What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains

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What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains
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Some Interesting Background Related

• Sales of Music CDs fell 20.
• Sales of Movie DVDs fell 14.
• On Christmas Day 2010, customers purchased more
  e-Books on amazon.com than physical books for the
  first time ever.
• Newspaper circulation dropped 7, while visits to
  newspaper web sites grew by more than 10.
• Sales of Greeting Cards Postcards Dropped
  Considerably.
• Volume of Mail Sent by USPS declined at fastest
  pace ever.
• Half of U.S. Universities Dropped Printed
  Editions of Journals in favor of Strictly
  Electronic Distribution.
• As more journals moved online, scholars actually
  cited fewer articles than they had before.
• Scholars cited more recent articles with
  increased frequency.

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Central Thesis

• The use of the World Wide Web, and its highly
  distracting way of presenting information in
  small chunks with hypertext, embedded video, and
  surrounding advertising, is making changes to our
  brains that are not altogether desirable.

Carr felt his capacity for what he calls "deep
reading" was fading. The very way my brain
worked seemed to be changing.It was demanding to
be fed the way the Net fed it and the more it
was fed, the hungrier it became.
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How does our brain best learn?

• 1) Short-term memory must be loaded with
  material to be learned.
• 2) This short-term content must be allowed to
  slowly transfer to long-term memory.
• 3) Step 2 cannot take place if short-term memory
  is overloaded by distractions.
• 4) The design of the Net actually prevents Step
  2 from ever taking place. It seizes our
  attention only to scatter it (p. 118).

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The Bathtub Thimble

• Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble that's
  the challenge involved in transferring
  information from working memory into long-term
  memory.
• When we read a book, the information faucet
  provides a steady drip. Through our concentration
  on the text, we can transfer most of the
  information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into
  long-term memory.
• With the Net, we face many information faucets,
  all going full blast. Our little thimble
  overflows, and were able to transfer only a
  small portion of the information to long-term
  memory.

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Our Neuroplastic Brains

• In short, we see plenty of evidence that the
  brain can reorganize itself, and is certainly not
  fixed in one state for all of its adult life.
• London taxi drivers whose posterior hippocampuses
  were much larger than normal.

The brains of London cab drivers even "grew on
the job" as they built up detailed information
needed to find their way around London's
labyrinth of streets - information famously
referred to as "The Knowledge".
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Evidence that past intellectual technologies
rewired our brains.
Mechanical clocks gave us scientific way of
thinking.
Printing press gave us an attentive way of
thinking.
Maps trained us to think abstractly.

• Ranks Net as greatest invention since printing
  press even alphabet. The Greek alphabet was
  the first effective alphabetic script in the
  history of humankind.
• An invention staggering in its implication.
• A piece of explosive technology, revolutionary
  in its effects on human culture, in a way not
  precisely shared by any other invention.

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The Greek Miracle

• A total of 24 symbols as opposed to the hundreds
  of symbols in hieroglyphics. This provided a
  simple, flexible system for storage
  transmission of info.
• A large percentage of the ancient Greece
  population achieved high levels of literacy so
  many achievements in art, literature,
  mathematics, philosophy, science.

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Neat Stories of Brain Rewiring
In 400 AD when St. Augustine finds St. Ambrose
(bishop of Milan) actually reading without moving
his lips. At time, no spaces between words
writings were transcribed speech.
Nietzsche was going blind later in life ordered
a typewriter so he could continue writing with
his eyes closed. Words now could continue to
pass from his mind to page. He later noticed (as
did others) that his style had becomes tighter,
more telegraphic.
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Web Influence on Book Writing

• Changes in reading style are bringing changes in
  writing style.
• In Japan, cell phone novels continue to grow in
  popularity.
• Top selling Japanese novels last year were
  originally written on mobile phones.
• These are made up of short sentences
  characteristic of text messages.

Homepage of Japanese portal site Maho no iRando.
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The Jugglers Brain

• A web design study with 232 people. He attached
  a small camera that tracked their eye movements
  as they read pages of text browsed content.
• The vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their
  eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that
  resembled, roughly, the letter F.
• Theyd start by glancing all the way across the
  first two or three lines of text. Then their
  eyes would drop down a bit, and theyd scan about
  halfway across a few more lines.
• Finally, theyd let their eyes drift further down
  the left-hand side of the page.
• F stands for fast. Thats how users read your
  precious content.

F
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The Jugglers Brain

• For every 100 words added to a web page, the
  average viewer will spend just 4.4 more seconds
  perusing the page.
• Most accomplished readers can read only about 18
  words in 4.4 seconds.
• When you add verbiage to a page, you can assume
  that customers will read 18 of it.
• Thats unlikely, because they are probably
  glancing at pictures, videos, ads.

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Conclusion

• In 2001, the thoughts actions of humans seemed
  scripted, like they were following an algorithm.
• We dont want to begin to lose our humanness, to
  sacrifice the very qualities that separate us
  from machines.
• It is our own intelligence that can flatten into
  artificial intelligence.

• Dave, stop. Stop, will you? My mind is going.
  I can feel it. I can feel it. -Hal
  9000