Cognitive Overload: Our Relationship With the Internet

In his article in The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr poses a question: “Is Google making us stupid?”

This is a question I’ve asked myself often in the last few years, partly because in our digital age, I find my attention span shortening.  It seems it’s not the quality of information, but the quantity that counts.  You can find the evidence of our new choose-and-consume, fragmented mentality almost anywhere you look.  Online, there are websites that promise to deliver the latest concepts and trends in minutes.  There are apps that present bite-sized versions of the classics, sentence-long summaries that can be processed by today’s busy “readers”.  The fate of  the Borders bookstore chain alone is an indication of the changing mentality of information consumers.  It seems long-form works no longer keep our attention; we prefer single-song MP3s to full albums, we browse more than we absorb.  We choose to download books on our iPads over turning the pages of their predecessors, and even flip from app to app between paragraphs.

Photo from Flickr.com, uploaded by Ben Atkin

As a student, the question has become one of purpose.  With information constantly available, why read your history textbook and memorize facts?  They’re all catalogued for you on Wikipedia.  In a class recently, a fellow student remarked that she felt that most of the time she’d spent acquiring knowledge in elementary school had been wasted – she could look up state capitals and the other bits of history she’d collected online.  What should education be when the problem is not a lack of information, but a lack of knowing how to integrate the information available to us?

According to Carr, the answer to the question “Is Google making us stupid?” is a resounding yes – the Internet, he says, is “chipping away at [our capacities] for contemplation and concentration”.  We may be reading more – text messages, status updates, and blog posts – but the way we read has fundamentally changed.  Carr attributes this to the malleability of the human brain, “neuro-plasticity.”  His main argument consists of a study in which after just five days of regular Internet use, digital newcomers showed heightened activity in the parts of the brain related to short-term memory and decision-making.  Carr speculates that if there is heightened activity in these neural circuits, and decreased activity in those associated with deep thinking and concentration, our ability to learn will suffer.

Though few studies have dealt with this idea, I sometimes feel as if I have already undergone the changes Carr fears.  I used to be a voracious reader, but now it takes me several pages of reading and rereading sentences just to get in the right mindset.  Even if my phone is on silent, across the room, I can still feel its presence – the weight of the emails my professors are sending me, the news stories that break every five minutes.  Maybe, though, I’m being a little dramatic.

In a rebuttal to Carr’s article, Professor Andrew Burn of the University of London says, “”I’m learning a musical instrument at the moment, and I can feel my synapses rewiring themselves, but it’s just a biological mechanism. And it seems to me that to say that some neural pathways are good and some are bad – well, how can you possibly say that? It could be a good thing: people are becoming adaptive, and more supple in their search for information.”  Hopefully, Burn is right.  Maybe what we’re undergoing now, as we adjust to new methods of information dissemination, is a period of growing pains.  If all goes well, perhaps we’ll adapt to the overload and go on to even greater levels of knowledge, synthesis, and creativity.