The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The third digression discusses the Flynn effect—a steady rise in IQ scores throughout the 20th century, named for political scientist James Flynn who conducted the study that identified this trend. The IQ test specifically measures spatial reasoning and pattern recognition. Average scores on other measures of intelligence, such as those testing general knowledge, vocabulary, and arithmetic, have shown a small decline. Since he first described the Flynn effect, Flynn has continued researching general intelligence, and in a 2007 interview, he explained his conclusion: IQ scores saw a rise specifically because “abstract reasoning moved into the mainstream” with the advent of electronic media and Internet use (147).

The Internet is designed for “the efficient, automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information” (150), and the company Google, founded in 1996, created a search engine for the World Wide Web that could catalog all the pages on the Internet. In 2000, Google began to derive the bulk of its revenues from advertising tied to relevant search results. To serve its company’s best interests, Google has consistently invested in data centers, freedom of information, and the efficiency and velocity of people’s interaction with the Internet. Google’s goal is to constantly increase the amount of information available on the Internet and the ease with which users can access that information; it has begun a project of digitizing all print media to make it searchable and manipulable through Google Book Search. Opponents of Google Book Search fear that the project breaks copyright law and could allow Google to restrict information access in the future. Paraphrasing a passage from the journal of 19th-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carr compares Google, with its focus on efficiency and speed, to the locomotive that breaks Hawthorne’s contemplative idyll as he picnics in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Carr notes that the historian Leo Marx made the same link in 1964 when discussing the advent of television—the idea that new technologies pose a threat to peace and contemplation is nothing new. American Transcendentalists like Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau believed that “true enlightenment comes only through contemplation and introspection” (167). They experienced urbanization and industrialization as disruptive to those mental efforts. In Carr’s present, accelerating intellectual technologies create the same kind of disruption. He describes how Google’s ability to categorize large quantities of information hasn’t lessened the effect of information overload but exacerbated it. Google’s founder, Larry Page, and other computer scientists have suggested that the solution to the human brain’s problems with inattention, confusion, or processing could be solved by artificial intelligence.

Prior to the development of digital media, memorization was instrumental to reflection and learning. As computers made information immediately accessible, memorization seemed less necessary; Carr quotes a variety of writers and thinkers who have referred to computers as a second brain, or a “substitute for personal memory” (echoing Plato’s claim about writing itself in the Phaedrus), but he then references a number of scientific studies that contradict these claims (181). Scientist Louis Flexner discovered that long-term memory involves synthesis of proteins; Eric Kandel discovered that moving information from short-term to long-term memory increases the number of synapses in the brain; and the Columbia molecular cognition research group, led by Kandel, discovered how the chemical serotonin triggers the growth of new synaptic terminals, leading to stronger memory. Scientist Kobi Rosenblum contrasts human 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” (191). The Internet, rather than expanding working memory, creating space for long-term memory and learning, puts pressure on working memory, and “[obstructs] the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas” (193). Conscious attention initiates and sustains the chemical process of long-term memory consolidation, so disruptions to attention—distractions—limit how well memory is processed. Carr references Williams James’s 1892 lecture on memory, in which James argued that the connections formed in the brain as working memory transitions into long-term memory are the foundation of human culture; “the connecting is thinking […] the connecting is the self” (195).

Carr explains how writing The Shallows was difficult at first, until he disconnected from the distractions of social media, notifications, and browsing. He notes that his ability to disconnect for a time is a form of privilege in a world where professional and social lives are intertwined with the Internet. He confesses that despite the learning he has experienced through writing the book, he still chooses to engage with the Internet: “I have to confess: it’s cool. I’m not sure I could live without it” (200).