The Brain and the Internet
(From a blog post on 5th September 2008)
Bill Thompson's article for BBC News, Changing the way we think, referenced an article by Nick Carr in Atlantic Monthly, Is Google making us stupid? Carr says he has lost some of his deep focus ability and wonders if the internet is to blame, definitely an article worth reading. Another BBC News article Is computer use changing children? includes quotes from neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield, who wonders if the rise of attention deficit disorder diagnoses is related to how children are exposed to instant access media through the internet. She mentions how children used to need a trip to the library to answer a question, now the internet will provide.
When I grew up, the library was the fountain of all knowledge and one of my favourite places. I read through the junior encyclopaedia on the shelf in our living room, ploughed through the inch thick book of ancient history, and spent Saturday mornings in the library picking out which six books I was going to read that week while my parents did the grocery shopping. Ipswich County Library was in an old building on Northgate Street, not far off Tavern Street, the main road through the town centre. It had worn stone steps and the smell of old paper, thick with murmurs and people trying to be very quiet. Pigeons nested above the main door until they put in wire mesh, and horse chestnut saplings infested the guttering. I read through the children's library and the young adult books, and was working my way into the science fiction and horror sections when I moved away to university. I took a job in the university library between my first and second years and spent weeks re-shelving and re-ordering the place floor by floor, collecting books from where they'd been hidden (maths textbooks in with the geology, psychology in with the abstracts, sociology in with the fiction) and putting them back where they belonged. I'm the person that rearranges books in the bookstore when they're mis-shelved. But I don't have a normal brain.
In May 2005, I wrote about an article in Wired Magazine (The Geek Syndrome). The article linked geeks to autism and Asperger's syndrome, and I wrote a blog post, Strange Minds, about it. There was an Autism-Spectrum Quotient test along with the article where "normal people" score around 16, and a score of 32 or above may indicate you're somewhere on the autism spectrum. I scored 31, which isn't exactly normal. But I'll happily vanish inside the words in a book, or a magazine, or even the label on the ketchup bottle, especially when I'm stressed, and that's not normal either.
Geeks may be capable of an abnormal level of focus, which is not necessarily a bad thing for their careers in the mild forms. What happens when you take someone on the autism spectrum and offer them instant-access information? It hasn't "cured" us. I retook the test three years on, and my new score was 33, two points more than in 2005 and now in the "there could be something officially wrong here" region. Hubby's score was still 33, and Sehlat's score went up 2 points to 38. We haven't been reduced to "normal" levels of focus by access to internet on demand, so there are limits on brain re-wiring. We're still a little odd, even with the internet, and we're happy with the way we are.
For my final year project at university, I pored over a decades-old research paper and skimmed books on the subject of game theory. The library was littered with people reading, and we kept finding each other's reference books. There was no Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Brittanica was hard copy, and there wasn't as much internet as there is now. Taking on the same project now, the internet would be my first stop, but not the only one. There's a level of fact checking in some print media that is absent on the internet and when the sources need to be right, you want someone to have checked the facts. The idea of the internet as the fount of all knowledge bugs me. There's a lot of knowledge there, but some is wrong, and it can be hard to find out which. If I needed data I could rely on, I'd be back in the library because there you have accountability and permanence. You can't change a book as easily as a web page. A changed web page leaves no trace, changing a book requires a second edition so you need to be right first time.
It's harder to read on a screen than on paper, so people skim webpages rather than read them, and they go slower. I print stuff out if I want to really concentrate on it. Smart web content writers know this and write accordingly. Jakob Nielsen's article How people read on the web starts off:
"They don't."
People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.
Nielsen's site is the textbook on web navigation and usability and he puts his rules into practise. A different sort of reading requires a different sort of writing that takes more work for long pieces. I think that deep focus reading is far better suited to print media and it's a skill that needs to be regularly exercised lest it atrophy. I think our brains are not re-wired by the internet, rather that we need a new mode of information gathering for the internet and the new mode isn't as helpful for offline reading. We need to learn to switch between the two.
As an aside:
Multi-tasking is a modern myth, you cannot do three things at once with the same quality as you can do them separately and many people deliberately shut off email and phone in order to concentrate. I used to do homework with music on, but I couldn't tell you what I'd listened to because its purpose was to block out other noise, not to entertain me, and I effectively worked in silence. At the write-in sessions for National Novel Writing Month, a stranger would see a bunch of people laughing and chatting, then everyone pull out headphones and ignore each other, typing furiously. We're a bunch of introverts, getting together to ignore each other in company. We come out of it for breaks, but you can see that focus in action. Some rare people can talk and create at the same time, I'm not one of them. I value silence, even though I have the mental circuits to block out noise. I can't hear music and conversation at the same time, though that could be a throwback to high school orchestra practices. I focus on the conversation and have to work really hard to catch the music.