#632： How the Internet Makes Our Minds Shallow
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Summary
Have you found it harder and harder to sit with a good book for long periods of time without getting that itch to check your phone? Well, you're not alone. My guest today makes the case that the internet has changed our brains in ways that make deep focus thinking harder and hard. His name is Nicholas Carr, and he documented what was then a newly emerging phenomenon 10 years ago in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast have you found
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it harder and harder to sit with a good book for long periods of time without getting that
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itch to check your phone well you're not alone my guest day makes the case that the internet
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has changed our brains in ways that make deep focus thinking harder and harder his name is
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nicholas carr and he documented what was then a newly emerging phenomenon 10 years ago in his book
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the shallows what the internet is doing to our brains the shallows has now been re-released the
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new afterward and nick and i begin our conversation with how he thinks the effect of digital technology
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on our minds has or hasn't changed over the last decade we then discuss the idea of the medium
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being the message when it comes to the internet and how this particular medium changes our brains
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and the ways we think and approach knowledge in the world nick then explains how we read text on
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screens differently than text and books why hyperlinks mess with our ability for comprehension
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why it's still important to develop our own memory bank of knowledge even in a time when we can access
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facts from an outsourced digital brain and how social media amplifies our craving for the fast
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and easy to digest over the slow and contemplative and we enter a conversation with how nick himself
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has tried to strike a balance in keeping the advantage of the internet while mitigating its downsides
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after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is slash shallows
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all right nicholas carr welcome back to the show thank you brett it's my uh my pleasure to return
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so we had you on the show a few years ago to talk about your collection of essays utopia is is creepy
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got you back on the show because 10 years ago you wrote a book called the shallows how the internet is
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changing our our brains and it's been 10 years you got a new edition out with an additional like a
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an afterward kind of an update on how things have changed or not changed in those 10 years
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what do you think what have been the big changes that have taken place on the internet that have
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affected how we think in the 10 years since you originally released the shallows i think that what's
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changed is the technology of computing you know back 10 years ago when we talked about going online
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that was still mainly we were still mainly talking about laptops and desktop computers
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and the smartphone smartphone was there it i think the iphone was was introduced in 2007
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but it hadn't really taken over by 2010 so i was i was writing the book in the era of the laptop and
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desktop and and now not only have smartphones kind of taken over from the cell phone i would argue
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they've taken over from the personal computer as the dominant form of computing device that that
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people use so i think on the one hand what's the big changes is the smartphone took over and the other
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big change is that social media which was also around in 2010 you know facebook was there and twitter
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was there but but it hadn't become so dominant in the way it is now so that's the second big change is
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what we do with our phones more often than not is something involving social media and as we talk
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about the the shallow what i think is interesting about the book i think there's still the main thesis
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that you have that you put out there i think still holds up it's just that i think it's even been
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refined even more because as you note in the after there's been more research that's come out to sort
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of confirm what you you were writing about 10 years ago i think i think in many ways the what the
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basic themes and the basic messages and research of the book if anything is is is even more relevant
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today as as we've switched to smartphones and social media because if you think about you know
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what i talked about in the book is how there's a trade-off involved when we go online when we use
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the internet on the one hand we get the benefit of having huge amounts of information delivered very
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very quickly from all sorts of different sources all sorts of overlapping forms audio video text and
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so forth but what we what we lose is the ability to pay attention because the internet is a distraction
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machine and so we're constantly shifting our focus constantly getting interrupted with alerts and
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notifications so we have more information but i don't think we're thinking as deeply as we used to
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because we're so distracted and if you think about smartphones and social media if if the internet
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in general is distraction machine smartphones and social media amp up the distractions way more than
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was true even 10 years ago so i think at the level of the basic analysis of the book unfortunately
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things have gotten worse rather than better well at the beginning of the shallows you talk about
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like the thing that sort of kick-started this whole thing 10 years ago this research project of yours
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was that you had noticed that you had had a hard time like doing deep concentrated reading of like
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long-form articles or even books and you started talking about this with other people and they're
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saying yeah i've got the same thing i can't read like i used to and how did you decide or you
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suspect that the internet had something to do with it you know back in 2007 right well i mean i've always
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since i was a since i was a boy i've been a big reader love books and around 2006 2007 after having
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spent quite a bit of time surfing the web as we used to call it i noticed that i was having trouble
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sitting down and reading not just books but even long articles and what i what i began to realize is that
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my brain seemed to want to seem to crave the stimulation it gets when i'm online when i'm looking into a
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computer screen so i can click on email you know go to a website get a text message or whatever
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and it was having trouble i was having trouble shutting off that desire for this constant
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information stimulation and concentrate on the text for page after page after page and what i began to
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realize is that it really did seem like the time i was spending online was in a sense training me to
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think in a different way and that was making it harder and harder to screen out distractions and
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filter out this desire for information stimulation and concentrate on the page and that was really
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the spur because i you know one of the things i asked myself is is this possible i mean can a tool
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that we use for a particular purpose actually change the way we think in some some deep way that
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that continues even when we're not using the tool and so that's what started me down the research
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that ultimately became the shallows and in a sense it was an exercise in in self-diagnosis
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at least in the beginning and so this idea that you know i think most critiques so this is this is a
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critique of the internet unlike a lot of critiques of the internet or even television or whatever whenever
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you see that people critique the media they're typically critiquing the content right like the
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internet there's porn there's violence there's trolls fake news whatever but like your critique
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is more meta than that you're actually critiquing or sort of looking at how the the medium of the
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internet can shape the way we think and basically who we are that's right and you know to give credit
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where credit is due i'm kind of building on the work of earlier media theorists in particular marshall
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mcclellan from the 1960s who coined the phrase the medium is the message and what he what he argued and
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what i argue is that it's only natural when we get a new communication medium or device to focus on the
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content you know if if it's an old-fashioned telephone we're focused on the conversation we're having
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with somebody if it's a newspaper we're focused on the news stories but but really the deeper change
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comes from the technology itself as we adapt to the new medium or the new device we do in a way
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train ourselves to perceive things differently to think differently to have different levels of
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attentiveness and i think we we we tend to ignore that side of things because we're so wrapped up in the
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content whether we think it's good or bad or indifferent and as a result what happens is
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we adapt ourselves to the technology very very quickly and only later do we begin to say hold on
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maybe i've done something to myself and to into my mind that isn't beneficial and maybe i've i've paid
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a cost that i wasn't aware of but now all of a sudden i can't escape this this deficit that i've taken on
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you know there's that quote i forgot who who said it you know it's like we shape our tools and
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thereafter our tools shape us right that was uh i can't remember the guy who said it but he was he
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was picking up on a mcclellan thought there right and so like mcclellan he wrote he came with the idea
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you know the medium is the message this is like in the 50s 60s like what was he seeing was he seeing
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like television changing the way people think or interact with the world yeah so he was he was looking
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mainly at what he called electric media and back then that meant radio and tv essentially although
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he looked ahead to computers and stuff but what he was what his big argument was that for 500 years
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ever since gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450 or so text in particular particularly
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text in books or in magazines and so forth had been the dominant cultural medium the dominant way we
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we exchanged information transmitted information in text if you think about text it's kind of an
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anti-social technology because you can't read a book with somebody else you have to kind of you know
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you have to kind of set up a barrier a real barrier or or at least a kind of mental barrier in order to
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concentrate on text and he thought that that this really shaped not only the way we read but also the
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way we communicate the way we think about ourselves he argued that it brought in much more individualism
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and also this sense that we're in charge of our own knowledge we're in charge of our own
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of building our own knowledge in our brains through this kind of isolated deep reading and he he believed
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that electric media was overthrowing the dominance of text and bringing in a very very different way of
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thinking and communicating that on the one hand was much more social and had all sorts of benefits and
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i think we see this today but also kind of withdrew us from both the practice of deep reading and deep
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thinking and the sense that that that practice that very contemplative attentive practice was even all
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that important and i think you know so he wrote this back in 64 1964 so a long time ago but i think
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that part of his message resonates even more today when when the internet and the various online tools
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and social media and stuff has really taken over from the book and the printed page as the basic
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means of cultural transmission and we'll get into more detail about that's where that transition from
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i guess we call it the literate brain to the i guess an internet brain but i mean i think one of
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the things i like about this book is you start off to explain like how is this even possible how is it
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that the brain can change or a tool can change the brain because for a lot of human history there's
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this idea that once you reach a certain point in your your development after adolescence your brain
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is basically like concrete and you're pretty much set for the rest of your life and then so the
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arguments like well how could it be that if you use the internet in your 50s and 60s your brain
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changes because your brain's already set in sort of this concrete but then you bring in this idea of
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neuroplasticity to explain how interacting with something like the internet can can reshape how
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your brain functions yeah so i mean when i was growing up and it really until just a few decades ago there
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was this conception of the brain as being very malleable in your youth where you you laid down
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your your circuits for thinking and then at the age of 20 it was believed that that ended in in the
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circuits you had built up at that point were the ones that remained throughout the rest of your life
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and they didn't change the only thing that happened this was kind of the dark view of the brain is that
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your your neuron slowly died off so you you had fewer and fewer but it turns out you know brain scientists
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since then beginning in this i think 70s and then building up much more recently have discovered that
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in fact our brains are changing at a physical level an anatomical level throughout our entire lives so
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so that malleability or as they call it plasticity doesn't stop at 20 but but continues on and what what
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happens is we adapt to our environment when we think just just in a in a analogous way to the way we
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adapt to our environment physically with our body so if you exercise a certain muscle it gets stronger
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if you don't exercise it it atrophies something similar the mechanisms different of course something
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similar goes on with our brain the more we practice certain ways of thinking or exercise those circuits in
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in our minds they literally become stronger they literally recruit more neurons more uh synaptic
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connections but on the other hand if we don't practice certain ways of thinking we begin to lose those
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our ability to do that and i think that you know i talked about mcclellan coming up with this idea that
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that that media changes the way we think what he didn't understand and this come out comes more
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recently is that there's a real deep scientific biological reason for that and that is our brains
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are adapting to the medium the medium kind of creates a new environment we think in ways that the medium
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encourages and as a result we strengthen certain ways of thinking but we weaken other ways of thinking
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so to explore this idea of how intellectual technologies so these are things like abstract things like maps
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or intellectual technologies clocks books schools etc you kind of take readers in the shallow sort of
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on intellectual history to show how these things these technologies have probably shaped the human
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mind so let's talk about like what was it what was the human mind like before you know like an oral
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culture before there was even reading and writing do we have any idea of what how they might have
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how what that that pre-literate brain was like well one thing we know is that our sense of sight
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in terms of in terms of reading the environment the actual natural environment around us was probably
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much much sharper which is why if you look at societies that haven't kind of come to be dominated by text
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you see you see feats of navigation and kind of reading the natural world that that are amazing to us
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because we can't contemplate them in the re one of the reasons for that is that when we when we learn
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how to read we have to recruit a huge portion of our visual cortex the part of the brain that that
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processes sight in order to become efficient readers if you think if you watch a kid learning to read
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he or she goes really really slowly they have to sound out every letter and then put the letters
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together to make a word what happens is a lot of our neurons as we train ourselves to read get
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dedicated to recognizing not only letters but but syllables and in words and then reading becomes
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automatic and so i think there's a great example of of neuroplasticity and the kind of deep influence
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it can have so in effect when we teach ourselves to read we're we're changing the way our visual cortex
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works in a in a really quite a fundamental way and we gain all the benefits that come with with the
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ability to read but we lose this kind of ability to read the natural world because we've simply we've
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simply rededicated those mental resources to something else so i mean that's one example i think it's fair
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to say that you know in oral cultures the way we think about society the way we think about each other is
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is very very different to pick up on that earlier theme of of reading encouraging individualism i think
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i think individual i i think people were much less focused on on themselves in isolation in oral
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cultures and much more thought much more about you know society as as a group of people the boundaries
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between them were not so sharp as as they became so so my thinking and i think other you know other people
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have come up with this as well and you know you can look at current societies that are you know that
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that don't have modern technologies and stuff and see some evidence of this but but i think it's fair to say
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that people thought and perceived things in very very different ways before the alphabet came along and
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reading and writing came along we're gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors
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and now back to the show well and speaking this idea that the the medium is the message or the tool
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can shape your brain like even socrates a couple thousand years ago he was kind of down on he didn't
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like writing because he said i think writing is going to help us or it's going to cause us to forget
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things not have a sharp memory you don't remember anything so he's kind of making him a clue and
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critique of of the media of media technology you know a couple thousand years ago exactly and i mean
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one thing that that story brings up is that reading and writing i mean never mind the printing press
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reading and writing are are quite new phenomena in human history you know they are just a little over
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2 000 years old when the alphabet was invented during the time when when socrates was alive and what you
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know before then the way people learned was by talking with each other by going to a wise person
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or an expert like socrates himself and having a long conversation and he worried that a couple of
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things would happen thanks to reading one is that we wouldn't be able to challenge the speaker
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quote unquote anymore because the speaker would be we'd confront the speaker through text therefore
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there was nobody to ask questions questions of anymore so the kind of dialogue that he thought
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was very very important to having a rich understanding of everything would no longer be available and also
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he he worried that because we'd be able to look everything up in books then we wouldn't we would
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no longer need to hold all our knowledge in our own memory and he feared that that would weaken memory
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which he very much associated with the richness of thinking and i think it's pretty clear that he
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was right about that that that there's there i think there's little question that after the alphabet
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came along and reading writing came along people's memories their store of information their heads
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kind of went down pretty dramatically because you could outsource it to an external memory in a book
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or a scroll or whatever right neuroscientists often refer to that as transactional memory because
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rather than holding it in your own mind you're you're in some way or another transacting with a
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book or with somebody else to get the information you need but you know his student plato he was a
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writer i mean he wrote lots of treatises like his dialogues they were written down and i think plato
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would say well yeah you might you might there's a there's a trade-off yeah you you your memory might
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be weakened but it says when you write the thing down like it becomes objective right so you can like
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point to and say this is what you said because if you rely on your memory there's all sorts of
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things that can happen there where you misremember or something i don't know it can change inside you
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as you processed it but with writing you can say well no this is what this is what you said we're
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going to focus on this yeah so i mean the big irony is of course everything pretty much everything we
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know about everything we know about socrates comes from plato's writings and if if writing hadn't come
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along and plato hadn't written all down all these dialogues we wouldn't we'd have no knowledge of
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socrates or or in would have no opportunity to be taught by him even if the way we're being taught
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is imperfect in in socrates size and so yeah i think socrates i think he was right in much of his
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diagnosis about what would happen to memory but i think he underestimated the power of the written word
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to to expand the facts and opinions and arguments and stories that people would have access to as we
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build up this huge store of literature that's suddenly available and and so the written word
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kind of breaks down the barriers to the transmission of knowledge speeds it up speeds it up over space and
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over time you no longer have to be a resident of athens and have immediate access to socrates to
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tap into socrates's knowledge and in a way this kind of tension between socrates and plato is a tension
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that that is ultimately resolved in favor of plato the writer and yet i do think that in many ways
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you know our intellectual lives our store of knowledge all were greatly expanded by the arrival
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of the written word and the persistence of text that doesn't mean that that socrates was wrong it just
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means he didn't really foresee all the implications of the new technology and then so as the alphabet was
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developed books were developed and as you mentioned this this shaped the way we thought because writing
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and reading could become a private affair you could have thoughts and experiment which gave way to
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new ideas and also writing or reading and writing encourages what you call linear thinking where
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you're not everything's not sort of like disorganized it's like you have to make an argument so it flows
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in the paper and that had big implications for us as a society i think so and i think it did
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i think it greatly encouraged all sorts of experiments with expressiveness experiments with
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arguments experiments with narrative everything we benefit from today that was built up through
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you know decades and centuries of writing but it also i think it also one thing we we we take for
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granted or don't fully appreciate about the act of deep reading and here i'm talking about really
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you know getting lost in a book or an article as the saying goes is that's often portrayed today as kind
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of a passive activity oh you don't get to you know you don't get to click a like button or you don't
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get to comment on on it because it's all it's all just fixed prose but i think that gets it totally
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wrong i think one of the great things that comes from deep reading of something in print where you're
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focusing your whole mind on it is that it in a sense opens a clearing inside your mind where your own
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ideas in your own not store of knowledge in your own memory collides with whatever the author's
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writing whether it's a fictional story or whether it's an argument of non-fiction and as we read in
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that way we're constantly kind of testing our own ideas we're constantly bringing our own experience
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into the story or the narrative in it there's this dialogue i think this is one thing that socrates
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is missed i think there's this dialogue between author and reader that goes on that very very much
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enriches i believe our own not only our own store of knowledge but really our own our own ability to
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think deeply and to analyze other people's ideas and to put new information into a broader context i think
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all of that was helped by the arrival the written word and particularly the printed word which made it
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by over time reducing the cost of books one important advantage of the printing press is it was an
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economic advantage it it opened these works to a much broader portion of the population and encouraged
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ultimately widespread literacy all right let's talk about how the internet is possibly changing the way
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we think or not possibly we have there's scientific evidence that's showing that it's changing the way
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we think let's talk about the just the fact of reading on a screen so when the internet first came on the
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scene the the first thing that people put up there because it was the the easiest didn't take up that
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much memory or ram or bandwidth was just text and so the idea was like well if it's just text on a
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screen it's just basically like reading a printed book there's not going to be much of a difference but
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you highlight all this research that says whenever text is on a screen we read it differently than we are
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in a physical paper book yeah you know there's one kind of assumption that is very common which is
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that text is text you know who cares if i'm reading it on in a book or on a desktop screen or even on my
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on my phone it's all the same it's still the same words and so it the same meaning in in therefore we
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shouldn't worry about it i think the the research is pretty clear that that's not true that actually
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the medium through which we read influences the way we read and in the reason for that i think is
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pretty clear you know if you think about a printed book for instance there's nothing else going on in
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the book other than the text and therefore that the book itself in a kind of almost literal way
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serves as a screen against distractions because there are always distractions in our lives there are
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always other things going on our minds are wander all the time it's very very hard for human beings
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to screen out distractions and really concentrate and focus our mind and i think the printed book
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by kind of isolating text very very much helped train us to pay attention to not give in to distractions
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and not let our mind waver all the time as as it sort of wants to do compare that to a computer screen
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any kind of computer screen whether it's your phone or your laptop or whatever
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sure there's the text you're reading but then there's all sorts of other things going on or
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available to you there there are alerts there's notifications there's text messages other messages
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there's uh social media notifications there's all the websites you might click on and even the text
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itself is different because there are links in the text so the links and this is some of the most
00:27:14.400
interesting i think research that i explore in the book links themselves are little distractions we
00:27:21.480
we're not even aware of it but when you come across a highlighted piece of text that you can click on
00:27:26.940
when you're reading online somewhere in your mind you're evaluating it you're saying why is this
00:27:33.040
highlighted why is this a link what's going to happen if i click on it will i get something useful
00:27:37.640
or useless should i click on it or not all of that which we're not conscious of disrupts our attention
00:27:44.840
as we read and there's some some very good studies that show that people who read the exact same text
00:27:51.100
if it has links in it they comprehend less and they retain less so all of these all of these
00:27:57.820
differences in the medium itself mean that while we certainly can read online we spend still spend a lot
00:28:05.640
of time reading online the quality of that reading in the depth of that reading is not the same as we
00:28:13.860
get when we're reading printed material where there aren't all of those distractions going on
00:28:20.520
simultaneously yeah they've done eye tracking whenever you know comparing reading in a book and
00:28:25.740
reading on a screen and when you read on a screen you just skim like you're kind of just you're like a
00:28:31.620
hunter like looking for just sort of big pieces of information and once you get it you move on and
00:28:37.740
with a book you're more likely just to read the whole thing through right so yeah there's a the eye
00:28:42.940
tracking studies show that we read on a on a screen we read in an f pattern which means we kind of
00:28:47.980
our our eyes go across the first couple of lines of text all the way and then it we drift down the left
00:28:54.840
margin then go about halfway across and then just drift down the left margin and continue to drift
00:29:00.180
down the left margin and then click and go out and i want to say that there's nothing wrong with
00:29:05.880
skimming and scanning even in printed text i mean i mean think of how we used to read still some of us
00:29:11.460
do printed newspapers it's not like we're reading every article in depth with total attentiveness
00:29:17.040
there's all sorts of skimming and scanning going on the difference though is that skimming and scanning
00:29:23.260
becomes the dominant form of reading on a computer screen because there's so much going on and so
00:29:28.920
many distractions so we rarely give ourselves the even the opportunity to get lost in a text to really
00:29:36.600
engage in deep reading there are many ways to read and they're all very very important the problem with
00:29:42.880
the computer screen is it steals from us both the practice of in the encouragement to engage in really
00:29:51.660
attentive contemplative deep reading i want to go back to this idea of hyperlinks because this was a
00:29:57.320
one of the big selling points of the internet is that you could take all this information and hyperlink
00:30:01.700
it together and give people more context about a particular topic without you know having to focus
00:30:08.220
on a particular piece so so if you're reading war and peace for example the idea is you can link to
00:30:12.740
different things within war and peace like to a wikipedia article to explain something about
00:30:16.660
russian history and the idea is like okay this will actually help people know more about this
00:30:22.420
but the studies say actually hyperlinking all this information together often results in people
00:30:27.740
knowing and understanding less of about a topic yeah and it all comes down to the the fact that
00:30:34.420
links are distractions they're distractions when you click on them and you suddenly jump to somewhere
00:30:38.780
else and they're distractions even when you don't click on them so all of these studies and
00:30:43.780
these are studies from quite a long time ago because you're absolutely right that in the early
00:30:48.120
days of the web everybody was really excited about hyperlinks i mean for one thing it was fun to click
00:30:54.100
on them and jump somewhere else but also there was there were all sorts of scholars and educators that
00:30:59.080
thought oh this is going to be a big breakthrough in reading because you'll you know be able to read
00:31:03.840
contrasting opinions or whatever and all of that is true i i mean links are can be very helpful
00:31:09.480
but nevertheless when you look at the way people come reading comprehension in the retention of
00:31:16.340
information from reading they go down when links are incorporated into text and there was one study
00:31:22.700
i talk about that actually took the same piece of text and just varied the number of links that appeared
00:31:28.460
in the text and then had lots of different people participants in the experiment read and what they found is
00:31:34.480
that the more links you get the lower the comprehension is so that created a very clear
00:31:41.020
kind of sign that links are intruding on our ability to read deeply and as a result derive the benefits that
00:31:52.000
come from deep reading which are everything from remembering what you've read to also getting into that
00:31:59.400
that deep state i talked talked about earlier where your your your mind is kind of bringing all of its
00:32:06.280
all of its resources and all of its existing learning into the act of reading and you're kind of
00:32:11.980
challenging yourself and expanding both what you know but also expanding the context of your understanding
00:32:20.100
and as you you expand that then whenever you get new information coming into you then you can fit it into
00:32:25.840
this bigger context and it becomes more meaningful so there is this big trade-off i think with reading
00:32:32.300
online versus reading on a printed page and unfortunately as a culture we're we're voting for
00:32:38.800
we're voting for the screen so well i think you also mentioned another study in the shallows where
00:32:44.460
they didn't experiment it relates to task switching or trying to multitask and that can cause comprehension to
00:32:49.820
go down as well so they gave people in one group they gave people two things to read but they had to read
00:32:55.040
one first and then the next thing and then the next group they gave like you could like go back and
00:33:00.860
forth between the two with hyperlinks and what ended up happening was the people who just read things one
00:33:05.680
at a time remember were able to remember more the people who were going back and forth i think they
00:33:10.920
thought they knew a lot about the topic but when we actually tested from comprehension they didn't
00:33:15.580
actually remember that much right they they they remembered less and they also they had a much more
00:33:21.780
superficial understanding of what they read and also and this is also important they enjoyed it less
00:33:29.500
they thought it was less fulfilling to read it they didn't think it was as worthwhile so it kind of this
00:33:35.140
this sense we have that oh if we could only just do things simultaneously we'd get the benefits of
00:33:40.700
contrasting and and everything it just doesn't it just doesn't hold up i mean i mean what all this
00:33:47.120
research points to is that sure there are times when you want to be distracted you want to be sharing
00:33:52.200
information very very quickly but if you really want to think deeply you have to focus because that's
00:33:59.240
when it all comes down to this this process that scientists refer to as memory consolidation which is moving
00:34:06.560
information that's coming into your mind new information into your long-term memory in that
00:34:11.680
it's during that process memory consolidation that you create associations and connections
00:34:18.340
with the new information between the new information and everything else you know everything else contained
00:34:23.900
in your brain and it's those connections and associations not the little isolated bits of information
00:34:29.860
that are the basis for personal knowledge and one thing we know about memory consolidation
00:34:36.480
is that it really only happens when we're attentive if you're distracted and you're taking in a jumble
00:34:43.200
of information you're not going to develop those associations and connections those rich associations
00:34:49.920
and as a result yeah you might have quick access to a particular particular fact but you're not going
00:34:55.800
to weave that fact into a broader in deeper context instead of knowledge in your own mind
00:35:02.500
oh this segues nicely to my next question which is another thing that happens with the internet is
00:35:06.960
because we know that we can just look something up we can google it or we can like my email i treat my
00:35:13.000
email basically like google now because i use gmail so i just archive everything and i'm like well
00:35:16.720
if i need to remember something i'll just search for it and one one argument is that for the sort of
00:35:23.040
pro internet is that well this is great because now that you're not having to remember all these facts
00:35:27.500
or all this stuff you're able to spend you have more brain power to expend on creativity and reasoning
00:35:33.860
and solving complex problems is there anything to that argument that having this external memory
00:35:39.400
like google that we it gives us more time or more brain power to focus on higher level thinking
00:35:45.820
no i think that i think that's a misreading of of how the mind works it and i'm not making an
00:35:53.920
argument against having stores of information outside of our own memory that we can draw on
00:35:59.780
that's i mean that's one thing books and everything else gave us and it's extremely important but it's
00:36:06.520
also important to recognize that the depth of our thought the the rigor of our analysis and everything
00:36:13.040
is all about is all about building context so we can fit new information into this kind of bigger
00:36:19.720
picture in actuality what the what the research suggests is that the more the richer the store
00:36:26.800
of information you have in your own mind in your own memory the more deeply you'll process new
00:36:33.700
information and as a result the more thoughtful you'll be the more analytical you'll be the better
00:36:38.580
able you'll be to evaluate the worth of some new piece of information so memory the store of
00:36:46.480
information in your own head is very very tightly linked to the depth and rigor of your thinking
00:36:53.140
it's not like these are two separate things and oh if i spend energy on remembering things then i'll
00:36:58.660
have less mental energy to to go toward analysis or whatever that's that simply gets our thought
00:37:05.880
processes wrong it's it it's actually very important to build up this deep store of information in our
00:37:14.780
own heads in our own memory and supplement it with the stuff that's that we can google or the stuff
00:37:21.780
that's in books so if we think of it in terms of supplementing our own rich store of information with
00:37:29.480
all the information that's outside of us and is written down somewhere or is on videos or whatever
00:37:35.000
that's fine that that gives us the best of both worlds but if we think of of the web and of google
00:37:41.120
as a substitute for our own memory and this is what a lot of people argue i think mistakenly
00:37:48.460
then that's when we get into trouble because at that point we no longer develop the context
00:37:54.780
necessary to really fully evaluate all the information that's coming at us so quickly online
00:38:00.940
well that's interesting because that kind of goes against i mean the pedagogy that they're
00:38:04.260
doing in elementary schools or high schools it's like well we want to teach kids
00:38:07.780
how to reason and think so we're not going to spend a lot of time learning facts but i was like
00:38:13.140
how do you expect a kid to like reason about the constitution or whatever if they don't even know
00:38:19.180
like what the constitution is like no like you have to have the building blocks in order to you know make
00:38:25.920
an argument or or analyze something exactly and and so you know i've been we've been talking about this in
00:38:32.440
terms of the technology but really this there's something broader that's been going on culturally
00:38:38.380
and socially where we've come to believe that you can you can separate memory what you know from
00:38:47.620
how you think in actuality you can't do that so this isn't i'm not making an argument for rote
00:38:53.500
memorization for sitting down and just you know going through a set of numbers or a set of facts and
00:38:59.480
and just going over them over and over and over again what i am arguing for is that we have to
00:39:05.800
recognize that to think deeply about anything you have to actually know stuff otherwise our minds start to
00:39:13.960
to work like computers where you have some particular fact you need to plug into some
00:39:19.800
some something you're doing and you grab that fact and then immediately forget it and go on to the next
00:39:25.480
thing some you can you can do some activities some mental activities that way and you can do them
00:39:31.740
quite successfully but if you really if you really want to think deeply you have to know things because
00:39:39.140
that's the that's the only way to build the context necessary to connect a new piece of information with
00:39:46.760
the lots of other pieces of information and it's only at that point that thinking actually becomes
00:39:51.600
really interesting that's interesting you mentioned you brought up that idea that we treat the brain
00:39:55.920
like a computer i was i think it's fascinating to study the history of metaphors for brains throughout
00:40:00.520
history because it says a lot about the technology of the time so you know back in the you know
00:40:05.800
industrial evolution the brain was like a machine or it was like a hydraulic pump in the way you think
00:40:12.340
about your brain it actually there's there's a there's a tendency for it to influence how you you go about
00:40:18.080
interacting with the world so what do you think of the implications of us thinking of our brain as
00:40:22.300
just a computer beyond just what you just said that oh you can just sort of just data in data out
00:40:26.740
that's all it is i think that i think the danger is that we we begin to we begin to value only those ways
00:40:36.320
of thinking that resemble the way a computer works and that's very much you know maximizing the
00:40:43.220
efficiency of input and output so we start to think oh the more information i can get the more
00:40:49.440
the more quickly then that's all to the good and what we begin to devalue are the ways of thinking that
00:40:56.880
happen when we're not being stimulated by flows of information so things like contemplation
00:41:02.160
reflection attentiveness in general all of those ways of thinking which are completely
00:41:10.080
you know go against the grain of what computers can do all of those ways of thinking we begin to think
00:41:16.880
are dispensable and i believe that's i believe that's one of the stories of our times that that
00:41:22.740
not only are we engaging in things like contemplation and reflection
00:41:27.760
less often but we're beginning to think we don't really need those ways of thinking
00:41:33.120
as long as we as long as we're processing lots of information and lots of messages
00:41:37.840
as quickly as possible as long as we're googling a lot of stuff clicking on a lot of buttons and icons
00:41:44.080
then then we're thinking in a kind of optimum fashion because then we're thinking more and more
00:41:49.760
like computers and you know i think i think that might be one of the great tragedies of modern times
00:41:57.700
is that we're we're losing even this sense that contemplation and attentiveness in quiet deep thought
00:42:05.940
has value well let's go let's talk about this idea of the the social media so like the smartphone
00:42:12.800
obviously they just it just amplifies our distractiveness i mean you're there's so many
00:42:16.380
things you can you're you're surfing the web on your phone you're like get a notification from your
00:42:20.000
app and then you're going to check instagram but let's talk about what is this increased social
00:42:25.620
interactivity of the web what is that doing or sort of amplifying with how the internet is is
00:42:32.660
affecting our brain yeah and that's a you know that's one of the questions i i tried to wrestle
00:42:37.920
with when i was writing this the new um afterward to the book because the shallows focus is very much
00:42:44.680
on on personal thinking and how having access to all this information online changes the way
00:42:52.080
we as individuals think what's become very very clear over the last 10 years as social media has
00:43:00.180
become more and more popular and become more and more kind of central not only to how we use
00:43:05.160
computers but how to how we live our lives is that there's very very much a social aspect that wasn't
00:43:11.320
as clear 10 years ago and i think and i think we're still learning about the effects of of this and
00:43:18.480
there are good effects and and there are ill effects and in some ways during the pandemic
00:43:23.120
we're kind of we're we're we're speeding up our learning because now even more than before we're
00:43:30.620
reliant on social media of various sorts to to do things that we used to do in person whether it's
00:43:37.260
business meetings or classrooms or or cocktail parties or whatever and so i i think in in in recent
00:43:44.100
years well let me back up i i think again one of the stories here is that in the beginning we focus on
00:43:52.000
all the good things that come out of of having social media and our ability to exchange information
00:43:58.280
with others and to express ourselves we focus very much on the positive side of that oh we've broken
00:44:04.000
down the barriers to media so each of us can be a producer and a content creator and we get our messages
00:44:11.940
out to the world and that that's very important i think and that is a big benefit but in recent years
00:44:17.400
we've learned that there are big negatives as well and a lot of those big negatives come from the fact
00:44:24.160
that human nature has a bright side and it has a dark side and to think that if we have this technology
00:44:31.340
that allows everybody to express everything going on in their head all the time that that's going to
00:44:38.480
draw out the very negative qualities of human nature as well as the sunnier qualities of human nature
00:44:44.240
human nature and once you create this this kind of web of social media it becomes very very hard
00:44:51.880
to to figure out how to regulate it how to emphasize the good qualities but get rid of the trolling and
00:44:59.320
the fake news and the vindictiveness and everything else that we we've been struggling with and i think
00:45:05.880
companies like facebook and google and twitter they they're in a position now where it's quite clear that a lot of
00:45:12.880
the you know a lot of effect the effects of their services are are quite negative but the social
00:45:19.060
media work at such a scale and such a speed it becomes very very difficult to figure out how do we
00:45:25.820
how do we rein in this information and and i think that's what we're we're seeing today is is a lot of
00:45:33.460
struggles with all of these these things and what's interesting too and thanks to the smartphone because
00:45:38.900
it's got a camera a lot of the way we communicate is very visual or video so it's like you you show
00:45:45.380
share a picture on instagram you a meme you create these memes on your smartphone that's just sort of an
00:45:50.060
image with a few simple words tick tock videos youtube like that's what people people gravitate
00:45:55.400
they're not gravitating towards like long-form articles in the new yorker they just want the the 15
00:46:01.580
second tick tock video yeah it's been a quite a dramatic change i you know particularly over the
00:46:08.240
last 10 years i i you know we had youtube and we were we had a lot of visual ways of exchanging
00:46:14.140
information online 10 years ago but but that's all accelerated greatly i mean i mean if you look back
00:46:21.380
in the early days of facebook it was very very text-based that's no longer the case and so
00:46:26.340
you know again i i think there's there's good and bad things here there's i think one of the things
00:46:33.260
that's going on is that the way we communicate is changing to respond to the fact that with our
00:46:43.100
phones or other computers connected to the internet there's a super abundance of information and it's all
00:46:49.620
streaming by very very quickly so you have to kind of you have to grab a person's attention and get as
00:46:55.340
much information across as quickly as possible and i think i think videos photographs and certainly
00:47:02.200
memes which are kind of this new form new form of expression that often intermingles text and in
00:47:09.460
pictures images i think all of these are a response to the to the need to make a point very very quickly
00:47:16.120
because you know that the audience is is not going to stay focused on one thing for very long and so
00:47:21.560
what you get is this a great deal of creativity in expressing things visually with maximum efficiency
00:47:28.660
and sometimes with great humor and wit and stuff but what you lose i think is is the depth of
00:47:35.780
engagement so you have to not only you have to not only design communications to fit within the medium
00:47:44.040
but you have to make them more and more superficial because you know that that's that's about the best you
00:47:49.640
can the best way you can you can grab a person's fleeting attention uh superficial and also amp up
00:47:57.820
any emotional content because that's what what stands out in the flow of information well i mean how
00:48:03.120
have you so i think i think the case you're not i mean you're critiquing the internet but you're also
00:48:07.980
saying okay there's some good things about the internet too he's got to be aware of what it's doing to
00:48:11.900
our brains to our minds and the way we think how have you personally tried to sort of balance the
00:48:19.540
benefits of the internet while also trying to downplay or mitigate its downsides and in sort of
00:48:25.340
have to keep that literate brain if that you you once had yeah and so you know as i said that my writing
00:48:32.420
about this subject and you know the inspiration for the shallows initially came out of my own experience
00:48:37.500
struggling with maintaining my ability to to be attentive and to be contemplative and things i
00:48:43.420
value and and it's still you know even after even after doing the research and writing the book and
00:48:49.700
kind of coming to i think a better understanding of why i and others are experiencing this it's still
00:48:55.640
a struggle in fact it is probably even even more of a struggle for a long time i i held off
00:49:02.460
and didn't get a get a smartphone and then finally i gave in and of course now like everyone i carry it
00:49:11.380
with me all the time it's always on it's always kind of even if it's not actively distracting me
00:49:16.400
you know part of my part of my brain is saying gee i should pull out my phone see what's going on
00:49:20.900
and so even that is a distraction so you know i guess i guess what i've done is tried to at least
00:49:28.680
at least moderate some of the biggest sources of distraction so i i've turned off notifications
00:49:36.960
on my apps and the other phone functions and stuff to the extent possible uh they still come through
00:49:44.940
because it's almost a full-time job turning off and keeping off notifications because companies who
00:49:50.800
develop these apps really want to keep you distracted and it also i i try at least and sometimes i'm
00:49:58.240
successful sometimes not to actually not take my phone with me all the time because it in in there's
00:50:05.920
some recent research that i that i talk about in the afterward that that shows that even even when
00:50:10.820
your phone's in your pocket you're not using it and there's it's not buzzing or anything it's still
00:50:15.540
a major drag on your attention major draw on your attention so i try to you know if i'm going to go out
00:50:23.380
to have dinner or something i'll say do i really need to bring my phone with me and more often than
00:50:28.780
not the answer is no and so i'll leave it behind or if i'm going for a walk or so i'm trying to be
00:50:33.680
more disciplined in choosing when i have my phone with me and when it's going to distract me rather
00:50:41.440
than simply go rather than simply take the course that i think as a society we've kind of accepted
00:50:47.300
without thinking which is you should have your phone with you all the time so those are a couple
00:50:51.660
of things but you know i have to be i have to be honest it's it's a constant struggle and i i still
00:50:56.840
find it distressingly uh difficult to kind of shut off this craving for stimulation and sit down and
00:51:07.340
do something that requires concentration like like reading a long article or a book so i think this is you
00:51:15.360
know i think very much this is the new environment cultural environment social environment intellectual
00:51:21.960
environment we've created for ourselves and it values some ways of thinking and devalues other it others
00:51:29.640
and for those of us who want to try to maintain a inability to to to think deeply and read deeply
00:51:37.340
it really does mean that that we're gonna it's we're gonna be kind of constantly in a sense
00:51:45.000
working against pushing back against not only the technology but the the set of cultural and
00:51:51.180
social norms that has developed around the technology and is constantly telling us we have to be always
00:51:58.320
online always exchanging messages watching messages replying very very quickly our culture has changed
00:52:06.440
in a way that is very much a process of adapting to the technology well nick this has been a great
00:52:15.280
conversation where can people go to learn more about the the new book the update and the rest of
00:52:19.520
your work um well i have a website so you can go there and be distracted it's nicholas carr.com
00:52:25.120
and that has a list of my various books as well as some of the articles and essays i've written over
00:52:31.500
the years so that would be the best starting point fantastic well nicholas carr thanks for your time
00:52:36.000
it's been a pleasure thank you brett my guest today was nicholas carr he is the author of the book
00:52:40.520
the shallows what the internet is doing to our brains is available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:52:44.540
everywhere you can find out more information about his work at his website nicholas carr.com also check
00:52:49.640
out our show notes at aom.is slash shallows where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper
00:52:54.420
into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at
00:53:05.600
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00:53:09.320
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00:53:39.700
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