Changing Our Already Changing Brains

Technology has been evolving and advancing at an increasing rate. Ever since humans began to speak and develop a spoken language we have been evolving in order to adapt to our surroundings and to survive. Soon after developing language and script we were able to keep records of everything and print with the printing press. It was inevitable that we would reach the point in time that we are currently in, with computers that are able to process thousands of things at one time. We have developed into a society that needs to have technology to survive. We have become accustomed technology and the Internet and it is changing the way we think, and the way we process information. In “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains,” Nicholas Carr discusses the side effects that we are experiencing from using the Internet. Most of which are seeded deep within the brain. As individuals we can combat the problems of selective learning, scanning through online readings and loss of concentration with some simple changes within our life styles.

“We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.” (Carr 91). Everything we search for on Google, Bing or any other search engine online, leads directly to what we wanted but “a search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we’re searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole” (Carr 91). A reasonably feasible solution to the problem of only seeing a few small details, instead of seeing things on a whole, we need to refer to when we were in elementary and middle school. If a concept is brought up that you do not know, you write it down on a separate piece of paper (or in this case, a word document), and then once you have finished reading the article look up the things that you did not know or want to know more about, it is a technique anybody can adapt to and use. This will allow you see the forest, not just the leaves and twigs.

Jakob Nielsen conducted a study by tracking 323 people’s eye movements and “found that hardly any of the participants read online text in a methodical, line-by-line way, as they’d typically read a page in a book. The vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.” (Carr 134). We scan through texts to find key words and sentences, which gives us only what we need, nothing more. Individually we can work on improving ourselves as online readers by taking things slow. Start reading at a slower pace, there is no rush; read word for word, line by line. Use self-control, self-discipline and self-determination. We live in a world where everything ‘needs’ to be fast, everything is on the go, and we are given the illusion that we do not have time to spend reading something thoroughly; but when we do not stop and slow down for a little we miss out on many things. This is also transferring into the way we read written texts on paper. I caught myself in the act of reading in an F pattern and went back to the beginning of the chapter and read slowly making sure to read everything, and found that I was able to remember more from that chapter than anything else I had read in the book after a week, when it was time to review¹. By taking time to slow down, and read carefully we will be decreasing the amount of fragmentation consumption and in depth understanding of readings, which is most definitely feasible for everyone. Even though everyone thinks that there is not enough time in the day for them to slow down and take their time when reading something, they would be surprised by how much time they are really saving.

The biggest issue discussed by Carr, is the loss of concentration. Throughout the book, Carr brings up how we are surrounded by distractors and we have the attentions span of a goldfish. We are constantly being distracted on the Internet. “A single Web page may contain a few chunks of text, a video or audio stream, a set of navigational tools, various advertisements, and several small software applications, or ‘widgets’” (Carr 91). These are all distractors from the actual content of an article we are reading online. These are things that we see on all areas of the screen, and our eyes are naturally drawn to the larger, more colorful, or interesting looking things. Hyperlinks are also a large distraction in articles. Often while reading online we get distracted by a hyperlink in the middle of sentence, and we click on it to see what it is, and by the time we have gone to the website and scanned through the information there, we are no longer interested (or we have forgotten) about the original article. Reading through an online article without a hyperlink is difficult to find. Not only are the things on the webpage, but the things that pop out of seemingly nowhere. Our email notifications pop up at the top corners of our screens, informing us of a new email and if we click on it, it will take us directly to the email, our cell phones making an all too familiar noise, informing us of a new text message or even the allure of Facebook and Twitter. I have learned through many rushed homework assignments and papers, that these distractions only waste our time and affect the way we are in the real world, outside of the World Wide Web². The solution to this is to turn off email notifications that pop up on top of everything, close other tabs on your Internet browser and only keep the essentials open and turn off the sound of your cell phone, or better yet, turn off the sound and put your phone away. The best solution to getting distracted while on the computer or Internet is to just print of the article that and read it old school on a piece of paper. This will prevent you from clicking on hyperlinks, advertisements and all the other pop up distractions online. Preventing the shrinkage of our attention spans is probably the most difficult to accomplish, but it is most definitely feasible for anyone that wants to and is committed to it.

The problems of the Internet, such as selective learning, scanning of online readings and loss of concentration, discussed by Carr, all have feasible solutions as long as the person trying to solve these problems is committed and determined to improve the quality of their Internet consumption and online learning. If more people knew about how the Internet is affecting our brains and what it is doing to our everyday lives, they would be more open to changing their habits and improving their lives. Already among my friends I have been able to change some habits that have developed and they have seen an improvement in their grades³ and social lives. This is a subject that should be brought to the attention of all students, teachers and parents, by implementing a few simple changes it could improve our online and physical lives.

Footnotes:

¹ As I was reading the Shallows, about seven pages before the end of Chapter Seven the study conducted by Jakob Nielsen was discussed, I realized that I was one of the people that he was discussing, so I went back to the beginning of Chapter Seven and reread it carefully and continued to read the rest of the book in the same fashion; carefully. I found that I was able to remember much more when it came time for discussion; when we discussed the beginning of the book I found it more difficult to draw out the information, while from Chapter Seven onwards it was easier to remember.

² Spending time with friends is always a fun time, but I have noticed that I have been becoming increasingly distracted when I am with them, by just the simplest of things. We may be having a conversation and someone says something that immediately makes me think of something completely off topic, which of course is added to the conversation and from there on out it continues in the same fashion. These key words that are triggering other things that are not always related are like the hyperlinks online, because in our conversations we were jumping around from one thing to the next and never really going back to the original topic.

³ My friends are mostly engineers and computer science majors and they have to use their computers a lot of the time to code and research things. We often spend evenings all together in one room just doing our homework, and I noticed that they would always be off task, doing something other than what needed to be done, which of course drew out the amount of time that they spent working on something. Something that would have originally taken 30 minutes turned into 2 hours. I challenged them to try to do work, without going off task, printing out their readings, turning off their cell phones and turning of their email alerts, which they accepted. They were amazed that they were able to complete their work in a fourth of the time that it took them before, and have now began to do their homework in this new way allowing more time in the evenings for sleep, extracurricular activities and other things.

Citations

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallow: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: Norton, 2011. Print.