How Does The Net Affect our Brains? Nicholas Carr and A Glimpse into the Debate

In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. Carr’s thesis states that Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and the structure of the Internet in general engenders “foggy thinking”, and “attention deficit disorder like syndromes in the mind”, a poverty of deep critical engagement with ideas and texts, and a general feeling of exhausted cognitive function. Carr famously quipped what the use of of the Internet had done to his reading habits:  “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

Now that Carr has converted that essay into a full length book The Shallows, the critics have come out to either crucify or exalt his Marshall Mcluhan-fused rhetoric.

From an essay in the Prospect on Carr’s new book The Shallows.

Whatever one makes of Carr’s broader claims about the Internet, many readers will be impressed by his summation of recent discoveries in neuroscience. He builds on the work of Nobel-winner Eric Kandel and others to reveal that human brains adapt to new experiences — a feature known as “neuroplasticity.” This is helpful from an evolutionary perspective, but it also means some brain functions atrophy if we don’t use them. Here Carr mentions an oft-cited study that found changes in the brain structures of London cab drivers as they began relying on GPS rather than their memories to navigate. He believes that neuroplasticity provides the “missing link” to understanding how the media has “exerted their influence over the development of civilisation and helped to guide, at a biological level, the history of human consciousness.”

In particular Carr cites work by Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, who found that the use of modern media “stimulates the brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening older ones.” His experiments showed that just five hours of Internet use saw activity in parts of the brain’s previously dormant prefrontal cortex — evidence, for Carr, that the Internet “rewires” brains.

From the data it does seem that continued engagement with the Internet does effect our brains and the way we think. The question is does it affect us negatively ? Some researchers say no.

Jonah Lehrer, in his NY Times review of the book states:

“There is little doubt that the Internet is changing our brain. Everything changes our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. This surprising result led the scientists to propose that even simple computer games like Tetris can lead to “marked increases in the speed of information processing.” One particularly influential study, published in Nature in 2003, demonstrated that after just 10 days of playing Medal of Honor, a violent first-person shooter game, subjects showed dramatic increases in visual attention and memory.

Carr’s argument also breaks down when it comes to idle Web surfing. A 2009 study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least when compared with reading a “book-like text.” Interestingly, this brain area underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet. Google, in other words, isn’t making us stupid — it’s exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.”

However, Lehrer on his blog did retreat back in his claim that the Internet makes us smarter after Carr responded to the review of his book with a compelling study of college students in classrooms who were allowed to use the Internet during class:

This was tested in a communication studies class where students were generally encouraged to use their laptops during lectures, in order to explore lecture topics in greater detail on the Internet and in library databases. Half of the students were allowed to keep their laptops open, while the other half (randomly assigned) had to close their laptops. Students in the closed laptop condition recalled significantly more material in a surprise quiz after class than did students in the open laptop condition. Although these results may be obvious, many universities appear to be unaware of the learning decrement produced by multitasking when they wire classrooms with the intention of improving learning.

Although this doesn’t prove that the Internet does make us dumber, it does bring up a salient point: Namely, that multi-tasking does not make us more efficient, it in fact cripples our learning and ability to work through ideas to their logical endpoint. There have already been many other studies that have shown conclusive evidence that this is the case aside from the studies that Carr cites.

… Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt –that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.”

Aside from the raw data and psychological studies it is refreshing to read introspective and anecdotal stories on the impact of Internet use on the mind. The NYTimes has picked up on this tangent with articles being written by nonprofessionals on the issue.

AJ Jacobs, a journalist who has been noted for treating himself as a sociological experiment and then writing about it, refused to multi-task for 30 days with often hilarious results.

In one sense, task-juggling makes me feel great: busy, energised, fulfilled, as if I’m living three lives in the space of one. But I also know I’m scattered. I’m overloading my circuits. This overstimulated, underfocused world is driving us all batty. My mother — who complains when I click through my emails while talking to her on the phone (and by talking, I mean I toss out an occasional “uh-huh” or “sounds good”) — recently sent me an article about how multitasking is actually inefficient. Hence Operation Focus. I’m going to recapture my attention span. I pledge to go cold turkey from multitasking for a month. Only single tasks. Uni-tasking. And, just as important, I’ll stick with each task for more than my average 30 seconds. I’ll be the most focused man in the world.”

With the number of studies on this subject already undertaken there is no way to arrive at any definite conclusions; they are being constantly reconfigured. However, with the Internet as our primary tool of foraging information, and now that multi-tasking is seen conclusively as perhaps causing both inefficiency and diminished cognitive function, the question recurs back to whether the nets exploit this tendency in us. How many times have you clicked on something else while reading this article ? In writing this post I checked my email 5 times, clicked on unrelated links to this article probably 10 times, with many wasted minutes in the process.

In asking contemporaries of mine on this issue many have expressed incredulity at the idea that their copious use of the net has had a negative affect on their cognitive capabilities. That their responses may reveal more about them than about the question at hand is hard to say. Any large scale critique of contemporary culture is a sure fire way to get the public up in arms, especially if that critique is mounted on our intelligence via a dissection of our daily habits. No one wants to be told that what they do, day in and day out, especially if it be a source of pleasure, or work, is not good for them. Whatever the case may be, Internet use around the world is skyrocketing at a dizzying pace and this is affecting the fabric of our lives in ways that may not be clear to us yet.

By focusing the discussion in biological terms (does my use of the net damage my brain and its ability to focus, thinking critically and engaging fully?) we may be missing a larger point: This dialogue is not really about our brains so much as it is an issue of larger structural changes in our society. Nothing exists in a vacuum, much less a media whose focus is networking individuals in ways that are changing our lives in radical ways. Capitalism, modernism, post-modernism, technologism, all these and many more concepts play into how the net’s use both affect us now and will affect us in the future. If anything, a completely new net-centric discipline of study that takes all of these divergent fields into a historical account may need to be erected in order to prescribe and dissect the net’s shaping of society. The dialogue has just begun.