Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the internet is doing to our brains.

[babylonsister]

Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the internet is doing to our brains.
by Nicholas Carr



"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »

brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”


I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

more...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

[Cleita]

1. IMHO if more people actually utilized Google there would

be fewer stupid ones. Knowledge can't hurt.

[babylonsister]

2. I can understand what this writer means though, in relation to reading.

I think I'm so used to skimming on the internets I do seem to get bored more easily reading books when that used to be my favorite pasttime. I think I might need more interesting books!

[DJ13]

3. U mught B right

[TransitJohn]

14. u cn haz dooooozi

:)

[1monster]

4. I've noticed the same problem, but I don't put it down to google or the Internet...

I do put it down to stress levels, getting older, and not getting enough sleep.

(I also notice that my tendency to call things and people by the wrong name--something I've done since childhood-- increases under stress and sleep deprevation too.)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

5. Yes, it is. Just like writing did.

"This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." (Plato, Phaedrus 275b)

Source: http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Mnemosyne.html

[kimmerspixelated]

6. Perhaps one way it is making us stupid

Is the fact that there is always a shiney, candy-like ad to click on. You feel so compelled to, and then one link leads to another, and if you have dial-up especially-the next thing you know, an hour or more has gone by, and you have yet to get the info you were seeking. It's a time destroyer, a plan destroyer!

[kestrel91316]

7. How in hell can Google make people stupid when it's really obvious

to me that damned few of them EVER use it?

People are stupid and ignorant because they are too lazy to bother googling anything and then reading up on it.

[kestrel91316]

8. Multitasking can make it hard to FOCUS on one thing.

Lots of internet-based reading is visually cluttered up like magazines are.

Nothing like sitting down in a cozy chair with a good book in hand, the TEEVEE OFF, the RADIO OFF, no food sitting there, maybe just a cup of tea. The zen of reading. It's how I prefer to spend my evenings. Crazy, huh?

[Igel]

9. We can only focus on one thing.

We multitask like a computer with a single processor multitasks: It goes from doing one thing to doing another one thing. Every time it switches its task, it accesses a different chunk of memory, a different program. When humans do it, they do the same thing, except we're not mindlessly following a program, and our working memory is much more limited than a computer's. It takes a brief moment for our focus to shift, and to recall all the relevant information and what the needed process is: The more the tasks are routinized and require little attention, the more successful. The more concentration's needed, the less successful multitasking is.

And since we need to concentrate to notice when we screw up, we need to put "self-monitoring" in the multitasking hopper ... and it's frequently one of the first things we screw up, making it easier to delude ourselves into thinking we're doing things at our same level of competence.

But when you get people in a lab, or monitor them in their normal environments, you see a degrading of performance or a loss of efficiency. They slow down to avoid mistakes, or take more time fixing mistakes that they don't realize they wouldn't have otherwise made.


More to the point: We need to build concentration and self-discipline. Young children usually lack it. A primate's brain likes having something new to look at every few seconds--consider how kids shows are formulated, how news casts are presented, how movies are paced and commercials structured. The PR guys know what works, they just didn't have psychologists' research results to guide them. Having kids watch TV a lot while asking them to developing concentration skills so they can focus and work on something that they don't find interesting is a losing proposition--the fast-paced tv shows reinforce how their brains natively work, something we try to get them to override. So, yeah, flipping from screen to screen and getting info in slightly oversized "blipverts" is a problem.

Moreover, as people age their brains also lost the ability to screen out irrelevant things--they simply can't focus as strongly younger adults, so when people hit maybe 45 and look back, they realize they had greater abilities to ignore ambient distractions. This can be a good thing--the older folks are aware of more things, and since this counts as background knowledge they can use it to their advantage. But in narrowly-focused situations, it comes across as reading more slowly, or taking longer to finish a task. For example, I find it nearly impossible to tune out my kid and background noise--I'm 49--while my wife, at 38, has a much easier time when she wants to.

[silverojo]

10. Maybe Mr. Carr is just getting older, and is in a state of self-denial

I've been online for a decade, and I'm not only capable of immersing myself in books, I also enjoy them. Even online, I read in-depth pieces without my mind wandering.

My late aunt, who didn't like reading non-fiction (and who had also had a mild stroke), was an avid reader of long, complex political articles on the internet.

Some people, like Nicholas Carr, are just a little too paranoid about computers.

[Mythsaje]

11. How funny.

No one in the circles in which I operate have noticed any such trend. Maybe the problem is the choice in books? Personally I found most "literary" novels about as interesting as watching flies fornicate.

Most authors are also readers and, though it can be tricky to balance the two at times, we seem to have no real difficulty. But, then again, most of the ones I know aren't particularly inclined to read the morose and often banal stuff that passes for "literature." Dour, dry, and dismal. Bleh. My college lit class was a kind of torture. I couldn't believe anyone actually LIKED that stuff in the first place. Maybe those folks who are actually worried about this alleged phenomenon should try picking up a book written to entertain. Oh, but wait. That might mean having to learn to not look down one's nose at us poor "genre" authors or readers.

Nah. Better just to blame the internet. Hah.

I know one thing for sure. People pick up one of my books, they usually don't want to put it down until they're done. And then they gripe that it wasn't long enough.

[Dervill Crow]

12. It's time for me to step away from the computer and go read a book.

I was chalking up my adult ADD and inability to read a book to too much TV and never having reading glasses handy, but I bet it is the hours I spend on a computer each day.

Scary thought. Reading used to be my number 1 source of pleasure. Even better than sex, but don't tell my husband.

[starroute]

13. I know I have a lot less patience with mediocre books

I don't read a lot of books these days, but I did happen to take a few out of the library last week. And I kept finding that what I was reading struck me as excruciatingly padded -- with unnecessary lists, illustrative anecdotes that online could have been linked for the reader to follow out or not, and summaries of other people's work.

That made me realize that just as when I was a kid and put up with a lot of mediocre novels for the sake of one original idea or one exciting chapter, so as an adult I plowed through a lot of mediocre non-fiction for the same reason.

It's a lot like having to buy an entire CD for the one or two good songs. You do it when you have no choice, but given the option, you'd far rather just go for the good stuff.

There are some books -- and some CD's -- that are good and original and exciting all the way through, and those are precious, but there aren't many of them. For all the rest, being able to get the good bits quickly and move on is far preferable.

And when I do run across a book that's good all the way through, I find I have no more trouble sticking with it than I did when I was 15.

[GOPBasher]

15. OMG! IDTS! IDBI! AAMOF, the web is gr8 4-eva! n/t

[Voltaire99]

16. No, but the center-right mush in The Atlantic will make you, if not stupid, at least very, very dull

[ChazII]

17. Long articles on the computer

I can't get into, so yes my attention span has decreased. However, I still am able to curl up with a good book (non-fiction or fiction) with no problem.

[Azooz]

18. It's the HTML smarty

Those of us blessed with naturally short attention spans do notice but take it in stride - but books are too long for me now to.

HTML was designed at first to copy the natural skipping process of human thought, read a book online and you get to jump (click) to a point that interests your mind and you get a full page about it, then another click and you might arrive at DU one day. The quantity of information obtained online is much larger but less concentrated - but that is why we have "favorites". It's like the impulse buys at the check out-counter, however good an online article is you'll get distracted by your own ideas and thoughts. A normal book will present the ideas and thoughts in a linear fashion, but you will too often forget your own ideas before you flip to the next paper page.

Look at any HTML page the main text will always have lots of links - yours here at DU has a link to "The Atlantic", I have never seen that site before - and when I click here I'll probably go read some of it and find someone explain it better than me - then another link there to a history of HTML, that will have a link to website design. The links are why people spend hours online because they keep you interested and attentive because it's more to your own way of natural thinking than a book.

The internet has introduced a totally new system of information presentation, something that is equal to the invention of writing, mathematics and the printing press all put together (IMHO)- and I think google is just a small step because the kids are just starting to pick up the internet from us boring old f--rts who are slowing things down way too much for those with even less attention spans.

[eppur_se_muova]

19. YMMV. Those who are inclined to bad habits will develop them.

My only problem with reading is that I'm too tired in the evening when I start (thanks, Bu**sh** job market!). If I'm well rested I think of 200 pp as a good comfortable read.

Of course, if it's a page-turner, I stay up til the wee hours and pay for it mightily. :(