The Core Knowledge Blog

Nicholas Carr, in the cover story of The Atlantic, worries that the Web has damaged his ability to think:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Carr’s cover story, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” notes that how we read matters as much as what we read. When you take most of your information from the Web “the ability to to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” writes Carr. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I need to go back and finish that article now…