Commentary: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember

The title of this commentary relates to the content of Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows 1. This is a confronting read as it challenges all teachers to keep up with the mind-set of current and future students. The book does a good job of dispelling the long time dogma that the adult brain is a fixed entity by describing multiple examples of neuroplasticity. Our brain changes adaptively when circumstances change, most spectacularly when a sense like sight is lost. The internet is a new tool for humanity and, just like adapting to cars for transport, our brains are changing to use the internet. Carr points out that we also like doing things to activate the areas of our brain that we have changed to support our activities. I confess to a mild e-mail addiction and feel disconnected if I do not get a regular fix of new messages. I know this from my withdrawal reaction when I was recently disconnected at home for several days due to a technical problem. Carr's words also gave me insight into the behavior of a concert pianist friend who always departs punctually from the amiable banter of university lunch time conversation to practice for a regular set time. We become fixed in our activities, and we repeat those activities for cerebral fulfillment. Our current students consume enormous feeds of information, but the activity tends to be unsystematic and the information is selected as small bits from a screen. Carr argues that this type of behavior makes it difficult for students to read a whole book or even a whole page. Students are losing skills that most teachers take for granted. Plato 2 was among the first recorded naysayers about the next generation when he complained that book reading “will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember for themselves.” Likewise, Carr leads us to despair that the internet has made it much harder for our children to engage with long texts and complex ideas. If Plato did not get it completely right in 360 BC then we can hope that Carr is likewise in error. Jonah Lehrer 3 has made the following rebuttal. “What Carr neglects to mention 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.” Change is not inherently bad, but it is inevitable. As an early adopter of word processing I used the technology for many years to transcribe words into the computer that I had composed with pen and paper. Did I write with a different style then? If you take Carr's slant on this, using the example of Frederick Nietzsche, then you may believe that the ubiquitous keyboard has widely diminished the creativity of writers. Carr largely avoids mentioning those who are empowered by the new technology, even though he claims that he is not a Luddite. The Shallows has led to many strong commentaries in the blogosphere, so seek it out; that is if you still retain the capacity to read long texts.