An excerpt of Nicholas Carr’s new book is featured in the June Wired. In it Carr says the Internet “is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.” A shallow neuroscience explanation:
The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system… Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by varying the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer much of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of knowledge and wisdom.
On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream.
Psychologists refer to the information flowing into our working memory as our cognitive load. When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to process and store it, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories. We can’t translate the new material into conceptual knowledge. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak. That’s why the extensive brain activity that [UCLA professor of psychiatry Gary] Small discovered in Web searchers may be more a cause for concern than for celebration. It points to cognitive overload.
Points to? Isn’t this a precise echo of the concerns over television in the 1980s? You remember, the couch made us both potato zombies and vulnerable to ADD and ADHD. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it heightens skepticism. Most especially of his excerpted conclusion:
What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.
That reads like 80s television to me! Carr will be discussing the book later this afternoon on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Note: My title is lifted from Slate’s Culture Gabfest. (It has no direct link; last week’s Political Gabfest skipped the links, too. Maybe Carr got to them.) The television observation, while hardly original, is my own.
You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.