Have you noticed that you have less concentration when
reading books, over the past several years? What do you make of the following?
In the book “What the Internet is doing to our Brains – The Shallows” by N. Carr (Pulitzer prize finalist), the following passage struck me: “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, re-programming the memory… I’m not thinking the way I used to. I feel it more strongly when I’m reading… Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do… I think I know what’s going on. For over a decade, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing… the web’s been a godsend to me as a writer… The boons are real. But they come at a price… media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”.
He claims that our brain neural pathways are physiologically changed by our use of the Internet. In the rest of the book he attempts to demonstrate this thesis scientifically. This is mind boggling if it turns out to be true. I can’t wait to read the rest of this book.
In the book “What the Internet is doing to our Brains – The Shallows” by N. Carr (Pulitzer prize finalist), the following passage struck me: “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, re-programming the memory… I’m not thinking the way I used to. I feel it more strongly when I’m reading… Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do… I think I know what’s going on. For over a decade, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing… the web’s been a godsend to me as a writer… The boons are real. But they come at a price… media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”.
He claims that our brain neural pathways are physiologically changed by our use of the Internet. In the rest of the book he attempts to demonstrate this thesis scientifically. This is mind boggling if it turns out to be true. I can’t wait to read the rest of this book.
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