I recently finished The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, and I feel somewhat obligated to put my thoughts into a blog post.  I've been extremely hesitant to write this post only because I'm so inexperienced in the field and one knowledgeable person could come along and rip me to shreds with a few keystrokes.  I also think that in many ways I'm biased in that I make my living from developing websites and applications that are precisely the culprit of the dramatic changes the internet are having on our brains (which I in no way refute, by the way).

My Understanding of Neuroplasticity

Basically, The Shallows details neuroplasticity, which I am now going to try to (and probably fail to) define.  In essence neuroplasticity is how our brains are able to be bent and molded by our environment to more efficiently adapt to our current situation.  Think of it as adaptation of the brain.  In some cases the process can be relatively slow (weeks, months, even years), but scientists have proven that the "circuitry" in our brains can be reworked to operate more efficiently.

One example provided in the book was blindness.  Say for instance someone becomes blind, it isn't uncommon for that person's other senses to become more precise, to be honed to compensate for the lack of vision.  This is a really stupid example but if you've ever seen the movie Ray, in which Jamie Foxx plays the blind musician Ray Charles, there's a scene in which Ray is sitting down to dinner with a woman and he mentions a hummingbird outside.  The woman wasn't aware of the hummingbird, but Ray says that he can actually hear its wings fluttering.  Presumably in this fictional scenario Ray's auditory senses have been increased because the synapses in his brain have been "rerouted," that is to say more of the brain's processing power has been directed to hearing.  When Ray lost his vision the part of his brain that usually accepts and processes visual information didn't just die, it was instead repurposed to help Ray process information in other ways.

Now apply neuroplasticity to the average person that is exposed to information on the internet.  We read facebook status updates, tweets, have message alerts on our phones, new email message alerts on our computers, we have RSS feeds that alert us whenever our favorite sites post a new article and so on.  This is a huge departure from older forms of information consumption, where-in someone might sit down a read a newspaper or book.  As a result, our brain is "adapting" to being constantly bombarded with small nuggets of information.

Information ADD

So what's the result?  In affect, our brains have become like hummingbirds jumping from one flower bud to the next.  We struggle with longer-form reading.  I'll be the first to admit it, much of the time when I'm researching on the internet I won't read an entire article, I'll instead scan for the information that's useful to me, or even jump to the bottom of a blog post to find relevant links to downloads or other information.

Additionally, because information is so readily available on the internet our brains are learning to focus more on information acquisition than retention.  Why, for instance, should your brain retain what the capital of The Netherlands is if you can find out in a matter of seconds by searching on Wikipedia?  Again, I'm also at fault here.  If I know I can easily regain access to information on the web I'm less likely to actually focus on memorization or retention.

Is This Bad?

So far you're probably thinking that I ate this book up and that I agree with everything found within, and truthfully I do agree with most of it, and I definitely agree that neuroplasticity is a real thing that is affecting users of the web.  However, unlike Nicholas Carr, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing.  In one section of the book he discusses what might be filling our memory if not facts that we need to perform well in school, or at our job.  I think that is an extremely interesting question - what if rather than filling our memories with facts, we had the ability to more accurately retain our life experiences?  It could be that a lot of nonsense would be easily recalled but in ways I'd rather remember the things I do on a daily basis than what the capital of an obscure country that I'll probably never visit is.

I know that the web is changing the way we think and learn.  I also know that most college courses are still being taught via lectures, a thousand year old method.  Although I can understand that there is a value associated with deep reading and deep thought, I highly doubt that folks are going to throw away their computers or phones anytime soon to return to books as a primary source of information.  There's an incredible opportunity for someone to come up with a new way of teaching that plays to our new way of taking in information, and I'm sure that will happen sometime soon.  In my opinion this change is not bad, will not lead to the end of creative thinking, and will not make us a bunch of brain-heads living in filled vats hooked intravenously to the Intertron™ of the future.  We will instead focus on content that is more valuable in order to work our ways to the same product more quickly.  Will it have a negative impact on our intellectual blossoming as an individual?  Probably.  Will we care?  Probably not, and folks that do will turn to traditional sources of information to have that experience.