Nicholas Carr bets you’re not even capable of reading his new, 224-page book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. That’s because after what has now been years of daily, repetitive, consumption of short blasts of hyper-linked information, your brain has actually changed shape and function rendering you unable to concentrate enough to digest the contents of a book, long article, essay or poem.
The implications are staggering to anyone who seeks to ignite ideas.
Most of the information on which we snack as we flit from link-to-link and text-to-text in the point-and-click world in which we live simply doesn’t stay with us. It finds a place in our short-term or working memory only long enough for it to be useful in the moment, and then it disappears. Unlike those things we savor, repeat and ruminate, such digital snippets just evaporate. They are not stored. They are never again available to us to throw a spark somewhere in our imaginations. (cf, “Cultivate Copiousness,” blogpost, October 1, 2009)
A mental life spent entirely on the fly is ultimately not equipped to be creative.
Carr cites volumes of empirical studies, including one by Jordan Grafman of the National Institute of Neurological disorders who, “explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multi-tasking, but improving our ability to multi-task actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.”
He’s right. Even I who am known to you as the resident bookworm have of late found it much more difficult to maintain acuity of attention to a book, a long article or a lengthy white paper, and now I know why. Carr writes, “In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler.”
Can you do it? Can you read this book, or still read any book? I challenge you to read The Shallows. In the meantime, I’m off to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, just to prove to myself that I still can.
Rick Segal
Worldwide President
Chief Practice Officer
Growing up during the summers, I would have this deal with my mom. After breakfast I would head out to play. I would return for lunch and, later, for dinner, but would otherwise keep out from underfoot. In return—and here, friends, you have the quid pro quo—she would not seek inspiration for things for me to do, namely chores. What can I tell you? The deal, struck in the sylvan days of American youth before the tyranny of organized sports cast its shadow over the land, worked for us.
This sublime meeting of the minds between parent and child comes to mind as I contemplate the current state of affairs for innovation.
In these times of scarcity, of wanting results today and not tomorrow, how do you find it within yourself to cut loose long enough to stretch a bit—to go play, as it were? Do you make a conscious effort to put slack into the system?
For the life of me I can’t decide whether the always on, wired mind is by nature a regimented mind and, thus, not fully open to ideas that compel and innovations that sell.