What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains

1. What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains

2. 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.

3. 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.”

4. 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).

5. 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 we’re able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory.

6. 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".

7. 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.”

8. 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.

9. 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.”

10. 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.

11. The Juggler’s 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. • They’d start by glancing all the way across the first two or three lines of text. Then their eyes would drop down a bit, and they’d scan about halfway across a few more lines. • Finally, they’d let their eyes drift further down the left-hand side of the page. • “F” stands for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. F

12. The Juggler’s 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.” • That’s unlikely, because they are probably glancing at pictures, videos, & ads.

13. Conclusion “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it.” -Hal 9000 • In 2001, the thoughts & actions of humans seemed scripted, like they were following an algorithm. • We don’t 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.”