The Shallows

A Teacher Librarian from South Carolina on LM_NET reviewed Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. She states, "It explains in understandable terms the brain research that has revealed the plasticity of our brains and the subtle effect computer and internet use have on the way the human brain functions. By comparison, it explains how 'the book' altered the brains of our predecessors as did other 'intellectual tools' like the map and the clock. While the author isn't sounding the warning that we are losing our minds as we allow the computer (internet) to take over many of our search/research decisions, he does make clear that we need to carefully evaluate this 'tool' and use it wisely. We alter the chemical flows in our synapses and change our brains. And when we hand down our habits of thought to our children, through the examples we set, the schooling we provide, and the media we use, we hand down as well the modifications in the structure of our brains.

By freeing us from the struggle of decoding text, the form that writing came to take on a page of parchment or paper enabled us to become deep readers, to turn our attention, and our brain power, to the interpretation of meaning. With writing on the screen...we read if anything faster than ever but we are no longer guided toward a deep personally constructed understanding of the text's connotations. Instead we're hurried off toward another bit of related information and then another and another. The strip-mining of 'relevant content' replaces the slow excavation of meaning...the more we use the web, the more we train our brain to be distracted--to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering."