m.guardian.co.uk
m.guardian.co.uk | Dec 18th 2011
What? What were you saying? I'm sorry. I was distracted; I was too busy trying to remember which of the 35 tabs I have open in my web browser is the most important. Also my phone just told me I have another email, and Facebook just popped up with a message that someone wants to chat. I've got a new DM from someone on Twitter that I have to pay attention to. I've completely lost my train of thought: what were we talking about? Ah, yes: the web and its effects on our brains. Of course. Sorry. My apologies. You have my full attention. What is the web doing to our brains? Are the machines really mucking around with our neurochemistry and transforming us from level-headed concentration kings into dumbed-down, quick-fix click addicts? I'm afraid the jury's still out on this one. Unfortunately, unlike most of the topics I've written about this year, there's no definitive answer and a whole lot of contradictory evidence. More than any other topic I've untangled from the web since November 2010 – from sex to social change, from disability to death, from laughter to love – this is the one that really gets people's knickers in a twist. Because our cognition is ultimately who we are. How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? asks the front cover of a new collection of thought pieces from the digerati. One of the contributors, Nicholas Carr – the author who brought us the polemic The Shallows – reminds us that Google is making us dumber by delivering the lowest common denominator information based on the wisdom of crowds. Harvard professor Steven Pinker is adamant that "electronic media aren't going to revamp the brain's mechanisms of information processing". And neuroscientist Steven R Quartz reminds us how little we actually know about thinking in the first place. Many of the claims are a synthesis of hunches, agendas, anecdotal evidence and a response to the general paranoia that dogs us when faced with something unknown. The book is ultimately a calling card for the go-to experts with Opinion X on the subject matter. The proponents say their opponents are spouting rubbish. And on and on. But that's the rhetoric. Let's have at the evidence. Susan Greenfield is on the record as saying the web infantilises our brains. She maintained, in a 2010 all-party hearing under the heading, "What is the potential impact of technology, such as computer gaming, on the brain", that the here-and-now of screen culture doesn't allow for the development of an understanding of metaphor, abstract concepts and imagination. She said as much to me in the BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution. Then she said we are transforming into childlike, literal creatures with short attention spans because we're spending so much time playing games and poking our friends on Facebook. Baroness Greenfield's position has been widely criticised for its lack of empirical evidence. Also at the parliamentary hearing was Dr Vaughan Bell, neuropsychologist and co-author of the Mind Hacks blog. Bell's commentary offered not only empirical evidence that technology may actually be improving our attentions but also the context that history has a tendency to repeat itself: new technologies – whether the printing press, the telegraph, the railway or the web – produce exactly the same concerns about our cognitive capabilities. How quickly we forget. There has not been enough time to address whether the web is actually rewiring our brains; it will be a few years before any longitudinal studies can offer evidence one way or another. And by then we'll be plugging the web directly into our spinal columns and browsing with our minds. This has not quelled the appetite for the continuing debates taking place in pubs, around dinner tables, in waiting rooms, in taxis and elsewhere about this new possible panacea/possible scourge. Despite the empirical work undertaken by researchers, we still maintain that it's the web's fault when we can't find our car keys or remember a friend's phone number. A study published in Science in August, Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips, does suggest that we are now using the machine to store things we once used to keep in our transitive memories, but this is something we've been doing since we first put pen to papyrus. Now, instead of using our newfound cognitive space to solve world hunger, we're spending it laughing at videos of cats. Our consciousness is so subjective that our own experience of sentience is all we have to rely on to tell us that we exist. Any apparent modification of this – or even the possibility of something that might affect it negatively – challenges us to face who and what we are. And so, as Bell pointed out in parliament, new technologies get to the very heart of us. How we adapt to the new thing reminds us of our limitations as human beings. And I've distracted myself into a philosophical discussion… Over the last year I've insisted again and again that the web is not doing anything to us; that it merely presents us with a mirror that challenges us to face ourselves. The only way we can untangle ourselves from the web is to pay attention to this, and to reflect on what it is, in the 21st century, we do to ourselves and to one another. Original Page: http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/s7TW6vHvCVyP9CuuCukyCgg/view.m?id=15&gid=technology/2011/dec/18/how-internet-affects-brain-attention&cat=technology
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