Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

It means money or bookstore with a calming commute. Nicholas R.. Forget certain images the few bookstores upcoming events tomorrow night will discuss his new book Extra Lives Why Video Games Matter. Seven is free. Wednesday night Mars your man's been dreamin will read from their new books bad memories and what he's poised to do. Reading is also free and we have tickets on sale now for upcoming events with David Mitchell Jennifer Wiener and Carl Hiaasen $5 you can buy those up at the registers and you can find more information on these and other upcoming events at Harvard bookstore online at Harvard dot com take months a turn off for science or cell phones if you have those with you. And also just like the people in the back you know we do have two monitors set up about midway through the first in the second room so you will be able to see the talk if you're more comfortable heading back there and as you can hear we have the talk Mike throughout the store so wherever you're most comfortable. I'm sorry that we don't have any more chairs so. Anyway tonight I'm very excited to welcome the Coast Guard to Harvard bookstore and discuss his new book The Shallows What the Internet is Doing to Our

Brains. Mr. Carr is the author of the big switch and does it matter. And his writing has appeared in The Atlantic wired the Financial Times and The New York Times Magazine among other publications. He's the former executive editor of The Harvard Business Review and he's on the steering board of the World Economic Forum's cloud computing project. In the shallows Mr. Carr considers how the Internet and modern media are restructuring our brains. Mr. Carr examines the evolution of information technology from the development of written language to the invention of the printing press radio television and up to email Google Facebook and other hallmarks of our new wired and wireless lifestyle citing recent psychological and neurological research Mr Carr argues that while the benefits of new information technologies are evident they come at the cost of contemplation and focus and are changing the very way we think. Slate called The Shadows a silent spring for the literary mind and the Wall Street Journal called the book absorbing and disturbing. We'll follow Mr. Carr's talk with a question answer session will end with the book signing here at this table.

You can buy the shelves of the registers with us if you purchase your copy before having it signed. And as always I thank those of you who do purchase the book tonight. By doing so you are supporting a local independent bookstore and this author series and make it possible for her bookstores bring fascinating authors like Nicholas Carr to you. So please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you Michael. And thanks all of you for coming out. I try not to be too disturbing given However given how warm it is today. What I'd like to do is spend a few minutes talking about the general themes of the book and then read a very short passage to give you a feel for the writing in the style and then open it up in. I'd be happy to answer any questions or hear any comments you might have. The Shallows comes out of my own personal experience. I've been a big

user of computers and since back when I bought my first my first PC Mac Plus in 1906 I became a writer about technology. I was a big. Was and continues to be a big user of the net in a great afficionado of that but a couple of years ago I began to realize that I was having a lot of trouble concentrating and I noticed it particularly when I'd sit down to read a book something that throughout my life has come completely naturally to me and I realize that after a couple of paragraphs or at most a couple of pages I've had this overwhelming urge to get up and check my email. Start clicking on links. Do some googling. Do all the kinds of things that we're get we're all getting used to doing when we're online. And at first you know I thought OK this is just middle age mind rot setting in and I'm

sure there's some of that but it was so clear that my mind wanted to behave in exactly the way it behaved when I was sitting at a computer or looking at my cell phone. That I began to see the correspondence between my ever increasing use of the Web use of digital media and my inability to concentrate inability not only to read a book but to kind of focus on one thing for more than a few minutes. And so I began to look into both the history of technology particularly the technologies we use to think with and also the neuroscience into how the brain works and what I could learn about my own what seemed to be a condition from the science. And so the shallows the basic overarching subject of the shallows is how those tools that we used to think with what I call our intellectual technologies influence the way that we think. And I think you can trace this influence back throughout throughout mankind's human kind's

intellectual history. I go back to all the way back to the map. Which is something that we all take for granted today but of course at some point long long long ago there were no maps and somebody had to invent it. It's a technology. And up until the point when the map was invented the only way to perceive location to perceive where we were where we are and to get around in the world was through direct sensory perception you saw the trees you saw the mountains you you heard things and that's how you got around with the map all of a sudden we could replace our direct sensory apprehension of the world with an abstract representation of that world. And of course that allowed us to do a whole lot more things practical things we could go places we'd never been before with confidence because somebody had charted them out. But it also I think more basically and more broadly gave us a more abstract way of thinking in general so completely completely outside of what the original people who created maps in the region

people who use them for thought about. Nevertheless there were some of these deep cognitive an intellectual consequences of map use. And I think the same thing or a similar thing happened with the mechanical clock once again until the clock came around time was a natural flow a similar cyclical flow and suddenly the mechanical clock broke time up into these little pieces these little perfectly measurable pieces seconds minutes hours and so forth. And again the basic tool was used for all sorts of practical purposes to make sure we were on time to coordinate the work of a lot of people in factories and so forth. But the deeper consequence was that it gave us this technology this intellectual technology gave us a more scientific mind one that focused on measuring things. Very carefully on seeing the world as this this almost clock like gearing system that had cause in effect and so

those two examples in one ways vary in some ways very simple technologies I think get across the profound effect that the tools we use to gather information store information exchange information can have on the way we think and even can reshape the course of intellectual history. Most of the book though is focused on two much more recent intellectual technologies. On the one hand the book which again we you know think of as so commonplace and we're surrounded by them but really is a fairly recent invention in history only a few thousand years old and much much more recent than that in its modern form. And as opposed to the book the latest in the great intellectual technologies we use to make sense of the world the Internet. I think and I argue that these two technologies even though in some ways we use them and for similar purposes to gather information to store

information have very very different effects on the way we think. If you think about the book for instance the book The Modern book really we tend to think of the great technological advance in the book as being Gutenberg who invented the printing press of course about five hundred fifty years ago. But before that about a thousand years ago came a technological development in the history the book that was every bit as momentous as Gutenberg but we don't hear about it anymore. And that was the introduction of the word space. It seems incredible to believe it but up until a thousand years ago when people wrote they didn't put spaces between the words that they wrote and this was because writing came out of the oral tradition and that first simply represented oral speech. And if you look at a little at a child when a child learns to write. Children don't put spaces between words because they'd simply write what they hear and when we talk we don't put little precise

spaces between words as you can hear of the syllables kind of just flow out. What happened when as soon as there was the introduction of the word space a thousand years ago. Is that reading changed fundamentally. Up until then figuring out what you were reading was really hard and in order to do it in order to figure out where one word ended and another began you had to read out loud. So almost all the reading that was done until then was done outloud it was very much a social type of exchange of information. As soon as you put word spaces in it became much easier to read and as a result people began to read silently and reading became very personal and often a very solitary pursuit. And it also became the actual decoding of text figuring out what each word meant became very automatic and what that did is freed our minds up to go very deep into the text and suddenly you've got this this personal form of reading that was highly interpretive not just figuring out what the author was saying but kind

of connecting with the author in a very deep way very emotional way often in many cases. Gutenberg press then didn't so much invent the modern book as push it out to a broader population. It democratized the book by making it much cheaper much easier to manufacture and as it did that it also pushed this new way of thinking out to the masses. In this way of thinking was on the one hand solitary on the one hand very concentrated and it was all built around paying deep attention to one thing and this was something that that was very rare in the in the course of human history are our basic wiring our of our basic instinct is to keep shifting our attention among lots of things simultaneously to multi-task to make sure that you know we don't miss anything going on in the environment and you can understand why that's true. You know back when we were cave men and cave women if you paid attention to one thing too long you know you probably got eaten by a

predator very very quickly or clubbed on the head or whatever happened back then. So so paying attention to one thing being deeply engaged in one thing is a very unnatural act and it was the book that helped to bring that style of thinking to a broad portion of the population. And you can trace the effects of what that meant over the course of the last 500 years. You see an explosion in literary experimentation for instance the arrival of the novel. Much more complexity of argument complexity of narrative a great deal of experimentation for instance in all of this emerged when writers began to assume that a very attentive reader was out there as soon as you knew that the reader was going to pay attention to what you wrote for a long time. You could do those kind of experiments. Suddenly what was written down was no longer just a utilitarian tool to pass information around. It became

truly a literary artistic experience and it went beyond literature to the areas of science. All the things that could be written about suddenly we had deep involvement deep engagement deep focus on what we were reading. And that again transferred out into our general lives people after that became able of much able to concentrate their attention in a way that had been limited to only a very small portion of of society. On the internet I would argue is almost precisely the opposite has almost precisely the opposite effect as an intellectual technology. If the great thing about the book is that it shielded you from distraction. You know the only thing going on by the book is the words. And when you concentrate on it you filter out all the stimuli going on around the Internet. In contrast inundates us with stimulation inundates us with distractions.

And this I think is fundamentally its nature. And in fact all the good things that we enjoy from the net are woven up in this way of distributing information. The net is fundamentally a hyper media or hyper text system. It has all those links that let us navigate very quickly between related bits of information. It's a multimedia system so it's not restricted to just video or audio or images or text it can bring all of those together and transmit them and transmit them simultaneously. It's also a messaging system a very powerful messaging system that can exchange information between people or between groups of people instantaneously almost. And as a messaging system that means it's also in an interruption system. It's very good at interrupting us and as we all know if we spend any time online or with our cell phones or our iPhones our Blackberries. More and more we're in a constant stream of interruptions and distractions. And finally the fourth kind of

major characteristic of the net is that it's a system that promotes multitasking. So you're not just doing one thing when you're looking into your screen whether it's a smartphone screen or a computer screen. You're usually juggling juggling lots of different things whether it's checking email reading something watching a YouTube video or gathering tweets whatever you happen to be doing. It allows you to do all of that again simultaneously. And this is why we spend so much time online. We like these characteristics of the net we like to be interrupted actually because as psychologists have found we crave human beings crave new information. And I think this relates back to the way being having our focus scattered being a very natural part of our survival once it's been shown that you know if if you're given access to new information you'll go in you'll grab it. Regardless of whether it's trivial or

important and in fact if you have an important piece of information in whatever form that you really should be paying attention to. If you know that there's new information coming through you'll look to the new information. There's there was an amazing study of office workers with their with computers that showed that they'll glance at their inbox their e-mail inbox 30 or 40 times an hour and this was before you know the BlackBerry and the iPhone and mobile e-mail. But when you think about that you know each one of those glances is a little break in attention it's a little distraction. And the problem with all of these distractions all of this influx of information is that on the one hand it provides us with all these new diverting and often very valuable tools for finding information and gathering it and exchanging it. But it bypasses or overrides the mental processes that are really key to the formation of deep thoughts. Of deep broad conceptual thoughts and that is the ability to move

information that's coming at us from our short term memory or working memory where it is. It comes and goes in milliseconds or seconds into our long term memory and it's only when information gets into our long term memory that we create the rich set of connections with other information that we have remembered or experiences we've had that gives our thinking richness in distinctiveness. And if we're constantly distracted if we're constantly glancing at different things juggling tasks we never pay enough attention to get information from that short term store into our long term memory attention. Is that the key to the entire process of transferring information into long term memory and creating connections. And we all kind of know what happens when our when our short term memory is overloaded. For instance if you've ever got up in your house and said. Need to do something in the next room when you take three steps over and all

of sudden you've forgotten what you got up to do and the reason is is because in the mean time during those three steps you've seen things around you you've looked at things around you maybe you thought about a conversation you had earlier in the day or some appointment you have tomorrow and your short term memory which can only hold a very little bit of information has been overloaded and you've forgotten what it is that you wanted to pay attention to whatever you set out to do. And that just shows when that kind of becomes our main way of taking in information which I think is what's happening today with the net. We're in that perpetual state of distractedness we're losing you know things are coming into and out of our memory without sticking into our long term memory where where really the richness of thought begins. And you can see you can see evidence of this in many studies that have been have been done over the last 20 or more years of the different aspects of the net. There have been studies for instance of hyperlinks. The little

links that seem pretty innocuous one are online an extremely valuable if you want to hop between information. But what's been found is that even if you don't click on a link it overloads your short term memory because your brain has to click in and say you know do I want to click on this or not. So there's a little mental process going on and there was one very interesting study where a woman gave the same piece of text to a bunch of different people to read on a computer screen. And all she did was vary the number of links appearing in the text and what she found is as the number of links increased reading comprehension she gave a test after reading comprehension went down and it didn't matter if you clicked on the links or not just the yes the a pay period of the links was a distraction. And in very similar ways we've we've we see that multimedia presentations of information also tend to decrease comprehension and understanding in learning. Compared to if you just focused on information coming in one you know whether it's text or video or

audio in one way and interruptions also similar type of. Research showing that the more you're interrupted the more you lose track of information. The less able you are to have a rich deep understanding. And finally multitasking also very similar. Similar effects now on the other hand. It's not all negative by any means there are also studies that show that there are cognitive benefits to Internet use. You tend to increase say a lot of visual acuity when you use the net a lot and this comes through particularly in studies of video gaming. And there's been a lot of them video gamers as you might expect are much better at shifting their focus among many different things on a screen many different stimuli in picking out which are important to the media. Whatever media tasks they want to do killing a zombie or whatever it is. And similarly if it helps hand-eye coordination

and it can even There's some indications it can even help expand the capacity of short term memory of working memory. If we're juggling things all the time which is very important because that means we we gain a better ability to pay attention. But. When we think about those benefits we have to look at the downside of this. And there are further studies that show that even as we improve our ability to multitask our ability to shift our attention among many different things were hindering our ability to do what psychologists call deep processing the kind of rich critical thinking intuition reflection interest introspection contemplation all of these things get thrown to the side as we become more adept at processing all of these interruptions coming at us all at once. And the most troubling part of all this comes when we look at some recent

discoveries about the plasticity of the brain as neuroscientists say or the adaptability of the brain. Until very recently it was assumed or it was thought that the brain the human brain was fixed basically in its structure. By the time we reached our 20s we were when we were children when we were very young that's when all our neural pathways were laid. And then after that you basically were stuck with what ever you developed when you're a baby in a child in a teenager. We now know that that's wrong. That's completely wrong that in fact our brains are always adapting to our environment and to whatever stimuli we're processing and they're adapting at a very deep cellular level. So when we practice one mode of thinking we strengthen the connections between our brain cells our neurons that support that way of thinking. But when we fail to practice a way a different way of thinking then we begin to lose the capability to perform that. And I think that. Explains why many of us even when we're not online

today even when we're not sitting in the front of a computer feel distracted feel feel like it's harder and harder to concentrate like it's harder and harder to sit down and engage in contemplative thought or deep reading or solitary thought. It's because we're literally as we practice these these very distracted modes of thinking we're literally rewiring our brains to be very good at them into want to do them. But at the same time as we neglect the more attentive modes of thought and I think the deeper modes of thought the more interesting modes of thought were losing our ability to do that to to to perform those things. That brings me to a brief reading I'd like to do from a passage of the book. This comes toward toward the end of it when I anticipate a question that readers will probably have by then and perhaps having gone through the general themes of the book. It's a question that you have as well.

I know what you're thinking. The very existence of this book would seem to contradict it's the TSAs If I'm finding it so hard to concentrate to stay focused on a line of thought. How in the world did I manage to write a few hundred pages of at least semi-coherent prose. It wasn't easy when I began writing the shallows toward the end of 2007. I struggled in vain to keep my mind fixed on the task. The net provided as always a bounty of useful information and research tools. But its constant interruptions scattered my thoughts and words. I tended to write in disk and disconnected spurts the same way I wrote when blogging. It was clear that big changes were in order in the summer of the following year. I moved with my wife from a highly connected suburb of Boston to the mountains of Colorado. There was no cell phone service at our new home and the internet arrived through a relatively poky DSL connection. I cancelled my Twitter account put my Facebook

membership on hiatus and mothballed my blog. I shut down my RSS reader and curtailed my Skype in an instant messaging. Most important I throttled back my email application. It had long been set to check for new messages every minute. I reset it to check only once an hour and when that still created too much of a distraction I began keeping the program closed for much of the day. The dismantling of my online life was far from painless. For months my synapses howled for their net fix. I found myself sneaking clicks on to check for new new mail button. Occasionally I go on a day long web binge. But in time the craving subsided and I found myself Self able to type at my keyboard for hours on end or to read through a dense academic paper without my mind wandering in some old disused neural circuits were springing back to life it seemed and some of the newer web wired ones were quieting down. I started to feel

generally calmer and more in control of my thoughts less like a lab rat pressing a lever and more like well a human being my brain could breathe again. My case I realize isn't typical. Being self-employed in a fairly solitary nature I have the option of disconnecting most people today don't. The web is so essential to their work and social lives that even if they wanted to escape the network they could not. In a recent essay The young novelist Benjamin Kunkel mulled over the nets expanding hold on his waking hours. Quote. The internet as its proponents rightly remind us makes for a variety inconvenience. It does not force anything on you. Only it turns out it doesn't feel like that at all. We don't feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even

like to. End of quote. The question really isn't whether people can still read or write the occasional book. Of course they can. When we begin using a new intellectual technology we don't immediately switch from one mental mode to another. The brain isn't binary in intellectual technology exerts its influence by shifting the emphasis of our thought although even the initial users of the technology can often sense the changes in their patterns of attention cognition and memory as their brains adapt to the new medium. The most profound shifts play out more slowly over several generations as the technology becomes ever more embedded in work leisure and education. In all the norms and practices that define a society in its culture. How is the way we read changing. How is the way we write changing. How is the way we think changing. Those are the questions we should be asking both of ourselves and of our children.

As for me I'm already backsliding with the end of this book in sight I've gone back to keeping my email running all the time and I've jacked into my RSS feed again. I've been playing around with a few new social networking services and I've been posting some new entries to my blog. I recently broke down and bought a Blu ray player with a built in y fi connection. It lets me stream music from Pandora movies from Netflix and videos from YouTube through my television and stereo. I have to confess it's cool. I'm not sure I could live without it. One of the points there is that as we become more dependent on a new intellectual technology it does get woven into the expert expectations social expectations we all feel. And so backing away becomes not just a matter of personal choice. Often if you disconnect if you back away from the technology you may suffer career consequences. If your

boss and all your colleagues expect you to be always reachable always connected and you might feel socially isolated if all your friends are Moment by moment putting their plans together through Facebook or through Twitter or through text messaging. On the other hand all of us as individuals do in the end have choices and are in control of our minds. And I think if we do value the calmer more attentive more introspective more contemplative and often more solitary modes of thought we have no choice but to begin to back away from our connected existence not give it up but begin to back away and practice those other ways of thinking in those more attentive ways of thinking whether it's reading long books whether it's reading long articles whether it's staring out your window for a long time thinking about whatever is out there to see whether it's. Engaging in some hobby that requires a huge amount of attentiveness. If we

don't keep this balance in our in the lives of our mind I think we're going to see those lives become less interesting. Flatter and less distinctive. And that not only affects each of us as individuals and in the intellectual lives we lead but I think if you look at culture as a whole and particularly a great monuments of culture that have been built up over the years you see that they were done by people who were able to pay attention whether it's in art whether it's in science whether it's in literature all of culture I think is founded on the ability to engage not just in scanning and skimming in rapid communication but in quiet solitary modes of thought. If we want to perpetuate those we have to make an effort to practice them. So let me end there and I'm happy to take any questions that anybody might have.

I saw your first year. I know that. I'm not a doctor so. So I'm wary of commenting on that I think there. I think there's a fair chance that technology has a role in that in there's one school of thought that thinks that the disorder might be related to constraints on working memory on short term memory the overloading of working memory and if that's true then being constantly bombarded by information from from media would certainly seem to play a role. But I think you know I think the jury's probably still out on what's causing what appears to be an increase in ADHD. Yeah right.

So the question is the brain adapted to earlier intellectual technology is it adapted to the book. Why won't it adapt to the internet it will adapt and I think that's the problem. It did the brain is very adaptable but adaptation is a process of change. So what we have to ask ourselves is not will we adapt I think will adapt to whatever whatever we're handed. The question is what is the adaption doing to us. What are we changing from India into. Because the process of adaption and being able to make sense of all this flood of information means that that skill will get better probably. But it also means we may well lose other mental

skills the one the ones I've been talking about. So adaptation in itself always happens but the end of adaptation what we become may not always be better than what we started out as. In order for it to be positive then we have to do what I said which is make sure that we leave room for to practice a variety of ways of thinking and the problem with the net particularly in its recent history for instance the rise of social networking the rise of the mobile net smartphones and stuff keeps pushing the velocity of information faster and faster in the bits of information smaller and smaller. We've gone in just a few years from the defining metaphor of online information being the page we go and look at pages of information to now it's becoming what Facebook and Google itself call the stream of information it's this but this constant very fast bombardment of

lots of short messages. So in order to maintain both styles of thought we have to go against what seems to be the natural grain of the net as a technology which actually doesn't want to give us any opportunity or any encouragement to slow down and think deeply about one thing you know. Yeah. Yeah yeah. It's a good question the question is maybe what we're seeing as this shift away from Solitaire or some modes of solitary attentive thinking to much more fast sharing of information and fast messaging and collaboration is just a change in the way society will define

creativity and define products in. My sense is that that may well be what's going on that I think there's a long term trend in society and it predates the web to place ever more value on things like profit problem solving efficiency the creation of products and ever less place devaluing the more solitary. Attentive ways of thinking led to the ways of thinking that are less about solving problems than simply exercising our thought kind of the open ended ways of thinking. So you may be right that all of society is going to redefine the norms and expectations of our lives to say that this is the way we should behave and this is what we're going to get rewarded for. But still that means that still doesn't change the fact that we lose what has been up until now not only a marker of the richness of our individual lives but an underpinning of culture. And if we make that

decision to give up that we should at least be clear with ourselves that that's what we're doing. I mean you know. Thank you. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's a very good question whether I've talked about you know dealing with this at an individual level by changing individual habits. Question is are there broader efforts you know changing institutions changing government changing social norms even. Right.

I'm not sure. I guess I my own feeling is where we are in this right now is that for most people it's not seen as a problem and therefore there's no reason to solve it. And so in order for people to change I think the first step is simply to become aware that maybe we're losing something important even as we're gaining all the benefits of the web. And to me that that has to begin at the individual level. Though you may be you may be right that groups of individuals can plumb those those questions even better than just single single individuals. But nevertheless I think before institutions begin to change before employers begin to say no we don't want you to be connected all the time. People at the individual level have to become aware of the problem and have to say we don't want this all the time we want to exercise different modes of thought. So I think eventually that changing institutions and changing norms becomes

possible but not until enough people actually consider it a problem. You know you hear that. Oh yeah like he said. So 50 years from now I think will I think the flow of information in the the expectation to be part of that flow will grow steadily. And that we will as a society decide that you know literary thinking contemplative thinking staring out the window solitary thinking they weren't all that important anyway so it's it's good that we've gotten rid of them and now we're much more productive efficient Coggs in the system. On the other hand I my guess is that there will be a and I think it will be basically a counter-cultural movement that will arise

among some subset of the population that will say no this isn't the way we want to live. There are other things beside productivity and efficiency and constant communication that are important. How big that can counter cultural movement will be I don't know. We could be very small they could be big enough to actually make some changes. Yeah yeah. The question is more ality in how lack of contemplative thought may affect that. I always get I get a little worried about talking about this because I'm already you know called a Luddite and a curmudgeon if I start talking about the Internet eroding our morals. That will be it for me. But I do think having said that there's And I think it's what I would be wary of making any kind of big claims about the. The moral implications of this change because that's one area where people

I think are generally pretty good at adapting. But there are some there are some studies of what might be called the deeper emotions or in the more refined emotions very sophisticated forms of empathy for instance. And what they seem to point to is that these emotions are finer emotions actually take time to emerge in our minds they're actually slow intellectual processes as opposed to say the more primitive forms of empathy if you see somebody get physically hurt it's it's instantaneous a very primitive type of mental process. So if that's true if in fact our our deepest most human emotions. Come out of slow fairly slow intellectual processes then. If we're constantly distracted and constantly interrupted you could you know make make the case that this will prevent us from from having those emotions or at least dampen them in the future.

I think it still I think that the researchers is too early to make any conclusion but it's certainly a concern when you look look at that. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah yeah. So one question is you know will will we be will we just naturally our ability to filter out the trivial unimportant things grow as we become more used to the to the medium. I don't know. I mean my guess is that probably it won't. And the reason is again to look there was a very interesting

study that was done at Stanford last year by a guy named a lab run by a guy named Clifford Nass and he took a bunch of heavy media multi-taskers and another set of people who much more rarely involve themselves in media multitasking. And he gave them a whole range of he and his team gave them a whole range of cognitive tests and the heavy multi-taskers did worse on every single one of those tests. They even did worse on the tests that that gauged multitasking skill. They were they found it harder to they were less efficient shifting their attention between different tasks. But the weird thing in the concerning thing is when you ask these people if they're good at multitasking they'll say oh yeah I'm great at multitasking I do it all the time I'm really good at it. And so so we may get a sense that we're really good at it as we do it more and more. But in fact that might be an illusion and we might actually be get even worse and worse and worse at filtering the trivia from the important stuff.

Yeah. So when you bought it what you're saying is more true or like you or me or that is really legit scientists that means that you said in your book of us you know people really want to read books. I've been there with you about this as well so I got you. This is like you know Internet. So I think that you know what they say but they don't know what he actually thinks. So most people that they don't most people have never thought deeply is that your point and so you know I mean I'm serious. I just want you. Yeah. You don't eat this but it is right not right or not you know I think there's some truth to that I'm not arguing that everybody was you know in you know

sitting around reading Paradise Lost. You know that never happened but to me that that makes this form of thought all not more dispensable but all the more precious the fact that not all that many people might engage in literary thinking or attentive thinking or whatever that means that we have to make sure that those people who have that ability. Are given the opportunity to develop those skills. And since we don't know who those people are when they're from the moment they're born we need to encourage everyone to try to try to develop these these more attentive skills so the fact that it's rare doesn't make it doesn't make me worry less it seems to me that makes it all the more precious and all the more reason for worrying about giving people less opportunities to develop it. That is right and that more will get narratives that look like them.

I read where that is right but I see the demand and it's not just about narratives I mean the demand for any type of contemplative concentrated thought I think is shrinking and then as demand the production of it shrinks as well particular to talk about creative works over there you know what. Good luck with that life. You look like one. Yeah and you do more or less your lot all right buddy. You're right. Yeah yeah yeah.

Well the on your on your first point I think that I think you're absolutely right that you know I think it's solitary deep attentive thinking is not the only way to be creative or innovative. There's also collaboration in and there is a kind of. They're juggling information in bouncing ideas off lots people can be energizing and can lead to its own kinds of progress and great thinking so I don't. I don't deny that my focus is that you know we want to spur that and we want to reap the rewards of that but we don't want to give up the other side. As for the other thing I think you're absolutely right I mean and this is kind of what I was getting at when I said we're moving from the page as being the metaphor to the stream that I think really just in the last few years. And thanks to things like Facebook and Twitter the expectation is that you know you're going to exchange ever shorter bits of information. I mean as a blogger now I feel completely out of date it's like oh I'm going to write three paragraphs when you know people are zing in 140 characters back and forth all

day and we see it and in texting. In some ways this is the most profound change in just the last few years particularly for kids who now the average American teenager sends or receives between two or three thousand text messages a month. And some are way the hell higher than that. And you have to realize you know you're throughout your waking hours you're being interrupted in one way or another every minute or two and how can you develop the discipline to think in different ways when when that's going on. So I yeah I think that's definitely an ongoing trend. Yeah. Does the i-Pad return us in some ways to more concentrated. Or give us the opportunity to do that. I think I think I think we're kind of. It's hard to say right now. I mean if you look at the Kindle for instance any reader

up until now it's been pretty good at presenting a page of text in a fairly calm quiet way in the i-Pad even though it's a multi-functional device the reading applications eye books and others also you know you when you see a page of text pages of text on there it is quieter and calmer than if you just went out on the web so on the one hand that's a good development. On the other hand I think what we know about the progress of gadgets particularly connected gadgets in general is that they always go toward more and more features and more and more multi functionality and multitasking. And one reason is that there's this huge competition among providers into it to distinguish themselves they keep putting new features in. So even with the Kindle now we're seeing you know there are links in it there are you click on a word you go to Wikipedia they just introduced a highlighting function that passages as you read when you're reading will be automatically highlighted of if a bunch of other readers of the same book.

Highlighted that thing with the i-Pad. You know it it's somewhat a crippled device now because it's it's a unit tasking operating system but Apple is now rolling out multitasking operating system. So unfortunately you know the push of competition the push and push of technical technological advance seems always to be toward more distraction rather than less. And the most worrying sign now is that publishers who are facing not the greatest future print publishers see these devices as ways to begin to bring video clips and audio into books. Social networking features so you can you know exchange notes about what you're reading with other people simultaneously and all those things each of those things you know in and of itself can sound attractive but they're all ways to break the attentiveness and to turn that kind of solitary deep reading into more of you know team sport or something.

So on the one hand it's encouraging on the other on. I know what happens with these devices over time. Yes. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. So will there be multiple internets out there in that if we don't want to be distracted all the time we can go to that internet and otherwise the other out. It's possible and I think there are already software applications for instance something called freedom

and many others that you can install and you can tell that you can program them to cut you off from the internet for a certain amount of time or are blocked your emails or do all sorts of things. And on the one hand those seem good on the other of course you have to wonder about them because we've always had the ability to cut ourselves off from the internet or to turn off our email so well right. But just the the fact that they exist shows that some people are actually starting to get concerned about what's going on. Whether those will become mainstream or not and whether you know enough people will want a kind of quieter calmer kinder Internet to actually bring one into existence that that's the open question and if enough people want it somebody else apply it certainly to more. Yeah yeah yeah right.

You're right that I'm using the Internet in a loose way to encompass all kinds of digital media digital communication to us because I think in our lives they are all lumped together in and we might as well look at the whole thing rather than individual things. And the other part of question is you know why not instead of demonizing the Internet why not focus on developing the cognitive skills that allow us to deal with constant dopamine injections from getting little bits of cool information. I don't know. I mean I guess because most people actually like to get those dopamine injections and actually crave them and I'm not sure that they

you know because of that there's a real pleasure in getting new information there's a real pleasure in getting being in touch with lots of other people who are your friends so I'm not sure that again this plays into my my sense that most people don't see this is a problem they see it as a wonderful new world where they are constantly distracted in a way that they don't necessarily find unpleasant. Yeah that's the last one. Probably I mean if you if you look at the habits in particular with texting Facebook and stuff like that. I mean it's a very

different kind of model of socializing than we've seen before. I haven't looked all that much into the social consequences of this and I'm sure there are good ones and I'm sure there will be bad ones but it it's almost certainly going to have deep effects on on on the way people not only think but but socialize. And you know to your to your earlier point. My own hope is that schools and educators who have with some major exceptions have kind of been big advocates of bringing ever more technology into the classroom at ever younger grades will start to look at some of the studies and start to say hey maybe we need to you know keep computers out of schools at least for the earlier grades. And of course that requires parents who up until now have acquainted technology investment in schools with better schools even though there's very little evidence that those things are connected to also take a harder look at

what inundating young children with with technology is doing. And you know also changing perhaps their habits and what we've seen in recent years with text messaging for instance is that you know a parent will get a young kid a cell phone for a reason for altogether good reasons they want to you know that for safety reasons the kid will be in touch. Then they get the first bill with text messages you know and they'll say Oh God let's get the $10 all you can eat messaging plan and then you're off to the races and what the kid is doing all day is is texting back and forth so there are two I think parents have too and maybe this is this is a case of this being just so new so we haven't really seen the drawbacks to it. But I think parents have to start challenging their faith in ever more technology particularly the ever younger kids. So thank you all for your attention. Thank you. So we'll move to a signing now. You can buy the book right up to the register is the last that we get the signing

line form going to my left and we'll start pulling chairs a soon as they're vacant to free up some space Thank you so much.