Nicholas Carr - The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

This book was recommended by the MA TESOL course tutor Gary Motteram.

It deals with a topic which I have been interested in and something which I believe is happening; technology, and most recently, the Internet, is changing the way we think and act.  Surfing the net is something most people love doing but I have had the feeling that clicking from page to page has affected the way we consume information, moving to a more superficial level of reading.  I've always had the gnawing doubt that my ability to concentrate on one topic has been affected by the ease of clicking form page to page online.

Nicholas Carr's book introduced and directed me towards the Socratic dialogue of Phaedrus, written by Plato, in which Socrates expresses animosity towards the writing and recording of philosophical discourse.  Socrates, an early Luddite, was against the written word believing that words should be written with intelligence in the mind of the learner.  David Malki's blog offers a great analysis of the Phaedrus dialogue (True Stuff: Socrates vs. the Written Word).

Chapter 7: The Juggler's Brain

I found the chapter entitled 'The Juggler's Brain' very interesting.  It looks at what the scientific effects that the Internet is having on how our minds work.

"Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning."

"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".

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm. NY Times

The Net sizes our attention only to scatter it.

Michael Merzenich ruminates that: "our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability,".

"When humans first evolved from the chimp line, they were (of course) only slightly more advanced than their relatives. It took them 10,000 to 20,000 years to develop the first useful language; about 40,000 years to figure out how to make a sharp knife; maybe 55,000 years or so to develop a method of writing; another several thousand years before they figured out how to make something sensible and portable to write on; another couple of thousand years to invent punctuation; another thousand years or so to figure out how to make more than one copy of a book; another 200 years before the general populace was taught to read, and then in only some places in the world; another couple of hundred years before the invention of the radio, television, the movies; and so on."
Are we getting smarter or dumber? CNET New, September 21, 2005.

"When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates DIFFERENT brains. Nicholas Carr records a beautiful statement from the psychologist Maryanne Wolf (a reading expert from Tufts University) that sums it all up: “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.” For “we”, you can substitute “our brains”, because they’re (You and Your-Brain are) synonymous."

Referring to the Internet and Google Michael Merzenich states: "THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES."
Going Googly, On the Brain Blog, August 11, 2008.

Gary Small, professor of psychiatry at UCLA: "The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains".

iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan

Also
Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation during Internet Searching

Working memory = scratch pad
Long-term memory = filing system

Long-term memory remains largely outside of our consciousness.  To think about something we have previously learned we have to transfer the memory from long-term memory back into working memory.  It was previously thought that long-term memory played little part in complex cognitive processes such as thinking and problem solving, however scientists have discovers that long-term memory is actually the seat of understanding.  Schemas, our understanding of complex concepts, are stored there.

John Sweller: "Our intellectual prowess is derived largely from the schemas we have acquired over long periods of time.  We are able to understand concepts in our areas of expertise because we have schemas associated with those concepts"

The depth of our intelligence relies on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schemas.  This can also form a major bottleneck.  Working memory is only able to hold a very small amount of information.

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

Cognitive load = the information flowing into our working memory at any given moment.

Chapter 9: Search, Memory

And as I write down the thoughts of others....
"Socrates was right.  As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory.  What once had to be stored in the head could instead be stored on tablets and scrolls or between the covers of codices.  People began, as the great orator had predicted, to call things to mind not "from within themselves, but by means of external marks."  The reliance on personal memory diminshed further with the spread of the letterpress and the attendant expansion of publishing and literacy.  Books and journals, at hand in libraries or on the shelves in private homes, became supplements to the brain's biological storehouse.  People didn't have to memorize everything anymore.  They could look it up."

From Internet to Gutenberg
Umberto Eco, November 12 1996, Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies.

Plato's imagined Socratic discourse in Phaedrus tells of a Pharoh who "was instantiating an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological achievement could abolish or destroy something that we consider precious, fruitful, something that represents for us a value in itself, and a deeply spiritual one."

"Books challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it."

Computer Meets Classroom, Classroom Wins.