Nicholas Carr, author of a new book titled “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” thinks that the Internet has left us incapable of concentration and deep thinking. He believes the way we dart about on the Web is fundamentally changing how our brains work.
Mr. Carr cites a number of studies in his book that suggest that reading hypertext reduces comprehension and retention. Linear text, as found in books, increases learning.
When we’re just Googling or just zipping around from Web pages, we draw in information very quickly from many sources but because it’s often a very distracted way of gathering information, it never makes the transition from our short-term memory to our long-term memory.
When you engage in long-form reading and particularly long-form reading in print, where there aren’t any distractions coming from the medium itself, it’s just the words. Through our pace of reading and through the attentiveness, we are able to get much more information much more deeply into our brain, into our long-term memory, and [we] begin making those connections with our own experiences, with books we might have read, other information we might have had.
Mr. Carr also mentions that our ability to store information easily on memory drives has reduced our brains ability to memorize information. (RN)
Dear Internet user: focus. Come on, foooocuuuus | The Globe and Mail | Dakshana Bascaramurty | 21 June 2010
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I enjoy Nick Carr’s writing. His treatise on Google making us stupid is a gem. But the observations made is this article are subjective and lack emperical foundation.
For example, I’m a researcher. I spend most of my day perusing blogs from the leading theorists in e-learning and related fields. I do this in a crowded open-plan office and I can completely concentrate on what I’m studying (except for one annoying, immature woman who’s always interrupting me and will never leave off for a couple of minutes when I ask her to. Anyone else working with a woman with a narcissistic personality disorder will feel for me.)
So, that’s one point. The next point is that I’m a holistic, right-brained, divergent thinker. Seeing things in context is vitally important to me and the web and its hyperlinks are quite indepsensible for me.
Third point, following from the second point, is that short-term memory needs to be handled differently as we get older. We lose the capacity to create new pathways and success lies in creating and strengthening connections between existing pathways. Again, seeing the material in context helps this.
In fact , the whole article is based on a faulty premise. This has nothing to do with hyperlinks and all to do with skimming. Anyone zipping through weblinks is going to have the same experience as anyone flicking through a book, picking up snippets here and there with no context.
And for those intently reading the material, I put my money on the web-reader. The number of times I’ve read a sci-fi novel or a detective story and the writer mentions Occam Razor. Every time I encounter it, I have to remind myself to find out what that’s about. At least if I’m reading it in a browser, there’s a good chance that the writer has included a hyperlink to an explanation – and even a footnote on a book’s page doesn’t beat that.