By Nicholas Carr
(7) "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski"
"The Net seems to be chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."
(33) "Our thoughts can exert a physical influence on our brains. We become, neurologically, what we think."
(35) "The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits."
"Just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect.
"If we stop exercising our mental skills, we don't just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead…When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent."
(65) Isaac of Syria, on reading a book: "As in a dream, I enter a state where my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart."
Carr: "Reading a book is a meditative act, but it doesn't involve a clearing of the mind. It involves a filling, or replenishing, of the mind."
(90) "Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It's tactile as well as visual." " 'All reading is multi-sensory. There's a crucial link between the sensory-motor experience of the materiality of a written work and the cognitive processing of the text content.' "
"The shift from paper to screen influenced the degree of attention we devote to a piece of writing, and the depth of our immersion in it."
(91) "We don't see the forest when we search the web. We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves."
"Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an 'ecosystem of interruption technologies.'"
(104) Ebooks "lose their 'edges' and dissolve into the vast, roiling waters of the Net."
(107) "Electronic text is impermanent…a printed book is a finished object."
(108) To see how changing attitudes can impact what's written, look at the history of correspondence:
"A personal letter written in the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal email or text message written today."
"Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence."
(112) "There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that tradition has declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and essentially become its first readers."
(119) "The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again."
(120) " Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don't fire together don't wire together."
"The circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart."
(124) "Our intellectual prowess is derived largely from the schemas we have acquired over long periods of time. We are able to understand concepts in our areas of expertise because we have schemas associated with those concepts."
Filling a bathtub with a thimble = challenge involved in transferring information from working memory to long-term memory
Reading book = information faucet provides steady drip. "Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas."
"With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next. We're able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source."
"When our brain is overtaxed, we find distractions more distracting." (High cognitive load amplifies the distractedness we experience.)
"When we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data."
(138) "Skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading."
(141) "Given our brain's plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our synapses when we're not online."
(142) Heavy multitaskers = much less able to maintain their concentration on a particular task.
"Whereas the infrequent multitaskers exhibited relatively strong "top-down attentional control," the habitual multitaskers showed "a greater tendency for bottom-up attentional control"."
"Intensive multitaskers are 'suckers for irrelevancy.'"
(166) [On Google Books] "The strip-mining of 'relevant content' replaces the slow excavation of meaning."
(173) [On Google/AI] Assuming we'd be better off if supplemented/replaced by AI is unsettling and revealing.
Underscores "firmness and certainty with which Google holds to its Taylorist beliefs that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized."
In Google's world, "there's little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."
(191) Difference between biological memory and computer memory:
"While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed."
"Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not."
"The brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated. Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal."
(192) "Unlike a computer, the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full."
"The amount of information that can be stored in long-term memory is virtually boundless."
As we build up our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper.
"We don't constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term information. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence."
"When we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches."
The Web places more pressure on our working memory
Divers resources from our higher reasoning faculty
Obstructs the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas
Web = technology of forgetfulness
(210) "Our tools end up 'numbing' whatever part of our body they 'amplify'."
(212) "An honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity to what's lost as well as what's gained. We shouldn't allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we've numbed an essential part of our self."
(217) Online scholarship database leads to a narrowing of citations; fewer and more recent sources cited.
Search engines "tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn't."
(219) Attention Restoration Theory = fewer external stimuli means the brain can relax
Working memory is no longer taxed by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions
The "resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind."
(221) "The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions."
"As the Net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts."
(222) Martin Heidegger (1950s): Our ability to engage in meditative thinking, which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. [Only be able to use calculative thinking.]
"The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at Concord station [interrupting Hawthorne], drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection."
"The frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere." -Heidegger
"We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls." -Carr
(224) "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."