Marshal McLuhan: "The medium is the message."

What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium in influencing how we think and act.

We're too busy being dazzled or disturbed by the programming to notice what's going on in our heads.

The concept of intellectual frisson: a sudden surge of excitement
We're all addicted to the 'ding!" of new information being available

Media isn't just channels of information. They supply the stuff for thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

Internet chipping away at capacity for contemplation and concentration

We seem to have arrived at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking.

Skittering along webpages, 'feeling' the brain light up, 'feeling' like I'm getting smarter

For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg's printing press made book reading a popular persuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science and society.

But is that just an aspect of Western thought? What about other intellectual models?

Despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of books, I don't recall feeling the anxiety that's sympomatic of what we today called "information overload."

Plasticity

THE ADULT BRAIN, it turns out, is not just plastic but, as James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, puts it, “very plastic.” Or, as Merzenich himself says, “massively plastic.” The plasticity diminishes as we get older—brains do get stuck in their ways—but it never goes away. Our neurons are always breaking old connections and forming new ones, and brand-new nerve cells are always being created. “The brain,” observes Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

The New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux explains in his book Synaptic Self that nature and nurture “actually speak the same language. They both ultimately achieve their mental and behavioral effects by shaping the synaptic organization of the brain.”

“Plasticity,” says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a top neurology researcher at Harvard Medical School, is “the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the life span.” Our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behavior, reworking their circuitry with “each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or [shift of] awareness.” Neuroplasticity, argues Pascual-Leone, is one of the most important products of evolution, a trait that enables the nervous system “to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.” The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t.

It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire our brains. Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry, sometimes in far-reaching ways.

Plastic does not mean elastic, in other words. Our neural loops don’t snap back to their former state the way a rubber band does; they hold onto their changed state. And nothing says the new state has to be a desirable one. Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones.

The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.

Technology and thought

For most of human history, people experienced time as a continuous, cyclical flow.

There was no particular need to measure time with precision or to break a day up into little pieces.

EVERY TECHNOLOGY IS an expression of human will. Through our tools, we seek to expand our power and control over our circumstances—over nature, over time and distance, over one another. Our technologies can be divided, roughly, into four categories, according to the way they supplement or amplify our native capacities. One set, which encompasses the plow, the darning needle, and the fighter jet, extends our physical strength, dexterity, or resilience. A second set, which includes the microscope, the amplifier, and the Geiger counter, extends the range or sensitivity of our senses. A third group, spanning such technologies as the reservoir, the birth control pill, and the genetically modified corn plant, enables us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires.

The map and the clock belong to the fourth category, which might best be called, to borrow a term used in slightly different senses by the social anthropologist Jack Goody and the sociologist Daniel Bell, “intellectual technologies.” These include all the tools we use to extend or support our mental powers—to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory.

Intellectual technologies, when they come into popular use, often promote new ways of thinking or extend to the general population established ways of thinking that had been limited to a small, elite group. Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work. The map and the clock shared a similar ethic. Both placed a new stress on measurement and abstraction, on perceiving and defining forms and processes beyond those apparent to the senses.

The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors.

What’s been harder to discern is the influence of technologies, particularly intellectual technologies, on the functioning of people’s brains.

The process of our mental and social adaptation to new intellectual technologies is reflected in, and reinforced by, the changing metaphors we use to portray and explain the workings of nature. Once maps had become common, people began to picture all sorts of natural and social relationships as cartographic, as a set of fixed, bounded arrangements in real or figurative space.

NOT UNTIL WELL after the collapse of the Roman Empire did the form of written language finally break from the oral tradition and begin to accommodate the unique needs of readers.

Readers didn’t just become more efficient. They also became more attentive. To read a long book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to “lose oneself” in the pages of a book, as we now say. Developing such mental discipline was not easy. The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness.

To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call “the still point of the turning world.” They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another.

The deepening extended beyond the page. It’s no exaggeration to say that the writing and reading of books enhanced and refined people’s experience of life and of nature. “The remarkable virtuosity displayed by new literary artists who managed to counterfeit taste, touch, smell, or sound in mere words required a heightened awareness and closer observation of sensory experience that was passed on in turn to the reader,” writes Eisenstein. Like painters and composers, writers were able “to alter perception” in a way “that enriched rather than stunted sensuous response to external stimuli, expanded rather than contracted sympathetic response to the varieties of human experience.”38 The words in books didn’t just strengthen people’s ability to think abstractly; they enriched people’s experience of the physical world, the world outside the book.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the study of neuroplasticity is that the mental capacities, the very neural circuits, we develop for one purpose can be put to other uses as well. As our ancestors imbued their minds with the discipline to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages, they became more contemplative, reflective, and imaginative. “New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read,” says Maryanne Wolf; “the increasingly sophisticated intellectual skills promoted by reading and writing added to our intellectual repertoire.”39 The quiet of deep reading became, as Stevens understood, “part of the mind.”

Computers and cognition

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,” writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, 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.” 22 The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.

Hyperlinks also alter our experience of media. Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. But their effect on us as we read is not at all the same.

“It’s surprising how easily you succumb to convenience,” he says, “and how little you miss, once they’re gone, all the niceties of typography and design that you used to value so much.” While he doesn’t think that printed books are going to disappear anytime soon, he does sense that “in the future we will keep them around as fond relics, reminders of what reading used to be like.”

Ebooks: "Eventually I get through the book and am glad to have done so. But a week later I find it remarkably hard to remember what I have read."

a further weakening, if not a final severing, of the intimate intellectual attachment between the lone writer and the lone reader. The practice of deep reading that became popular in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention, in which “the quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,” will continue to fade, in all likelihood becoming the province of a small and dwindling elite.

Xerox PARC and the demo of all demos: Some in the audience applauded the new system. They saw that it would enable people to use their computers much more efficiently. Others recoiled from it. “Why in the world would you want to be interrupted—and distracted—by e-mail while programming?” one of the attending scientists angrily demanded.

Multitasking has become so routine that most of us would find it intolerable if we had to go back to computers that could run only one program or open only one file at a time. In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-​minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler.

As revolutionary as it may be, the Net is best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped mold the human mind.

One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-​altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book.

The Net also provides a high-​speed system for delivering responses and rewards—“positive reinforcements,” in psychological terms—which encourage the repetition of both physical and mental actions. When we click a link, we get something new to look at and evaluate. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

But if we let the problem sit unattended for a time—if we “sleep on it”—we often return to it with a fresh perspective and a burst of creativity. Research by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who heads the Unconscious Lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. But Dijksterhuis’s work also shows that our unconscious thought processes don’t engage with a problem until we’ve clearly and consciously defined the problem. If we don’t have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, “unconscious thought does not occur."

The researchers found that when people search the Net they exhibit a very different pattern of brain activity than they do when they read book-​like text. Book readers have a lot of activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing, but they don’t display much activity in the prefrontal regions associated with decision making and problem solving. Experienced Net users, by contrast, display extensive activity across all those brain regions when they scan and search Web pages. But the extensive activity in the brains of surfers also points to why deep reading and other acts of sustained concentration become so difficult online. The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli, requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information. Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to pause, for at least a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or not we should click on it.

Memory

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schemas. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms the major bottleneck in our brain. Unlike long-​term memory, which has a vast capacity, working memory is able to hold only a very small amount of information.

The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment is called our “cognitive load.” When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information—when the water overflows the thimble—we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-​term memory. We can’t translate the new information into schemas. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow. Because our ability to maintain our attention also depends on our working memory—“we have to remember what it is we are to concentrate on,” as Torkel Klingberg says—a high cognitive load amplifies the distractedness we experience. When our brain is overtaxed, we find “distractions more distracting.” (Some studies link attention deficit disorder, or ADD, to the overloading of working memory.) Experiments indicate that as 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.

Deciphering hypertext substantially increases readers’ cognitive load and hence weakens their ability to comprehend and retain what they’re reading.

Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

Although not all the studies showed that hypertext diminished comprehension, they found “very little support” for the once-​popular theory “that hypertext will lead to an enriched experience of the text.” To the contrary, the preponderance of evidence indicated that “the increased demands of decision-​making and visual processing in hypertext impaired reading performance,” particularly when compared to “traditional linear presentation.” They concluded that “many features of hypertext resulted in increased cognitive load and thus may have required working memory capacity that exceeded readers’ capabilities.”

In another experiment, a pair of Cornell researchers divided a class of students into two groups. One group was allowed to surf the Web while listening to a lecture. A log of their activity showed that they looked at sites related to the lecture’s content but also visited unrelated sites, checked their e-​mail, went shopping, watched videos, and did all the other things that people do online. The second group heard the identical lecture but had to keep their laptops shut. The surfers, the researchers report, “performed significantly poorer on immediate measures of memory for the to-​be-​learned content.” It didn’t matter, moreover, whether they surfed information related to the lecture or completely unrelated content—they all performed poorly.

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated. The near-​continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to “vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,” as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that “the new is more often trivial than essential.”

The ability to skim text is every bit as important as the ability to read deeply. What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading.

“Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought. What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.”50 The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

They found that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted by “irrelevant environmental stimuli,” had significantly less control over the contents of their working memory, and were in general 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,” suggesting that “they may be sacrificing performance on the primary task to let in other sources of information.”

More of what is of interest to us becomes visible to us. Information overload has become a permanent affliction, and our attempts to cure it just make it worse. The only way to cope is to increase our scanning and our skimming, to rely even more heavily on the wonderfully responsive machines that are the source of the problem. Today, more information is “available to us than ever before,” writes Levy, “but there is less time to make use of it—and specifically to make use of it with any depth of reflection.”49 Tomorrow, the situation will be worse still.

It was once understood that the most effective filter of human thought is time.

The digital computer long ago replaced the clock, the fountain, and the factory machine as our metaphor of choice for explaining the brain’s makeup and workings. We so routinely use computing terms to describe our brains that we no longer even realize we’re speaking metaphorically.

It takes for granted that the brain operates according to the same formal mathematical rules as a computer does—that, in other words, the brain and the computer speak the same language. But that’s a fallacy born of our desire to explain phenomena we don’t understand in terms we do understand.

Today, people routinely talk about artificial memory as though it’s indistinguishable from biological memory.

The notion that memory can be “outsourced,” as Brooks puts it, would have been unthinkable at any earlier moment in our history. For the Ancient Greeks, memory was a goddess: Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses.

Müller and Pilzecker concluded that it takes an hour or so for memories to become fixed, or “consolidated,” in the brain. Short-term memories don’t become long-​term memories immediately, and the process of their consolidation is delicate. Any disruption, whether a jab to the head or a simple distraction, can sweep the nascent memories from the mind.

the growing body of evidence makes clear that the memory inside our heads is the product of an extraordinarily complex natural process that is, at every instant, exquisitely tuned to the unique environment in which each of us lives and the unique pattern of experiences that each of us goes through. The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-​tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips.

Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes. Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to form new synaptic terminals.29 Once we bring an explicit long-​term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-​term memory again. When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context. As Joseph LeDoux explains, “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.”30 Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal. The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits; you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were.

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-​term memories and the development of schemas. The calculator, a powerful but highly specialized tool, turned out to be an aid to memory. The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.

Attention

WHAT DETERMINES WHAT we remember and what we forget? The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention.

“'Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” said the novelist David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” To give up that control is to be left with “the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

We cede control over our attention at our own peril.

What makes us most human, Weizenbaum had come to believe, is what is least computable about us—the connections between our mind and our body, the experiences that shape our memory and our thinking, our capacity for emotion and empathy. The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers—as we come to experience more of our lives through the disembodied symbols flickering across our screens—is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines. The only way to avoid that fate, Weizenbaum wrote, is to have the self-​awareness and the courage to refuse to delegate to computers the most human of our mental activities and intellectual pursuits, particularly “tasks that demand wisdom.”

The tight bonds we form with our tools go both ways. Even as our technologies become extensions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies.

Nature isn’t our enemy, but neither is it our friend.

More information can mean less knowledge.

The subjects using the bare-​bones software consistently demonstrated “more focus, more direct and economical solutions, better strategies, and better imprinting of knowledge.”

As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a “narrowing of science and scholarship.”

WHAT EXACTLY WAS going on in Hawthorne’s head as he sat in the green seclusion of Sleepy Hollow and lost himself in contemplation? And how was it different from what was going through the minds of the city dwellers on that crowded, noisy train? A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-​up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.

There is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic.