{"id":164213,"date":"2020-07-06T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=164213"},"modified":"2020-07-05T04:54:03","modified_gmt":"2020-07-05T03:54:03","slug":"how-technology-literally-changes-our-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/07\/how-technology-literally-changes-our-brains\/","title":{"rendered":"How Technology Literally Changes Our Brains"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Deep Reading and Digital Thinking<\/em><\/p>\n

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Project Syndicate<\/p><\/div>\n

1 Jul 2020 – <\/em>In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan published his opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man<\/em><\/a>. In it he writes, \u201cIn the long run, a medium\u2019s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.\u201d Or, put more simply: \u201cMedia work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

This idea that the media technologies we rely on reshape us on a fundamental, cognitive level sits at the center of Nicholas Carr\u2019s 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains<\/em><\/a>. A world defined by oral traditions is more social, unstructured, and multisensory; a world defined by the written word is more individualistic, disciplined, and hypervisual. A world defined by texting, scrolling, and social feedback is addicted to stimulus, constantly forming and affirming expressions of identity, accustomed to waves of information.<\/p>\n

Back in 2010, Carr argued that the internet was changing how we thought, and not necessarily for the better. \u201cMy brain, I realized, wasn\u2019t just drifting,\u201d he wrote in The Shallows<\/em>. \u201cIt was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the same way the net fed it \u2014 and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.\u201d His book, a finalist for the Pulitzer that year, was dismissed by many, including me. Ten years on, I regret that dismissal. Reading it now, The Shallows<\/em> is outrageously prescient, offering a framework and language for ideas and experiences I\u2019ve been struggling to define for a decade.<\/p>\n

Carr saw where we were going, and now I wanted to ask him where we are. In this conversation on The Ezra Klein Show<\/em><\/a>, Carr and I discuss how speaking, reading, and now the internet have each changed our brains in different ways, why \u201cpaying attention\u201d doesn\u2019t come naturally to us, why we\u2019re still reading Marshall McLuhan, how human memory actually works, why having your phone in sight makes you less creative, what separates \u201cdeep reading\u201d from simply reading, why deep reading is getting harder, why building connections is more important than absorbing information, the benefits to collapsing the world into a connected digital community, and much more.<\/p>\n

The point of this conversation is not that the internet is bad, nor that it is good. It\u2019s that it is changing us, just as every medium before it has. We need to see those changes clearly in order to take control of them ourselves.<\/p>\n

An edited excerpt from our conversation follows. The full conversation can be heard on The Ezra Klein Show<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n