Reposting this entry from my earlier blog; this was originally posted in March of 2011
Review of the book: “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains”
by Nicholas Carr
A very enjoyable and thought-provoking read. The basic proposition of this book is that the internet is impacting our brains in a very profound way and that this diminishes some of our most important human faculties. Specifically, the author suggests that humans are losing the ability to engage in deep thought and the ability to maintain a sustained attention span. This is attributed directly to our increased use of the internet and the world wide web.
Carr lays out what I thought was a very well constructed case even though his eventual conclusions might seem a bit overly alarmist. Carr builds his case by going through several examples through history. These include the evolution of the book and the written word as well as several “tools of the mind” such as the map, the clock, the typewriter and eventually electronic media such as radio, television, computers and the internet itself. This background is well researched and well presented. As an example Carr illustrates the debate between Socrates, a proponent for the oral tradition of knowledge transfer, and his disciple Plato, who was more sympathetic towards the written word.
Carr then ties these in with well-established theories from the world of neuro-science. The “plasticity” of the human brain is explained using theories from neuro-science. Carr explains that modern neuro-science has clearly established the fact that the synaptic structure of the human brain adapts to the methods of thinking that are most frequently exercised. In the past, our use of tools such as maps or books caused our brains to adapt to a certain form of thinking. Similarly the internet with its myriad of web pages, inter-linked across each other, is causing our brains to get wired in a manner that is more efficient at absorbing short quick nuggets of information. At the same time we are spending less time exercising the brain with activities that require sustained deep thought such as reading a book. This is causing our “plastic” synapses to get re-wired in a way that makes it harder to engage in deep thought and much easier to jump around between multiple nuggets of information. There is plenty of evidence for this all around us, Carr argues, as we are all finding it harder and harder to sustain attention span or read books cover to cover. He argues that this is the loss of a very important human faculty since it is precisely this ability to engage in deep sustained thought that has resulted in many of the miraculous inventions of the last few centuries. Carr hastens to add that he is not implying that the internet is all bad since clearly it is a huge boon to society and democratizes information on a much larger scale than even Guttenberg’s invention from a couple of centuries ago. The benefits of the internet are too many to list; however it is only to our own benefit to also at the same time understand the flip side of all this.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Carr’s book and strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in neuro-science and the impact of technology on humanity.
Writer in the Cloud 