📒The Shallows

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

A Pulitzer Prize finalist, first published in 2010, and still relevant enough for a second edition in 2020. The book is an expansion on Carr’s essay in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He weaves together history, philosophy, psychological and neurological research, and personal anecdotes to explore how the Internet is rewiring our brains — moving us very quickly away from centuries of development of the meditative “literary mind” trained by reading and capable of transformative insight, and toward a new kind of shallow thinking we don’t yet fully understand.

(More detailed reading notes in 🔒 Private Note.)

Key Ideas & Takeaways

“The medium is the message.”

We all remember this quote, but we’ve failed to internalize Marshall McLuhan’s real warning: every time a new medium appears, arguments about the medium’s positive or negative qualities wind up focusing on the content it delivers. But it’s the medium itself that winds up changing the way we think and reshaping society. We need to pay more attention to what Internet use in and of itself is doing to our brains.

🔥 “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.” —Marshall McLuhan

“Cells that fire together wire together.”

Our brains are malleable; they physically adapt to the tasks we perform over and over — this is called neuroplasticity. Over time, new synaptic links form between neurons that frequently fire together, forming our brains’ “vital paths,” or the paths of least resistance that shape how we think and what we can do.

We’re born with certain vital paths determined by our genes, but our experiences reinforce or reshape those paths over time. Moreover, our brains crave stimulation — so once we’ve experienced a stimulus and formed these paths (good or bad), we crave that stimulation again.

Our tools change us, and alienate us from the object of our work

Humans are exceptionally adaptable to tools and technologies — this has been a critical factor in our success as a species.

Over time, physical tools are mapped by our brains as extensions of our bodies, and intellectual technologies change the way we think because each “embodies an intellectual ethic.” For example:

• Maps and clocks taught us to think in terms of measurement and abstraction, reducing the physical world to simplified representations
• The shift from oral to written language changed how our brains process visual signals, how they reason, and how they form memories

But this adaptation comes with a catch:

“Even as our technologies become extensions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies. When the carpenter takes his hammer into his hand, he can use that hand to do only what a hammer can do. The hand becomes an implement for pounding and pulling nails.”

We should ask: is the extra efficiency worth how it changes us? (Or how can we mitigate the change?)

Adapting to a task has (often unexpected) implications beyond that task

When our brains physically adapt to a task, they also tend to over-perform at related skills (that use the same parts of the brain) and grow weaker in other areas.

For example, the rise of the printing press led to a proliferation of books and personal libraries, and the rise of the “literary brain.” We moved from using books as memory aids for public recitations to private readers, which created a personal relationship with the written text. We got better at deep thinking and concentration. (A departure from our natural instincts!) As we bought more books, we also began to compare ideas and our own observations, giving rise to scientific thinking.

Biological memory is NOT analogous to digital memory

Techno-optimists often talk about the potential of offloading the need to remember information to computers — let them remember for us, and free up our minds for more creative work. But this fundamentally misunderstands how biological memory works.

Digital storage is finite, and the data is always the same — you can move it from one slot to another and it doesn’t change. You can accumulate any amount of information and it’s stored separately as discrete bits.

But biological memory is stored over time. We recall information over and over, and each time the memory grows stronger and may change slightly as it’s stored again. There’s infinite capacity to store information, but there’s a bottleneck moving short-term/working memory into long-term storage.

The key advantage of biological memory is the potential for synthesis — each time we recall a piece of information, we can link it to other information stored in our memory to form a schema of knowledge. This web of knowledge is far more complex than any digital network we can produce. It’s what enables insight and wisdom. And our own personal knowledge schemas have long been seen as keys to our individual identities.

In offloading our memory of knowledge, we put the process of personal synthesis and building our personal knowledge schemas at risk — which means we put our capacity for building wisdom and individual identity at risk too.

A few corporations are gatekeepers to the Internet, and we should question their motives

Carr specifically takes aim at Google — I think you could generalize this lesson to the other handful of companies with oversized impact, but it’s a good example:

Google’s search is absolutely critical to making the web of information online useful, BUT they’re not a neutral party looking out for the good of humanity; they’re a business! Their profits are driven by more clicks. (In the words of one exec, “Google’s profits are tied directly to the velocity of people’s information intake.”) Is “velocity of... information intake” good for humanity?

Or look at Google’s “moon shot” project to digitize all books ever printed and make them searchable. In some cases they cut deals to control access to the information they digitized. Search also intrinsically fragments the information in the book — it prioritizes the most efficient path to a specific piece of information at the expense of context, or the web of foundational knowledge the author might have once required the reader to explore to obtain that information.

And then there are algorithms (and increasingly, although Carr doesn’t really get into it, AI). These are essentially invisible scripts that guide our actions and shape our choices online, even though we generally have no visibility into what they’re doing, or why. (In fact, in the case of AI, sometimes the company deploying the models actually doesn’t understand why it’s directing us one way or another.)

Consuming information online has a very different effect on our brains than reading it in a book

Reading a book is a slow and personal experience. It introduces information to our working memory at a pace that it can be consolidated into long-term memory. It encourages us to be attentive and focused, a transferable skill that can be useful for other intellectual activities.

Consuming information online is like trying to drink from a firehose. We’re absolutely overwhelmed with the breadth of information at our fingertips and unable to consolidate it in long-term memory. Even when we do read, links and notifications tempt us to break focus. Moreover, search and recommendations are designed to find the most efficient path to a piece of information vs. encouraging the slower meditative processes that internalizes knowledge and builds wisdom. And, rather than building our own personal data schemas of knowledge, we’re often unknowingly following scripts written by someone else online.

When we spend lots of time online, we train our brains to engage shallowly with information. We’re optimizing our brains to become efficient hunters and gatherers of information rather than synthesizers of knowledge to generate insight.

All of this is probably unstoppable, but...

It’s pretty clear the Internet’s not going anywhere (not to mention I personally love all the opportunities it provides), but learning all of this has motivated me to stay personally committed to:

• Turning off screens and reading books on paper every day to keep those skills sharp
• Taking small steps to minimize my phone’s control on me (turning off notifications, putting it in another room sometimes, etc.)
• Writing better notes about what I’m learning every day, consciously building my own knowledge and connecting what I’ve learned to spark insight
• Paying attention to how I engage online — search and recommendation algorithms are unavoidable now, but I also want to actively seek out human connection online and prioritize new information and wisdom valued by other people (especially experts in fields that interest me)

More Reading

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
• David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (2001)
• Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)