The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In a recent article in The Atlantic magazine, author Nick Carr wonders if Google is making us stupid. ÒOver the past few years IÕve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory,Ó he writes. ÒMy mind isnÕt going Ð so far as I can tell Ð but itÕs changing. IÕm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when IÕm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. ThatÕs 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 IÕm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.Ó Are computers changing our brains? Are our attention spans changing and becoming much shorter because of all the options we have and because of all the information we are having to deal with? Multi-tasking used to be something that we all thought we could do. I took great pride in the fact that I could listen to music, write something and read, pretty well at the same time, switching back and forth between tasks very easily. New brain research that has emerged in the last year or so has proven me wrong though. We only have so much brain power available and we canÕt fool ourselves by switching back and forth between tasks. What we end up doing instead is giving 100 per cent of our attention to each task for a short period of time. Over time, this causes our brains to get used to working in these ways. The question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? We used to need a long attention span. We lived in a world that rewarded a long, slow, considerate attention span, but is that still true? In a world filled with fast changing information, multiple devices, and global breaking news, do we still need to work in these ways? Have computers changed the information landscape so much that our brains are evolving to match them? Think of the hours that you probably spent as a kid being bored. It was of course a terrible thing to have nothing to do. But for most of us, our parents probably had very little sympathy for us and they kicked us outside and told us to go find something to do. Eventually, we did. We jumped on our bikes and took off or we found some friends to hang around with until a game of some kind broke out, or we went and built a go-cart. I donÕt think kids these days have this same opportunity to be bored. My own kids have computers and video games of all types around our house and would willingly spend endless hours on them if their parents were not so incredibly mean and restrict their time on them. How are these kids different from us? How are the hours of video games and cell phones changing their brains? Are they different from us? IÕm not sure about the answer to this question, but I think it is one that parents, employers, and school systems need to spend some time thinking about as they work with kids to give them the best future they can possibly have. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
