Are smart phones making us dumb?

There was a time several years ago when I subscribed to both the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times newspapers.  I enjoyed reading both, but it just got to be too much.  I soon found myself just throwing the daily edition of each newspaper unread (or partially read) into the recycle bin.  I have to be 100% honest though, while I thought the writing was slightly better in the WSJ (and more focused on current events in the US), the articles were shorter and easier to digest in the FT.  I've posted in the past about how much I like to read, but more recently I've found myself enjoying shorter books, magazine articles, and newspaper articles.  So, I started wondering if something was going on with my reading habits.  Have they changed?  As it turns out, there may be a very logical answer and explanation.

The American writer and journalist, Nicholas Carr, wrote an article for The Atlantic in 2008 entitled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"  He expands on this theme in his excellent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. He suggests (and provides convincing evidence) that our online reading habits have changed not only how we read, but also how we think.  Consider this - studies show that when we read online, we skim over information and bounce around the Internet using either the embedded hypertext links or by starting a completely new search.  Just like my preference for the shorter articles of the Financial Times compared to the Wall Street Journal, we've all lost our ability to read lengthy passages of text.  Our brains have become permanently accustomed to the 280 character count of Twitter or the short messages with all the emoji's that we send and receive in a text!  As Maggie Jackson writes in her book Distracted, the Internet, social media, and email are all set up to distract us and keep us distracted.  Carr describes the changes in his reading habits by stating, "Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words.  Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."  Case in point, in his book Carr references an article that appeared in New York magazine in 2009 written by Sam Anderson, entitled "In Defense of Distraction."  I took a look, but when I saw how long it was, I quickly skimmed through it!

Even traditional forms of media have been forced to adapt to our new reading habits.  Television programs add text crawls at the bottom of the screen, while magazines and newspapers (if they are even around) have shortened their articles (see my point on the Financial Times above) or provided abstracts or summaries of the longer articles.  I've even heard of e-books that have started to look more like the Internet, complete with hypertext links, pop-up advertisements, and rolling text crawls.  

What if the Internet has changed more than just our reading habits?  What if it has fundamentally changed the way we think?  Carr starts and ends both the Atlantic article and his book with a famous scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Astronaut Dave Bowman is slowly turning off the computer HAL-9000, which had tried to kill him earlier in the film (and actually did kill his fellow astronauts).  At first, HAL-9000 admonishes, "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop?"  As the astronaut continues to shut off HAL's circuits, one at a time, the computer responds with "I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid."  Carr ends the article (and the book) with, "That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."  It's a haunting prediction, but one that doesn't seem all that far off.  

Carr writes, "The Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope, and it makes it easy for us to sort through that library - to find, if not exactly what we are looking for, at least something sufficient for our immediate purposes.  What the Net diminishes is...the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence."  To be blunt, the Internet is driving our brain into the shadows!

There is evidence to suggest that "how" we read helps to shape the neural circuits inside our brains (called neuroplasticity - for another example of neuroplasticity, see my post "London Hackney" on the neuroplasticity found in London taxi drivers).  For example, experiments have shown that readers of written language that uses symbols (e.g., Chinese characters, called Hanzi, that are among the oldest writing systems in the world) develop different neural circuitry compared to those whose written language uses an alphabet.  Similarly, studies have shown that our online reading habits ("power browsing" to use a term by another author) form different neural circuits in our brain compared to our traditional way of reading, where we become deeply engrossed in an article or book.

As it turns out, people have been worrying about how advances in technology can change us in dramatic ways since the time of the ancient Greeks.  In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates laments how writing has made people forget how to think.  Socrates argues that the written word is "a recipe not for memory, but for reminder."  And as people use the written word as a substitute for the knowledge that they used to carry around in their heads and recite by memory, they will "cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful."

Maybe Nicholas Carr is right.  Maybe our smart phones have made us less intelligent.  Technological progress has become, to use Socrates' analogy, a crutch that in the long run will only make us less intelligent, less resilient, and less independent.  Carr carries on this theme with his book on the dangers of automation, The Glass Cage: How Computers Are Changing Us, but that is a topic for another post.