Last week I attended a lecture by Nicolas Carr, the Mediatheek had tipped me and it turned out to be a great tip. It’s always nice to hear an expert expressing your suspicions. And mine is that the internet isn’t always a blessing.

Well Carr confirmed this suspicion. He states that the internet trains us to be distracted. Not to cope with distractions, but to want to be distracted. It unlearns concentration and therefore real learning. Het states “What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”


Now this statement is not based on hot air or the prejudices of an anti IT freak. On the contrary. Carr is an IT expert and has been writing about IT related subjects for the past years in his blog. He bases his statements about the loss of the ability to concentrate on a lot of recent neurological (and related) studies.


The constant distraction the internet provides us trains our brains to need distraction. We lose the ability to concentrate. He himself discovered this in 2007 when he found he wasn’t able to concentrate on books anymore. His mind “wanted to jump around”. Not that he wandered around, no he really wanted to be distracted. A result, he found out, of the constant distractions hyperlinks and multitasking provide us with.


One of his statements is that there are some intellectual technologies that have influenced our way of thinking: the map gave us the ability to think abstract, the mechanical clock changed time from a flow to a series of units which gave a more scientific way of thinking in measurable terms, the printing press gave us the book and a more attentive way of thinking shielding us from distraction. These ways of thinking we adapt to other areas of our life and the mind adapts to it. Our brain adapts to these new ways of thinking (but as we want to be distracted don’t read me about it, but listen to Carr).


So we lose our ability to pay attention, we skim and scan and multitask, and ‘en route’ we lose the ability to concentrate. Our brain does develop after we are 20 years old, and likes to learn. It likes repetition and of we repeat something over and over the brain will adapt to it. And that means that our brain develops (or maybe has developed?) towards the need to have constant distractions. The problem here is that we shift so fast that our working memory gets overloaded (we can store 2 -4 bits of information simultaneously, not more) and we are not able to store and process the information in our long term memory which can evaluate the new information and combine it with things we already stored. The consequence is that the last information we get seems to be the most relevant. Now we know this can not (always) be true, but our mind will trick us into believing this as that is how it works.


Before I leave you to reading Carrs book one last thing.


Multitaskers are better at processing information. Right? No sorry, wrong! Stanford professor Nass put this assumption to a test. He tested students who were heavy and light multitaskers. The first tests showed that multitaskers could not ignore irrelevant signals, believing their memories might be better than those of low multitaskers they tested that assumption. Again: wrong! It was the other way around. Well, than they had to be better at switching fast from one thing to the other. Unfortunately for the multitaskers, again: wrong! “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,” Ophir, one of the researchers, said. “When they’re in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal,” said Wagner, an associate professor of Psychology at Stanford. “That failure to filter means they’re slowed down by that irrelevant information.” At Stanford they are still studying if this ‘disorder’ is born or bred, but they fear for the worst…


There is a lot more to be said on this topic but as this is only a blog written for heavy multytaskers in this day and age I’ll leave you here. If you still possess the ability to concentrate try reading Carr’s book ‘The Shalows’.

tagged with: multitasking internet thinking neuro

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