The Shallows
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Wondering what the Internet is doing to our brains? Then I think you’ll love The Shallows. It’s a fascinating, well-researched, brilliant book. Big Ideas we explore include a quick look at the neuroscience of just how “massively plastic” our brains are, the hungry gremlins in your brain, how hyperlinks decrease retention, and young vs. old brains.
Big Ideas
- Hello again, Dr. Hebb“Hello, again!”
- The perfect way to blow up our brainsEnter: Internet.
- The gremlins in your hungry little brainIn your hungry brain.
- Attention: Seized then scatteredSeized then scattered.
- Hyperlinks + Hyper-reduced-retention= Hyper-reduced attention.
- Time for some attention restoration therapyTip: Go outside into nature.
- Young & old: We have the same (vulnerable) brainsSame vulnerable brains.
“We seem to have arrived, as McLuhan said we would, at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking. What we’re trading away in return for the riches of the Net—and only a curmudgeon would refuse to see the riches—is what Karp calls ‘our old linear thought process.’ Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better. John Batelle, a onetime magazine editor and journalism professor who now runs an online advertising syndicate, has described the intellectual fission he experiences when skittered across Web pages: ‘When I am performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am ‘feeling’ my brain light up, I [am] ‘feeling like I’m getting smarter.’ Most of us have experienced similar sensations while online. The feelings are intoxicating—so much so that they can distract us from the Net’s deeper cognitive consequences.
For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg’s printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.”
~ Nicholas Carr from The Shallows
Wondering what the Internet is doing to our brains?
Then I think you’ll love The Shallows. It’s a fascinating, well-researched, brilliant book by Nicholas Carr. (Get a copy here.)
I was introduced to it by Cal Newport who references the book a number of times in his Deep Work (see Notes) that I come back to often these days. (Especially in Masterpiece Days 101.)
As Nicholas and Cal argue, unfortunately, most of us spend most of our time in The Shallows and we’d be wise to note just how profoundly the Internet is changing our brains.
The book is packed with Big Ideas. I’m excited to share a few of my favorites so let’s jump in!
Download MP3
Download PDFBetween the intellectual and behavioral guardrails set by our genetic code, the road is wide, and we hold the steering wheel. Through what we do and how we do it—moment to moment, day by day, consciously or unconsciously—we alter the chemical flows in our synapses and change our brains.
Get the BookHello again, Dr. Hebb
“What goes on in the microscopic spaces between our neurons is exceedingly complicated, but in simple terms it involves various chemical reactions that register and record experiences in neural pathways. Every time we perform a task or experience a sensation, whether physical or mental, a set of neurons in our brains is activated. If they’re in proximity, these neurons join together through the exchange of synaptic neurotransmitters like the amino acid glutamate. As the experience is repeated, the synaptic links between the neurons grow stronger and more plentiful through both physiological changes, such as the release of higher concentrations of neurotransmitters, and anatomical ones, such as the generation of new neurons or the growth of new synaptic terminals on existing axons and dendrites. Synaptic links can also weaken in response to experiences, again as a result of physiological and anatomical alterations. What we learn as we live is embedded in ever-changing cellular connections inside our heads. The chains of linked neurons form our minds’ true ‘vital paths.’ Today, scientists sum up the essential dynamic of neuroplasticity with a saying known as Hebb’s rule: ‘Cells that fire together wire together.’”
Nicholas walks us through the underlying neuroscience of how our brains are shaped.
As we’ve discussed numerous times in our collection of Notes on neuroscience, our brains are “massively plastic.”
What we do and the thoughts we have literally shape our brains on a physiological and anatomical level. Moment to moment to moment.
As Dr. Hebb’s Law states: “Cells that fire together wire together.”
This can be a good thing or a not-so-good thing.
In our other Notes on neuroscience, we’ve chatted about how our positive or negative thoughts affect our brain’s wiring. This book is all about shining some light on what the fast-paced, non-linear nature of the Internet is doing to our brains.
The short, obvious answer is: A LOT. And it’s not particularly good—not if you want to preserve and cultivate your most precious asset: your ability to put your attention where you want when you want for however long you want.
The longer answer is part of the next Idea:
We become, neurologically, what we think.
The perfect way to blow up our brains
“Now comes the crucial question: What can science tell us about the actual effects that Internet use is having on the way our minds work? No doubt, this question will be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise. The news is even more disturbing than I had suspected. 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. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.
One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. 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.”
So, uh…. Want to create something that will most rapidly and thoroughly change the way our brains are wired?
Create the Internet. (Hah.)
The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.
The gremlins in your hungry little brain
“It wasn’t just that so many of my habits and routines were changing as I became more accustomed to and dependent on the sites and services of the Net. The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple minutes. At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of my middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed me—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data-processing machine, a human HAL.
I missed my old brain.”
Let’s get right to it with this one: How’s your attention?
Can you focus your mind on one thing for more than a couple of minutes?
Seriously.
Can you?
Or is your brain so hungry that it craves more and more novel stimulation—checking for new email or new notifications or messages or whatever it can get its neurons on?
As we discuss again and again, the ability to control our ATTENTION—again: to be able to put our attention where we want when we want for however long we want—is *the* most important attribute of happy, creative, flourishing human beings.
In my chat with Tony Schwartz (see Notes on The Power of Full Engagement), he described how alarmed he was by his inability to slow his brain down long enough to actually read a book. That’s when he knew it was time to change things up.
I’ve had the same experience. (Many times.)
As I’ve mentioned, when I was in full-time CEO-mode, unless I read first thing in the morning or took the day to just read, it was always very challenging to slow my brain down enough to read.
Now, as a professional lover-of-wisdom hermit (hah), I’m blessed to have the autonomy to spend my days essentially however I choose.
When I stay offline most of the time/day, it’s truly remarkable to me how easy it is to sit down and focus on a book.
However, when I get into more of a biz mode and spend more time in email/etc., it’s remarkable to me how quickly my ability to go deep (into a book or just to THINK) evaporates.
How about you?
Is your brain uber-hungry all the time? Pay attention.
Unplug just a little (or a lot) more today. Let’s cultivate a calm mind.
P.S. I love the way Nicholas captures the point here: “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers.”
P.P.S. People often ask me how I read so much. My immediate response is that it’s my job to read and, therefore, I prioritize it and simply put a lot of time into reading. But another one of the keys (that I’ll talk about in Reading 101) is the fact that I’m not online that much and I deliberately constrain the amount of technology I allow into my life.
There’s no question that if you want to be able to read a lot (effectively and enjoyably), you need to tame your brain’s hungry little gremlins constantly barking at you for hyper stimulation. Let’s do that.
It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire our brains. Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry.
‘We shape our tools,’ observed Jesuit priest and media scholar John Cilkin in 1967, ‘and after they shape us.’
Attention: Seized then scattered
“Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. We focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli. Whenever and wherever we log on, the Net presents us with an incredibly seductive blur. Human beings ‘want more information, more impressions, and more complexity,’ writes Torkel Klingberg, the Swedish neuroscientist. We tend to ‘seek out situations that demand concurrent performance or situations in which [we] are overwhelmed with information.’ If the slow progression of words across printed pages dampened our cravings to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Net indulges it. It returns us to our native state of bottom-up distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to deal with.”
First: “The net seizes our attention only to scatter it.” <— Genius.
Imagine that for a moment. The Internet SEIZES your attention. You’re super focused on your little bright screen. Then what? Then it scatters that attention. Throwing you from one seductive bit of content to another.
That’s not a winning combo.
Second: The Internet presents “far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to deal with.”
This is another really important point to remember. As Alberto Villoldo described in One Spirit Medicine (see Notes), we are exposed to more stimuli in ONE WEEK than our ancestors were exposed to in their ENTIRE LIVES.
Trying to keep up with all that information is EXHAUSTING.
So, if you’re feeling tired or just a little burned out or fully depressed, remember that we did not evolve to consume THIS much stimulation.
Check in on how you might be able to cool off your nervous system a bit.
Can you quit consuming digital news and just read the newspaper? Or maybe turn the talk radio off in the car and just drive in silence? Or start your day more slowly and not go online till after you’ve done some self-care + creative goodness?
If you’re feelin’ it, pick one thing to slow down. And do it.
Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.
Hyperlinks + Hyper-reduced-retention
“Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. In a 2001 study, two Canadian scholars asked seventy people to read ‘The Demon Lover,’ a short story by the modernist writer Elizabeth Bowen. One group read the story in a traditional linear-text format; a second group read a version with links, as you’d find on a Web page. The hypertext readers took longer to read the story, yet in subsequent interviews they also reported more confusion and uncertainty about what they had read.”
Fascinating.
Did you know that retention of information decreases online?
Yep. We overload our working memory with too much stimulation and, although we may *feel* like we’re learning more, the retention is much shallower.
That’s another reason why I read books. No blogs. Just books. :)
Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.
Time for some attention restoration therapy
“A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.”
We’ve chatted about some of the pernicious effects of hyper-stimulation via the Internet.
Now for a remedy: Go outside.
Hang out in nature.
Science says it works.
Here’s how Michael Gelb describes it in Brain Power (see Notes): “Poets and philosophers have always counseled people regarding the benefits of being in nature, and now science is catching up. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2008, neuroscientist John Jonides, Ph.D., and his colleagues measured students’ performance on tests of memory and attention before and after taking a walk. One group strolled through a beautiful arboretum near the campus of the University of Michigan, and the other walked in downtown Ann Arbor. The researchers discovered that those who walked in nature improved their test scores by 20 percent, while those who walked in the city showed no improvement (moreover, they reported a decline in perceived well-being). The researchers concluded, ‘In sum, we have shown that simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control. To consider the availability of nature as merely an amenity fails to recognize the vital importance of nature in effective cognitive functioning.’”
How can you integrate a little nature time today/this week?
Me? I will hike!!! I am looking at some beautiful mountains out my office window as I type. For some odd reason (hungry brain!), I don’t make the effort to spend more time on them. :0
The constant distractedness that the Net encourages—the state of being, to borrow another phrase from Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’—is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking when we’re weighing a decision
Young & old: We have the same (vulnerable) brains
“I’ve always been suspicious of those who seek to describe the effects of digital media in generational terms, drawing sharp contrasts between young ‘Internet natives’ and old ‘Internet immigrants.’ Such distinctions strike me as misleading, if not specious. If you look at statistics on Web use over the past two decades, you see that the average adult has spent more time online than the average kid. Parents are besotted with their BlackBerrys as their children are with their Xboxes. And the idea that those who grow up peering at screens will somehow manage to avoid the cognitive toll exacted by multitasking and persistent interruptions is a fantasy contradicted by neuroscientific research. All of us, young and old alike, have similar neurons and synapses, and our brains are affected in similar ways by the media we use.”
Digital natives vs. digital immigrants.
Is the distinction really that helpful/meaningful?
I don’t think so.
As Nicholas advises, we all have the same neurons and synapses and our brains will be affected in similar ways by the technology and media we use.
As the parent of a 3-year-old, this is something I think about often. Before Emerson was born, Alexandra and I decided that helping Emerson cultivate a strong attention was one of our top priorities in our commitment to creating the environment in which he can best flourish and actualize his potential.
As such, we decided to drastically limit his screen time. Other than sitting on his mom’s lap at 3 months old while we watched Magic Mike (did I just type that? hah!), he hasn’t been in front of a screen for more than 10 minutes at a time.
It’s CRAZY for me to see how, after watching a <5 min Let It Go video, he wants to watch it AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. (No news for all parents out there!)
Witnessing this has been a shocking demonstration of my own hungry brain and how much it craves its own version of seductively stimulating media.
Emerson will obviously spend more time in front of a screen as he gets older (and we’re obviously deliberately extreme in our approach). But we are more certain than ever that his (hoped-for!) ability to non-addictively focus his attention will be one of his greatest assets.
We like to feel connected—and we hate to feel disconnected. The Internet doesn’t change our intellectual habits against our will. But change them it does.
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