What the Internet is doing to our brains

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What the Internet is doing to our brains

(Source: http://www.cycleoftime.com/articles_view.php?codArtigo=95 )

"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 [a] 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?"

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in

medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental

habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb

a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of

Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a

telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a

"staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages

of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore,"

he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of

more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term

neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a

definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a

recently published study of online research habits, conducted by

scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be

in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of

the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs

documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one

operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational

consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other

sources of written information. They found that people using the sites

exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to

another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They

typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book

before they would "bounce" out to another site.

Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that

they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study

report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional

sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging

as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and

abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to

avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the

popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading

more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our

medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it

lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

"We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental

psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the

Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we

read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a

style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be

weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when

an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works

of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become

"mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make

the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without

distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human

beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to

teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into

the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use

in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part

in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments

demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a

mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry

found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The

variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those

that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the

interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well

that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from

those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a

Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and

keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful,

often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his

writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The

typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered

touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the

tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the

page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of

Nietzsche's friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his

writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more

telegraphic. "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a

new idiom," the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work,

his "`thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of

pen and paper."

Also see:

LIVING WITH A COMPUTER

(July 1982)

"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or

start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and

the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows "You are right," Nietzsche replied, "our writing equipment takes

part in the forming of our thoughts." Under the sway of the machine,

writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche's prose

"changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from

rhetoric to telegram style."

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to

think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the

100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the

time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that

that's not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who

directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason

University, says that even the adult mind "is very plastic." Nerve

cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. "The brain,"

according to Olds, "has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly,

altering the way it functions." As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our

"intellectual technologies"—the tools that extend our mental rather

than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the

qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into

common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In

Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis

Mumford described how the clock "disassociated time from human events

and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically

measurable sequences." The "abstract framework of divided time" became

"the point of reference for both action and thought."

The clock's methodical ticking helped bring into being the

scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something

away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in

his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to

Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the

widespread use of timekeeping instruments "remains an impoverished

version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct

experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old

reality." In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we

stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is

reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to

ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of

their brains as operating "like clockwork." Today, in the age of

software, we have come to think of them as operating "like computers."

But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor.

Thanks to our brain's plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a

biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on

cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan

Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only

as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function

of any other information-processing device. And that's what we're

seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system,

is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming

our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our

calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the

Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking

ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the

content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message,

for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the

latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our

attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net's influence doesn't end at the edges of a computer screen,

either. As people's minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet

media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience's new

expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and

magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule

summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets.

When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the

second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its

design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the "shortcuts" would give

harried readers a quick "taste" of the day's news, sparing them the

"less efficient" method of actually turning the pages and reading the

articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media

rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our

lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet

does today. Yet, for all that's been written about the Net, there's

been little consideration of how, exactly, it's reprogramming us. The

Net's intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an

earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch

into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic

series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant's

machinists. With the approval of Midvale's owners, he recruited a group

of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines,

and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations

of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small,

discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one,

Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an "algorithm," we might

say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale's employees grumbled

about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little

more than automatons, but the factory's productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine,

the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its

philosopher. Taylor's tight industrial choreography—his "system," as he

liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country

and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum

efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion

studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers.

The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The

Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for

every job, the "one best method" of work and thereby to effect "the

gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the

mechanic arts." Once his system was applied to all acts of manual

labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a

restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of

perfect efficiency. "In the past the man has been first," he declared;

"in the future the system must be first." Taylor's system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic

of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that

computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual

lives, Taylor's ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as

well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and

automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information,

and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the "one best

method"—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of

what we've come to describe as "knowledge work."

Google's headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the

Googleplex—is the Internet's high church, and the religion practiced

inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric

Schmidt, is "a company that's founded around the science of

measurement," and it is striving to "systematize everything" it does.

Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its

search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments

a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the

results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people

find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the

work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is "to organize the

world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It

seeks to develop "the perfect search engine," which it defines as

something that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back

exactly what you want." In Google's view, information is a kind of

commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with

industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can "access"

and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become

as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men

who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science

at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search

engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might

be connected directly to our brains. "The ultimate search engine is

something as smart as people—or smarter," Page said in a speech a few

years back. "For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial

intelligence." In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, "Certainly

if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain,

or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be

better off." Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that

Google is "really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it

on a large scale."

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a

pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and

a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally

scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use

technology, in Eric Schmidt's words, "to solve problems that have never

been solved before," and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem

out there. Why wouldn't Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it? Still, their easy assumption that we'd all "be better off" if our

brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial

intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is

the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can

be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google's world, the world we

enter when we go online, there's little place for the fuzziness of

contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be

fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster

processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed

data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the

Internet, it is the network's reigning business model as well. The

faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we

view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect

information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the

proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in

collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to

link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want

is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's

in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I'm just a worrywart. Just as there's a tendency to glorify

technological progress, there's a countertendency to expect the worst

of every new tool or machine. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned

the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on

the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry

inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue's

characters, "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful." And

because they would be able to "receive a quantity of information

without proper instruction," they would "be thought very knowledgeable

when they are for the most part quite ignorant." They would be "filled

with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom." Socrates wasn't

wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he

was shortsighted. He couldn't foresee the many ways that writing and

reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand

human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg's printing press, in the 15th century, set

off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo

Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to

intellectual laziness, making men "less studious" and weakening their

minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would

undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes,

and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor

Clay Shirky notes, "Most of the arguments made against the printing

press were correct, even prescient." But, again, the doomsayers were

unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would

deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those

who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be

proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring

a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then

again, the Net isn't the alphabet, and although it may replace the

printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of

deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not

just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the

intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted

reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that

matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and

analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues,

is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we

will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our

culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently

described what's at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my

ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the

highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried

inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the

entire heritage of the West. [but now] I see within us all (myself

included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of

self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the

technology of the "instantly available." As we are drained of our "inner repertory of dense cultural

inheritance," Foreman concluded, we risk turning into "`pancake

people'—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of

information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

I'm haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and

so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of

its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its

childlike pleading with the astronaut—"I can feel it. I can feel it.

I'm afraid"—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state

of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the

emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who

go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their

thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps

of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so

machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine.

That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on

computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own

intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.›

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

Nicholas Carr