Nicholas Carr | What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

okay so life is worth living and the glass is half full but bertolt brecht said the man who is laughing has not yet heard the bad news Hynek niccola's car Thank You Moses thank all of you very much let me start by asking how many of you have a smartphone either on your person or near your person right now it's pretty much unanimous well my goal is is by the end of my talk when you go out for your lunch break I want you all to go out following the example of network I'll go out onto the sidewalk and smash your smartphones but that that might be setting the bar too high so at least think about smashing your your smartphones we we humans crave information we crave it the way we crave sex way down deep in our synapses deep in our neurons there have been studies that show that whenever we find a new piece of information or even when we go out and seek a new piece of information a little bit of dopamine is released in our brain and as you probably know dopamine is a pleasure producing chemical neurotransmitter very very important to brain function but also implicated in pretty much all kinds of addictions what dopamine basically does is encourages you to do something over and over again by making it pleasing so we have what seems to be a very deep instinct to seek out and gather as much information as quickly as possible and when you think about it I think it becomes clear pretty quickly why this evolved in our brains why this instinct I mean when you think about what it must have been like in hunter-gatherer times or earlier than that even being able to find new information to know everything that was going on around you probably increased substantially the odd odds of your survival you wanted to see that tiger before it jumped on you or you wanted to see that little berry bush so you could have dinner for the evening and stay alive so we have deep in our biology this desire to know everything going on around us and that's amplified by another very basic instinct our social social instinct we get rewards when we know what other people are thinking about us what conversation is going on around us even just having more information than other people makes us socially attractive raises our social status so we have these very deep instincts to go out and gather as much information as possible and for most of human history that was fine in fact you know they the reason they call them survival instincts is they add to our odds of survival but think about what we've done in recent years we've created essentially this new environment in which we live more and more a digital environment that we enter through our smartphones that we enter through our computers our tablets that's all wrapped up with social media in the internet we've created environment of unlimited information and then we've give that environment to push information to us all the time through our phones and other devices from Google or from Facebook or from Twitter or whatever so we have this instinct that's very primitive instinct to want to know everything that's going on around us and then we've created an environment in which there's no end to information that's out there in what we begin to see very very quickly is this excuse-me compulsive kind of behavior and my guess is since most of you walk around with cell phones or smart phones all the time you've probably seen that kind of compulsive behavior in yourselves pulling out your phone even when nothing's going on and there's not even any particular reason to do it you'll pull it out just to see you know who knows maybe there's something going on and certainly if there's any indication that you've got a new message or new notification well you'll you'll pull out your phone and for a lot of people the last thing they do before they go to bed check your phone or your computer first thing they do when they get up check your phone or computer and if you have a bad night's sleep and wake up at 2:00 in the morning well you might as well check it then too because something interesting could have happened and when you look at the science of our behavior you see all sorts of evidence that in fact this is taking place there are been studies of how long people spend on looking at individual webpages when they're browsing the web or googling stuff looking for information it's about 10 seconds and that includes the time it takes for the page to load and what's very interesting in that research is it doesn't matter how much information or even how good the information is on the webpage the researchers in one study they added a lot of text or added a lot of images the time people stayed on the individual page stayed at about 10 seconds so what clearly what you want to do is grab the gist of what's on the page then find a link and click and go somewhere else so you can get some new information there was an interesting study of what happens when people have computers in front of them at work this was a few years ago researchers went out they want to find out how often people glanced at their email INBOX first they asked the people how often do you glance at your email inbox and people said oh two or three times an hour then they put these eye tracking goggles on them that actually tracked where their focus was and they found that people glanced at their email INBOX twenty to thirty times an hour ten times more than they were even conscious of so every couple of minutes if you look at studies of teenagers in their phones in texting you find that the average teenager sends or receives about 3,300 texts a month these days for teenage girls it's actually over 4,000 texts a month and that breaks down to one text about every six minutes throughout your entire waking life and if you think adults are behaved more show any more restraint around their gadgets well forget it because the latest studies of how often an adult will pull out his or her smartphone in look at it during the course of the day it's about a hundred and sixty times which works out to about once every six minutes during your waking life and as we know from that email study that's almost surely in understatement because people consult their phones consult the internet consult social media all the time without even consciously realizing they're doing it well this kind of behavior is very good for Internet companies if you're Google or Twitter or Facebook you want people to constantly be checking their phone constantly be go online you don't want people to stay put at any place for very long and the reason for that is that these companies and almost all Internet companies make more money the more quickly we jump from bit of information to bit of information that's when they gather more information about us and that's also when they gain new opportunities to show us the advertisements that ultimately fund their businesses so this is very good for Internet companies but what about for ourselves and the way we think and the way we use our minds you might say well we're just adapting to a new technology we've had new technologies new information technologies new media technologies for hundreds of years now every time one comes along we adapt our way of thinking to suit the technology and so we're becoming maybe it's good to be scatterbrained maybe it's good to be distracted all the time and interrupted all the time and we're optimizing our mind to live in this new environment I think there's a lot of truth to that I think we are very good at adapting we have flexible malleable minds but we need to look at the downsides because even if we adapt that doesn't mean that we end up better people or better thinkers after that process of adaptation and if we look at what the internet in all this technology is actually doing to the way we think the picture gets much much darker and it all has to do with how our brains transform information mere information into knowledge giving us the ability to think deeply to think rich thoughts to think conceptually and critically and the way this happens really has a lot to do with two forms of memory on the one hand you have what's called your working memory and that's basically the contents of your conscious mind at any given moment it's what you're thinking about and what we know about working memory is it has a very very tiny capacity you can only fit about two to four elements of information in your conscious mind at any given moment and then the other form of memory is what we refer to when we refer to memory which is our long-term memory and this has an enormous capacity in fact nobody's ever filled up their long-term memory nobody's ever said that's it that remember anything anymore it's full so it's incredibly expansive incredibly large in the key to deep thinking is being able to take the information that's coming into your mind from what you're learning for the conversations you're having what you're reading this very very small capacity of working memory and transfer it to your long-term memory and that's a process called memory consolidation and it's only during memory consolidation that you connect that new piece of information to everything else you've learned and thought and experience in your life and it turns out knowledge isn't about these fragments of information that we can pick up all the time today it's about the connections in associations that we make inside our own brains among all the pieces of information we gather it's only when you make those connections that you get rich thinking rich knowledge maybe if you're lucky you even end up with some wisdom the problem is that there is a break it's very easy to break this consolidation process because you have such a small capacity in your conscious mind if you're overloaded with information not stays there very very long because in order to take in that new tweet or notification or Facebook update or Google result you have to clear out something that's already in your conscious mind and what we know about the consolidation process is it only happens when we're attentive only happens when we concentrate for some period of time on new information it's a tension that triggers the transfer of information to our long-term memory and allows us to create all of these connections in what we've created for ourselves with this rich vibrant digital environment is a constant source of disruption interruption distraction that means we're never keeping information long enough in our attention to form these rich connections and we've this is more than just a theoretical concern we see growing bodies of scientific evidence that show this happening there is a very important study done a few years ago at Stanford in California where the researchers gathered two groups of people one people who spent a lot of time online a lot of time multitasking glancing from one message to another they call these the heavy multitaskers in another group of people that did much less of that which they called the light multitaskers they gave these two groups of people six standard basic tests of cognitive function how deeply they thought how well they thought the heavy multitaskers did worse on all six of the tests one of the tests was a test of multitasking skill itself heavy multitaskers did worse on the multitasking test although if you ask them they say oh I'm great at multitasking I do it all the time what really happens is that they're burning up all their mental energy switching from one thing to another and if they just focus for a little while on one thing they would perform much much better but to me the most interesting most revealing of these tests was one that examined how well people are able to distinguish important information from trivia and here the heavy multitaskers performed much worse than the light multitaskers in what the scientists theorize and I think this makes complete sense is that the more time we spend jumping from bit of information to bit of information every couple of minutes during our day the less we worry about how important something is in the more we're simply attracted to whatever's new so it's the new thing that grabs our attention for instance if it's a nice little cat video you'll go to the cat video you won't focus even if you have something very important very interesting in front of you and so that's what we've created for ourselves is this world in which thanks to our technology were constantly subverting our ability to think our deepest most profound thoughts and there was another study done a couple of years ago in which a woman named Patricia Greenfield at the University of California Los Angeles went out and looked examined 50 different experiments that had been done over the years to see how different technologies different media influenced the way we think what she concluded was that there is a benefit for all this time we spend online we seem to have greater visual acuity and by what's meant by that is we can shift our focus more quickly among more images more things on a screen than we were able to do before but the trade-off here what we lose in optimizing our brain for shifting our attention is what she described as mindful knowledge acquisition creative thinking reflective thinking critical thinking now however much we might appreciate that we've optimized our brains to shift our focus very quickly I think most of us would agree that those things mindful knowledge acquisition the ability to think critically in to think conceptually and deeply those are really the fundamental aspects of the highest forms of human thinking in essentially by becoming slaves to our technology we've cut ourselves off more and more from those highest forms of thinking I'd even argue that as a society we're starting to pretend that that doesn't matter we place all our focus on the speed with which we can gather new information and that's always been a very important part of being intelligent to gather new information but it's only the first stage of using your mind in the fullest way possible the second in more important stage is actually to cut yourself off to screen yourself from all that incoming information and consider deeply think deeply about what you've discovered and it's that second process more important process that is fading more and more away from us and as I argue as a society we're kind of saying oh that doesn't matter what matters is the speed of the consumption of information so if there's the one overarching danger that I think we face as individuals and as a society in our dependency on these on our smart phones and our computers and the web it's that we're sacrificing our ability to determine for ourselves what our minds focus on what we pay attention to we're seeding that incredibly important function to the technology itself and we know that Facebook and all these other companies are happy to take over that function for you happy to determine what you look at but it seems to me if we sacrifice that fundamental quality of our mind the ability to determine for ourselves what we're going to think about and how much time we're going to spend thinking about it then for all the gains the Internet has given us we'll be sacrificing perhaps the most important thing - that governs the depth of our thought thank you very much thank you so I bet now you're not so sure Nicholas thank you so much thank you yeah that was great thank you

Channel: ideacity

Views: 99,410

Rating: 4.9137254 out of 5

Keywords: Digital Media (Industry), Nicholas G. Carr (Author), Idea, Internet Service Provider (Industry), City, The Internet (Media Genre), Nicholas Carr, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, technology and culture, Is Google Making Us Stupid, growing dependency on computers

Id: PF1JgIWbSlQ

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/-1_-]

I have a very small allocation of internet bandwidth and youtube = TV.

Nicholas Carr has written many insightful books including my favourite The Shallows and his website is an excellent blog.

But why not post a piece of writing instead of a youtube which is invading this sub.

Ironically this is exactly what Nicholas Carr is concerned about.