This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle. That, according to Nicholas Carr, describes the intellectual environment of the Internet.
Carr is the man who wrote the article in the Atlantic "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" And he's now expanded that idea into a book called."The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." His point, in a nutshell, is that on the Internet we consume information, well, in a nutshell lots of nutshells. It's a medium based on the desirability of interruption. And according to Nicholas Carr, it is changing the way we read and conditioning us against the very activities we associate with the acquisition of wisdom: deep reading, solitary concentration.
Nicholas Carr joins us from Boulder, Colorado. Welcome to the program.
Mr. NICHOLAS CARR (Author, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains"): Thanks very much.
SIEGEL: And, first, this is a project that you undertook after noticing something about your own ability to concentrate. Tell us about that.
Mr. CARR: Well, I'd been, like a lot of people, I'd been using the Internet more and more over the years and certainly have found it hugely beneficial to doing research and all sorts of other things. But a few years ago, around 2007, I noticed that I was basically losing my ability to concentrate. And this was even when I wasn't online. I'd sit down with a book or a long article and after a couple of pages, you know, my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check email, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page.
And so that got me looking into what was going on and looking into the science of the brain and how important it is to be able to pay attention and so forth. So this really came out of - originally out of my own personal experience.
SIEGEL: And your argument in the book is that the neuroplasticity of the brain, the brain's capacity to adapt, to stimulate, to change, means that we don't merely lose concentration as we're reading while surfing, but you would say that we are generally diminishing our power to concentrate as a result of reading while surfing.
Mr. CARR: That's right. So it follows us, in effect, even when we turn off our computers. And the reason is is that over the last few decades, neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic. They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so, the more time we spend surfing and skimming and scanning online and multitasking and processing lots of interruptions, the more adept we become at that mode of thinking. But at the same time, we begin to lose the capability to pay attention, to concentrate, to be contemplative and introspective.
SIEGEL: You cite many studies in your book that show that reading online yields less comprehension than reading a printed page. But considering how recent a phenomenon reading online is, isn't it possible at least that a generation that grows up without the printed page, should there be such a generation, are reading everything online, just might grow up much better at doing that than people today and nearly all of us having begun reading books and taken up reading online only very recently, later in life?
Mr. CARR: I think that's possible but what you have to remember is that reading online is very different from reading off of a printed page. So, even as we might become better hopping between pages and clicking on links and processing many small bits of information, that doesn't mean that we aren't at the same time losing that other slower, more contemplative mode of thought. And in fact if you look at a lot of recent research on multitasking, it shows that, in fact, as people optimize their ability to multitask online, they become less creative in their thinking. They become, you know, more likely to simply process information rather than think deeply for themselves about it.
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