The Shallowing of Our Minds
Recently my best
friend ruined my weekend. He grabbed from his shelf a book published last year
and said it might fit in with what I was writing. It was titled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
I
had never read a non-fiction book in two sittings, but Nicholas Carr’s book I
just could not put down.
He
starts off with anecdotal evidence by Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at the
University of Michigan Medical School, who notes that since the switch from
reading printed material in the form of books to reading books on to the Net a
decade ago, he and many of his friends and associates have noticed a marked
lack of ability to concentrate. Losing the thread of their thoughts, they are
unable to handle not only attention demanding novels like War and Peace, but have even “lost the ability to read and absorb
a longish article.”
Surfing,
skimming along the surface of things, taking “information the way the Net
distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” some of them worry
that they have become scatterbrains.
Carr
himself notes that, “the Net seems to be chipping away my capacity for
concentration and contemplation. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward
brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become
a struggle.” And he goes on to lament the trend of the “calm, focused,
undistracted, linear mind 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.”
He
describes the typical new mind as that of a former student body president at
Florida State University, a Rhodes scholar, who unabashedly states, “I don’t
read books . . . it’s not a good use of my time . . . I can go to Google and
absorb relevant information quickly.” And that from a philosophy major.
The
enormous difference between the two types of reading, Carr describes as
follows: “To read a book silently required the ability to concentrate intently
over a long period of time, to lose oneself in the pages . . . In the quiet
spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made
their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their
own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply . . . Quiet, solitary
research became a prerequisite for intellectual achievement. Originality of
thought and creativity of expression became the hallmarks of the model mind . .
. For the last five centuries . . . the linear, literary mind has been the
center of art, science and society.”
All
the above stands in stark contrast to a completely different neuro-involvement,
in that, “when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory
reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning.” Not to
mention superficial thought.
Carr
gives no example so I will illustrate his statements with an obvious
comparison. The op-ed pages of the print version of The New York Times contained, until recently, almost no advertising. You
could read without visual distractions about complex often crucial issues like
the Start treaty, global warming,
and the Rwandan genocide, assimilating the articles with what you already knew,
filling in spaces with your own opinions, reinforced by sympathy, or even
empathy, at the end creating in your mind a brand new and exhaustive bank of
knowledge on the topic, a new “complex concept or ‘schema’.”
No
more.
A
few days ago I read an op-ed piece on the web-version of The Times. The topic was the plight of homeless Haitian
children following the earthquake. The piece was not alone on the page. While
reading about human suffering, I was invited by a colorful, page-top streamer
of smiling faces to “Vote for my Favorite Under 25 Movie Star,” while being
simultaneously coaxed by a fluorescent blue ad for “A full-body waxing for only
$99.95,” all the while, a video in a little box ran a trailer for the film 127
Hours in which someone stuck in a hole
decides to saw-off, or chew-off, or nail-file off his own arm.
Was
I confused? Not on your life. I recall every detail of how for only $99.95, the
Haitian under 25 movie stars got to chew off their own arms last summer at Wax
Camp.
Now
that is what I call power-multitasking.
As
for the Haitian children, if they really want my attention, they’ll just have
to get their own page-top magenta streamer.
The trend away
from linear reading to the visuals of the electronic screen is truly jaw
dropping. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2008 found young adults between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, while putting in 8.5 hrs of
screen-time, read only an average of 7 minutes a day. To put it bluntly at the risk of over simplifying, that’s 510
minutes a day of shallow thinking vs. 7 minutes of linear, potentially
deep, thought.
Some
may shrug and say, So what? Well, as Carr reminded us, the linear, patient
mind, ”as supple as it is subtle, has 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.”
That
prospect frightens me for a truly selfish reason. As you may recall, our
childhoods were filled with parents, teachers and elders, advising us to slow
down, take our time, think things through, sleep on it, come up with the best
all-round solution. I must confess that in my case that had no effect but I’m
sure that some of my very favorite people took it to heart. I met two, both
doctors, both the directors of their respective departments at Cornell Medical
School at New York hospital, one of whom was the “father of sonograms,” the
other, the world’s best in his field. My experience with them after a freak
accident ten years ago left me with a complete re-evaluation of the medical
profession and taught me an
unforgettable lesson about life.
One
doctor was in his forties, the other in his early sixties, and both had
something nearly unearthly about them that in New York City stood out even
more: an infinite calm. They translated that into patience and thoroughness,
repeating the same procedure, double-checking, triple-checking, rethinking,
reconsidering, until they were absolutely satisfied that not a flicker of doubt
remained in their minds. They were determined to do the best job with a minimum
of interference. Their aim in fact was to avoid any interference at all. And
they did. The simplest thing would have been to perform surgery, but they
resisted. They reflected. Thought “deeply, linearly, subtly.” Thoroughly.
Will
the Rhodes Scholar philosophy major, who has no patience for books, bother to
do so? Or worse: would he, without the experience of reading and thinking
profoundly,
even have developed the ability?
Piling
information atop information, without the wherewithal to have a broad overview;
without the ability to consider all sides and all possibilities, without the
experience for the kind of thinking we unconsciously develop while reading
non-fiction or novels about complicated lives of complex people with often
convoluted motivations, without that capacity for “concentration and
contemplation,” will, I truly believe, lead to a plethora of knee-jerk
responses from shallow thinkers, who are conditioned to only superficially
“skim” their brains.
It
might just result in a society where thoughtless, often senseless outbursts
will be the norm because our brains will have been physically transformed.
If
I understand neuro-physics, it all works something like this.
Our
brain cells—neurons—are separated from each other by barriers called synapses.
The neurons communicate with one another through tentacle-like appendages
called axons and dendrites. When a neuron is activated, a pulse releases
chemicals called neurotransmitters, which allow the flow of an electric pulse
from its axon to the dendrite of the next
nearby neuron setting off a new impulse in
that cell which is then, in turn, transmitted to others forming a whole circuit
of paths. “Thoughts, memories, emotions,” Carr states, “all emerge from the
electrochemical interactions of neurons . . . The average
neuron makes about a thousand synaptic connections, and some
neurons can make a hundred times that number.” This varied and unique “mesh of
circuits . . . gives rise to what we think, what we feel, who we are.
“As
the same 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.” Either
through generation of new neurons, or new terminals on the axons and dendrites,
we form
“chains of new neurons . . . our mind’s true ‘vital paths.’”
He
quotes the British biologist J. Z. Young, “The cells of our brains literally
develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy and waste away with disuse.”
In
a brilliantly simplified experiment, biologist Eric Kandel who eventually won
the Nobel Prize, tested the brain cells of sea slugs and found that with very
little training of only forty impulses, motor neuron connections can be reduced
from ninety percent to ten percent. So, Kandel wrote, “synapses can undergo
large and enduring changes.”
Well
now. If forty delicate impulses can lead to abandonment of eighty percent of
connections between neurons, imagine what the eight-and-a-half daily hours of constant screen watching do to our
neuron connections that were once in frequent use with deep reading and deep
thought, that allowed people to concentrate, to make “their own associations,
draw their own inferences and analogies, foster their own ideas”? What has the
deluge of staccato bits of unconnected information done to our “originality of
thought and creativity of expression . . . the hallmarks of the model mind . .
. the center of art,
science and society”?
Maybe
we should hurry up and tweet someone to find out.
But the bad news
gets worse. It seems that we have two kinds of memory, short-term and
long-term. Envision short-term memory as a revolving door letting things in and
spewing them out. Long-term is more like a vault, where memory is kept for
years or even life. The problem is that changing a short-term memory into a
long-term one is no simple task. One essential element is repetition—“the
neurons grow entirely new synaptic terminals” hence causing an anatomical
change. And as Kandel states, “The growth and maintenance of new synaptic
terminals makes memory persist.”
The
formation of long-term memory, or what he calls “complex memory,” requires “system consolidation” or
“conversations” between entirely different areas of the brain. This “memory
consolidation” requires not only time—some scientists say hours, others
days—but also attentiveness, “strong mental concentration,” in other words
“intense intellectual or emotional
involvement.”
Kandel
now writes his most important conclusion, “For a memory to persist, the
incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is
accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully
and systematically with knowledge already established in memory.”
The
final element needed to create long-term memories is quiet time.
With
the continuous and intense surfing of the web, distracted by hypertexts,
streamers, pop-ups, and videos, our minds are constantly bombarded by stimuli;
our memory is on overdrive. There is no down time, no reflection, no chance for
the mind to even begin consolidating, or forming “schemas.” And there is
certainly no time for new neurons to be formed even if our poor brains could
decide where to form them.
So
this is where our Rhodes Scholar who has cast away books goes wrong when he
believes that instead of slow and considered reading, he can go on the web and
“absorb relevant information quickly.” He may be surfing quickly, browsing
quickly, even stopping to look at facts
quickly but, for his long-term memory, for his complex memory he’s absorbing little or, nothing at all.
Aside from
assimilating little, the active parts of the brain develop, while those
parts left unused, wilt and atrophy. So let us go to an extreme. Let us say one
browses the web all day, sends abbreviated e-mails, tweets, and texts, then
goes home and plays a few video games; then, to “relax,” watches his obligatory
five hours of TV. The only rest his mind gets, the only quiet time for complex
memory to form, is while he’s brushing his teeth.
The
above, I fear, is much closer to the norm than to the exception. It is thus
conceivable that one’s complex memory, the seat of one’s self, the source of thoughtful judgment and wisdom, is almost
never engaged. Little by little, what small part had developed through the
years, namely the complex part of our brain, shrivels. Of course, I suppose it
could be slowly rebuilt, regenerated with use, but exactly when would this new,
unaccustomed use occur? What would trigger it? And in a world made up of
multiple screens and sound bites, who would even bother triggering it at all?
One final observation.
Carr cites the work and comments of Antonio Damasio, the Director of USC’s
Brain and Creativity Institute. Damasio and his colleagues have found in
experiments that the higher, more noble human emotions such as compassion and
empathy, are slow to form in a situation; it takes time to
comprehend and feel the “Psychological and moral dimensions of a situation . .
. If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions
about other people’s psychological states.”
Let
us go back to the question I posed chapters ago; what happened to Wall Street?
How could some of the world’s brightest minds bring the world to the edge of
financial chasm? How could they be so stupid? What were they thinking?
I
believe the answer lies in neurons. First, the financiers of Wall Street were not
stupid; they were brilliant. They were
brilliant at browsing and surfing, at skimming information, at buying and
selling at the blink of an eye, at reacting to blips on a screen, to two-word
news flashes, to pop-ups and to flags. They were even superb at reducing the
world to numbers where the only thing that counted, the only single goal was—at
the end of the day—to have a larger number showing on the bottom of the screen.
True reality, the rest of the world, countries, people, mothers, fathers,
grandfathers and children, sad or laughing, suffering or happy, never entered
what we can call, without malice, their “equation.”
In
other words, the working memories of our financiers were frantically and
permanently “otherwise engaged.” Meanwhile, their complex, long-term memories,
their wisdom, empathy and compassion shriveled day by day.
Think
of this new generation that grew up with remote controls, and video games, Web
surfing and tweeting, constantly distracted, and often overloaded, when did it
have time to form complex memories? When did it have time to rest, think deeply,
reflect? And when did it have time to feel compassion, sympathy, not to mention
empathy?
Unfortunately
a new study by the University of Michigan shockingly finds “almost never.”
Analyzing the personality tests of 13,737 college students over a 30 year
period, between 1979 and 2009, the researchers found a 48 percent decrease in
empathy and a 34 percent decrease in perspective-taking—considering someone
else’s point of view.
The
authors of the study note that the biggest changes have occurred since the year
2000, with the inundation of callous reality TV shows, and the explosion of
social networks and texting, which allow people to disengage from others at the
click of a key. They blame these “physically distant online environments” for
encouraging people to “lionize their own lives” and “functionally create a
buffer between individuals, which makes it easier to ignore others’ pain, or
even at times, inflict pain upon others.”
Mary
Gordon, the founder and president of Roots of Empathy, also cites a “poverty of
time” in families. “You have to experience empathy to continue to develop it.
If children don’t have enough opportunity and parents don’t have enough time to
be with their children, it’s really difficult.”
As
our lives accelerate, as our attention span is shredded, will there be any of
us with a complex memory left? Will any of us have that unique set of schemas,
the brain’s vital paths, whose infinite array of combined experiences—physical,
intellectual and emotional—made each of us so miraculously unpredictable,
volatile, spontaneous; unique? Without empathy and deep emotions, when we are
only indistinguishable flickers of keys and gleaners of information, then how
close do each of us come to being clones?
A REAL LIFE: Rediscovering the Roots of Our Happiness is available through
