Shift to the Future

It is fascinating to me how people lived and interacted historically.  I’m reading “ The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains ” by Nicholas Carr (Kindle version – quotes refer to Kindle locations) and finding the historical perspective he provides on literacy to be very interesting.  From oral only to writing on rocks, wood, wax, clay, papyrus, and paper.  It’s amazing that people only had brain memory and no recorded memory, for so many generations. Even contracts and laws were simply oral agreements.  Fortunately, symbols were developed to enable the representation of what was spoken in a permanent form.  When people first wrote using an alphabet the words all ran together and were not in a grammatically correct order and all reading was originally out loud.  As the technology for writing changed, so too did the capabilities of authors. “As soon as the introduction of word spaces made writing easier, authors took up pens and began putti...

I just read an article “ The web shatters focus, rewires brains ” in the latest Wired magazine (yes, the paper-based version, not on an ipad).  One writer, Nicholas Carr, makes the case that the barrage of information and interruptions in our lives “shatters our focus and rewires our brain”.  The article ( Wired June 2010 pp. 112-118 ) is adapted from his new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, to be published in June 2010.  He shares examples of research done to compare heavy to low Internet users where they fMRI’d their brain activity.  Heavy Internet users did have higher brain activity and that the brains of the low users after spending an hour a day online for a week then showed very similar brain use patterns.  Their brains were rewired!  This might sound promising whereby Internet use reroutes neural pathways but Carr argues that this is actually turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our b...