partially migrates to hippocampus (ideal because it can adapt very fast). After a while completely erased from sensory cortices and only exists in hippocampus. Then over very long time (up to years) it’s transferred to cortex into true LTM.
Hippocampus as conductor of different incoming information and also link to old ones.
Hippocampus relieved from most other duties during sleep. —> Sleep extremely important for memory consolidation.
Outsourcing of memory to computers ignores that human memory is organic and keeps being processed long after it’s been initially stored.
Also confuses limited working memory with effectively boundless LTM.
[q] “Unlike a computer the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full.”
- Nelson Cowan
Evidence suggests that building personal memories sharpens the mind, not the opposite.
Web great supplement, but unfortunately often treated as a substitute.
A Thing Like Me
Joseph Weizenbaum after creating the remarkably/surprisingly successful ELIZA (interactive NLP system): Some technologies become so ingrained in society, they can never be abandoned, at least not without "great confusion and possibly utter chaos.”
[bq] “The introduction of computers into some complex human activities may constitute an irreversible commitment.”
When we pick up a tool (say a hammer), the way we perceive the world completely changes.
[q] “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”
- John Culkin
McLuhan: Tools are “numbing” whatever part of our body they “amplify”.
Spatial reasoning and mental maps: First revolution was map, now another revolution with GPS. This is not necessarily bad, but we should be aware of the tradeoff and that it’s happening.
Computer amplifies so much of the central nervous system that it also threatens to numb a lot of it…
We’re wired to understand/empathize with other people, which also makes us very easily attribute human characteristics to computers.
Our socially adapted brain makes us quickly “merge [into] a singe, larger system” with computers (Norman Doidge)
[bq] “We program our computers, and thereafter they program us.”
Christof van Nimwegen studies (p. 215f): Externalizing problem solving and the cognitive tasks leads to a reduced capability “to build stable knowledge structures [that can] be applied in new situations.”
James Evans’ 2008 study in Science (p. 217): Popularity gets amplified through search engines, in scholarly articles leading to a “narrowing of science and scholarship."