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

Tonight I'm very excited to welcome the Coast Guard to Harvard bookstore 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 evidence 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.

Thank you Michael and thanks all of you for coming out. I try not to be too disturbing given how 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 became a writer about technology. It was a big. Have was and can 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. I mean 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 use 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 stay in for similar purposes to gather information to store information. I 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 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 a 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 made it democratize 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 pain 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 bring that style of thinking to a broad portion of the population. And you can trace the effects of 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 e-mail reading something watching a YouTube video. 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. 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 it 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 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've 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 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 gee I need to do something in the next room and 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 to little links that seem pretty innocuous when we're online and serenely 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 paper parents 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 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 and 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 into 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 were baby and 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 practiced 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. And 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 being 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 next expanding hold on his waking hours. Quote the internet as its proponents rightly remind us makes for variety in convenience. 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 do 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 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. And 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'm not a doctor so so I'm wary of commenting on that I think. 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. 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 that 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 ones 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 encourage men to slow down and think deeply about one thing.

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 fast messaging and collaboration is just a change in the way society will define creativity and define products and 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 creation of products and ever less place devaluing. The more solitary attentive ways of thinking let the ways of thinking that are less about solving problems than simply exercising are 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.