'The Shallows' is haunted by the presence of HAL, the malfunctioning supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and specifically by the scene towards the end of the film when HAL pleads for its life, or rather for its memory circuits: "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? . . . Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid." At the beginning of the book Carr positions himself as HAL, his mind, like the computer's memory circuits, not going, but changing: "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading . . . I feel like I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." By the end of the book, having explored the impact of the Internet on our brains, our minds and our emotions, Carr has changed places. He now stands with the human figures in the film, who, in contrast to HAL's "outpouring of feeling . . . go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency." This, he argues, is the inevitable outcome of our increasingly addictive, and increasingly dependent relationship with the Internet.
The thrust of his argument is that the response/reward distractions of the Internet, the multimedia, the hyperlinks and the adverts, the tabs and the windows within windows, the e-mail alerts, the social web-site updates, are all together eroding our mind's long established habit, born of Gutenberg's mechanical printing press, of deep and linear reading. And in turn our inclination and ability to think deeply. This is the 'intellectual ethic' fostered over centuries by the 'technology' of the book. It is not, Carr argues, the intellectual ethic of the Internet: "we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler."
Much of the earlier part of the book charts the biological and neurological history of the human brain, from Aristotle's theory that the brain acted something like a refrigerator to cool the blood, to the Industrial Age metaphor of the brain as a mechanical contraption, each part fixed and unchanging, to the prevailing modern day understanding of the brain as something altogether more organic, as something that is able to adapt, sometimes within a period of days, to environmental stimuli. Thus our brains "register and record experiences in neural pathways" and these pathways strengthen or weaken according to habit. Our brains behave like plastic. Carr cites lots of research to illustrate the point. For example, a British research project involving London cab drivers, which found that, "the drivers' posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations . . . was much larger than normal . . . (and) the longer a cab driver had been on the job, the larger his posterior hippocampus tended to be." And then there is an experiment in which two sets of pianists are asked to practice a melody, each group with keyboards but one group only imagining that they are playing. The result is identical brain activity in both groups. The point of course is that our brains, and specifically the pathways therein, evolve according to our thoughts, and our thoughts in turn evolve with the technologies we use.
From this premise Carr asserts that the technology of the internet, as well as fostering a more distracted 'juggler's' mode of thinking, has encouraged a shallower way of thinking too, in large part because we have come to use the internet, and the computer more generally, as an external source for our memories. Put simply, and in modern parlance, we have outsourced our memories. And while this in itself may not be a revolutionary idea, the simplicity and clarity with which Carr illustrates the workings of our memories makes it at least a forceful, and subject to your way of thinking, a frightening idea. He explains that we have two parts to our memory, our working memory, capable of storing no more than four or five separate ideas at any one time, and our long term memory, a much larger space where some of those working memories settle down, and take root. It is how the Internet effects the dynamic between these two parts of our memory, one the thimble, the other the bath-tub, which provides, to my mind, the book's most compelling indictment of the Internet's influence on our brains.
Just a note here on that "to my mind." This book is not set out as an indictment. It does not read like a polemic. It is not a Luddite's attack on the Internet, informed by a nostalgic conviction that the best of times are in the past. It is a lucid and empirical, and also human account of the impact of a technology that has become an integral part of so many of our lives.
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