The July/August Atlantic magazine's cover asks, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Nicholas Carr, a Dartmouth and Harvard-educated author who has published several controversial books about relationships between technology, business, and culture, wrote the cover piece. He offered anecdotes of his own and others' experiences with abbreviated attention and distractibality, attributable, he and they say, to Net surfing. Carr believes that the quick click/scanning/hyperlinking behavior so inherent in browsing content on the Internet results in changes to brain function. Similarly, researchers at University of Wisconsin, Madison, found that meditation activated electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with positive emotion (Robbins, 2004).
So, though Carr, a self-professed luddite, may be grossly premature in suggesting a causal relationship between Googling and increasingly superficial reading habits, I do believe that we may become what we do. I know that I have become more distractable and fidgety, and less able to concentrate for more than a few paragraphs on meaty reading material . I thought my brain was just old, but perhaps I have taught it to perform this way. Comforting to find company with a Harvard man.
Carr, N. (2008, July/August). Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic, 302(1), 56-63.
Robbins, M. (2004, January). Meditation apparently activates positive areas within the brain. Discover Magazine,25,(1), 45.
Posts
