'The Shallows': Is the Net Fostering Stupidity?

Nicholas Carr's new book faults Google for being "in the business of distraction" and Twitter for being neurological heroin

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Citing examples, Carr makes a persuasive case that the vast amount of information we process has a deleterious effect on our lives.

The Bad: While he offers arguments about the Internet's negative effects on our lives, the author does not propose any solutions.

The Bottom Line: Carr's book is significant for calling our attention to the fact that the Internet's profound impact on lives is not all for the good.

Reader Reviews

(The story has been updated to reflect the correct rating.)

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
By Nicholas Carr
Norton; 276 pp; $26.95

Have you ever worried about your annoying need to go to Google (GOOG) because you couldn't remember something? Have you wondered about your constant desire to check your e-mail, Twitter account, or favorite blog rather than read a great book or enjoy a beautiful day?

If you haven't yet, you will after reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book, an expansion of his 2008 article in The Atlantic, makes a compelling case that such fears are justified. Our constant inundation with electronic stimuli, he argues, is actually changing the brains's wiring. As we choose among all those enticing Web links, process blinking online ads, or get our Facebook fix, we are also sapping our neurological ability to remember facts or pay attention long enough to fully digest what we read. Those who didn't experience life before Google—or have already forgotten it—may even have a harder time generating the same empathy or interest in their fellow man.

If that sounds like an apocalyptic anti-technology rant, give Carr a chance. A prolific blogger, tech pundit, and author, he cites enough academic research in The Shallows to give anyone pause about society's full embrace of the Internet as an unadulterated force for progress. One study he refers to shows that people watching a CNN news spot retained far more information without the headlines scrolling by at the bottom of the screen. Another shows that the more links there are in an article, the lower the comprehension of the reader. A third indicates that our brains automatically overvalue information simply because it's new. Carr quotes neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who says we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." Perhaps most scary, the Brain & Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California found that while the brain's response to physical pain shows up immediately on neurological scans, people must pay attention for a longer time before their brain shows telltale signs of caring about someone else's pain. Carr's takeaway: "The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctly human forms of empathy, compassion, and emotion."

Carr lays out, in engaging, accessible prose, the science that may explain these results. One key is the brain's shortage of so-called working memory, the mechanism that sifts through the avalanche of real-time information that swamps our senses and selects the important bits for incorporation into our long-term memories and insights. It turns out there's only room for two to four items at a time in this neural way station—not nearly enough to keep up with a website packed with links, videos, and RSS feeds. While the mind of the book reader considers what's important at its own pace, the Netizen's brain has to choose much more quickly and haphazardly. As a result, our ability to make the most of the input is diminished, and we become "mindless" consumers of data. This may also explain why sometimes it becomes harder to concentrate the longer you spend browsing the Web.

Unsurprisingly, many of the Internet companies that we have come to live by don't fare well under Carr's gaze. While Twitter is a powerful tool for good in the hands of protesters in despotic lands, he writes that its very motto—"Discover what's happening right now"—might as well be an advertisement for a neurological heroin that trains your brain to be even more distracted. And while Google's geeky founders may truly believe in their stated objective "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Carr argues that Google is, "quite literally, in the business of distraction." After all, the more links you click on, the more money the company makes.

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