Susan Greenfield
Attention, Please
The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember
By Nicholas Carr (Atlantic Books 276pp £17.99)
Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!
Last year, adults in North America were apparently spending an average of twelve hours a week online, double the time devoted only four years previously. Perhaps more thought-provoking still is that this activity, which constituted some third of all leisure time, was not being subtracted from, but was additional to, other screen pastimes such as watching television. In sad contrast, another recent survey showed that the average American over fourteen years of age was spending a mere 143 minutes a week reading printed works. For the writer and journalist Nicholas Carr, the increasing predilection for online living is changing the way we think in a truly deep way - or more accurately in a 'shallow' way: hence the title of this highly readable and timely book.
Carr sets the scene for his concerns by combining history, personal anecdote and science. As a result, his narrative is flabby in places - for example, with an overly detailed account of the rise of Google. And, as is inevitable in an interdisciplinary work, we can sometimes see the joins rather than being transported along in a seamless flow of thought and argument. Yet these qualms are minor compared to the relevance of his central thesis. Indeed, Carr's unhurried style exemplifies one of his main points regarding reading from the printed page compared to the screen. He suggests that reading a book promotes the skills of 'calm, linear thought - the ones we use in traversing a lengthy narrative or an involved argument, the ones we draw on when we reflect on our experiences or contemplate an outward or inward phenomenon'.
To his great credit, Carr is as even-handed as possible. He consistently emphasises the fact that screen technologies are neither evil nor miraculous in their effects on the human mind: rather, for every talent lost or diminished, another will be gained or enhanced. What is certain, however, is that our minds will change.
In Carr's end is his beginning: his journey starts with a chapter on a phenomenon that has been well known to neuroscientists for decades, but still comes as a surprise to many others: the 'plasticity' of the brain. Here Carr gives a clear account of what could have been rather indigestible technical material on how a 'use it or lose it' principle operates among brain cells: the more active and hard-working a cell or network of cells is as a result of specific experiences, the more effective and larger that cell or network becomes.
Carr treats us to some nice examples, ranging from studies of London cab drivers to the results on the brain of playing the piano for a mere five days, to demonstrate just how exquisitely sensitive the brain is to the environment. Once we've grasped this phenomenon of plasticity, then the stage is set to reflect on the significance of an environment that is being indisputably transformed by the Internet. Carr examines systematically both environment and brain.
His conclusion is that the screen environment is indeed fundamentally different from the book. Carr's central idea is that screen media, so effective at attracting all the user's attention, are then designed to fragment it. Fast presentations, with brief extracts from otherwise lengthier works or performances, delivered simultaneously with multiple images and hypertexts, drive shorter attention spans - all in clear contrast to the linear passage of a book.
The chapter on the brain is a discussion of the evidence that these unprecedented new environments are changing what is happening to our neuronal connections. It is particularly welcome as an argument against those who still feel that concerns over the impact of screen technologies are unfounded because any change has yet to be 'proven'. Carr summarises a host of different types of studies, from neuroplasticity to brain scans to psychology, demonstrating quite clearly that the screen can change our brains, and thus how we think. Carr's plausible conclusion is that the screen enhances skills for the multiple processing of large amounts of incoming sensory information, while the book predisposes the reader to reflection and 'deep' thought. By deep thought, Carr means embedding whatever the subject might be in a wider, personal conceptual framework that will have developed gradually in the brain as it has adapted to the experiences of living out a person's unique life narrative.
This life narrative amounts, in physical brain terms, to memory, the subject of a subsequent chapter. Carr deals briskly but accurately in lay-friendly terms with an overview of the neuroscience of memory. His aim is to show that although brains work well with computers, they are very different entities. The brain does not have simple memory storage that could be just as easily off-loaded or downloaded to an external device. Rather, memories are dynamic, ever changing through their interconnections with all other memories: a memory is never fixed or isolated, but is the quintessence of what it is to be human.
Carr acknowledges that human brains can nonetheless work like computers in processing incoming information, and indeed that is what the use of screen technologies such as Google are causing us, increasingly, to do. But there is a big difference between information and knowledge, between process and content. While there is nothing wrong with developing fast and efficient mental processing, it should not be conflated with what might be consequently placed in jeopardy (and this is Carr's fear): an ability to appreciate significance and to understand content.
Although Nicholas Carr delivers no instant solution, it would have been in contradiction to his own thesis to do so. The Shallows is a worthy illustration that books do, indeed, enable deep reflection. My only remaining quibble is that he could have included the most appropriate quote of all from the physicist Neils Bohr, who long ago admonished a student, 'You're not thinking; you're just being logical.'
Susan Greenfield is Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind at the Oxford Martin School and Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. Her books include 'ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century'.