The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
"Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." - Nicholas Carr
Nicholas Carr's 2010 book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," sparked a significant conversation about how our constant digital connection might fundamentally change our thoughts. Reading it today, Carr's observations feel strikingly relevant, perhaps even more so than when they were first published. Carr argued that the internet, far from being just a neutral tool, was actively rewiring our neural circuitry, making deep, focused thinking increasingly difficult.
Like many readers, I felt this shift personally. As Carr described his own experience—finding it harder to immerse himself in a book, his concentration drifting after just a page or two—it resonated deeply. It felt like my brain was becoming hungry for the Net's constant stream of information, always wanting more, faster.
The Medium Shapes the Mind
Carr builds compellingly on Marshall McLuhan's famous insight: "the medium is the message." He argues that we often focus too much on the content delivered by a technology while ignoring how the medium itself shapes our cognitive processes.
"As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society."
We tell ourselves technology is just a tool, inert until we use it. But Carr warns this view blinds us to profound changes happening within our minds. Indeed, we often overlook the technology itself and its effects.
Tools for Thought: A Historical Perspective
Carr's argument becomes more powerful when viewed through history's lens. Throughout history, each major innovation in how we process information has led to profound changes in how we think.
Writing itself transformed thinking—it wasn't just a way to record speech but allowed us to externalize thoughts, examine them, and build complex arguments. As Socrates famously worried, writing also changed how we remember, shifting from the rich, interconnected memories of oral tradition to more structured, linear forms of thought. Books further changed cognition by training us to follow these complex arguments across many pages through sustained attention. Other cognitive tools shaped thinking too: mechanical clocks changed our experience of time from a continuous flow into measurable units, while maps enabled abstract spatial thinking.
Each intellectual technology alters not just how we think but what we can conceive. The internet follows this pattern, but at unprecedented speed and scale. This historical perspective reveals our current cognitive shift as part of humanity's ongoing relationship with its thinking tools.
Our Plastic, Rewireable Brains
The scientific backbone of Carr's argument is neuroplasticity. Our brains aren't fixed structures; they physically change in response to our experiences. Neural pathways strengthen with use and weaken with disuse. Research found significant changes in brain activity in internet novices after just five hours of web use—they had "already rewired their brains."
This plasticity is a double-edged sword. It allows us to learn and adapt, but it also means our tools constantly shape us. The more we exercise certain neural circuits (like those for scanning and multitasking), the more our brain wants to keep using them, while circuits for deep focus atrophy from disuse.
From Deep Reading to Power Browsing
Perhaps the most profound change Carr documents is the shift away from deep reading. The ability to lose oneself in a book for hours, following complex arguments, is not an innate human ability but rather a learned skill developed alongside the technology of the printed book. With its hyperlinks, notifications, and constant stimuli, the internet creates an environment hostile to this kind of sustained attention.
"When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It's possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it's possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that's not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards."
Studies confirm this. People rarely read web pages linearly, instead scanning in an F-pattern. As Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, bluntly put it, "How do users read on the web? They don't." Research shows that hypertext, with its constant decision-making about clicking links, increases cognitive load, impairs comprehension, and weakens retention compared to linear text. We sacrifice the quiet attentiveness needed for deep reading.
Outsourcing Our Memory
Carr identifies a fundamental shift in how we treat memory. Since Socrates worried about writing weakening recall, thinkers have fretted about technology's impact. But the internet, Carr argues, does something different than previous tools like books. It encourages us to bypass memorizing. Why remember something when you can Google it?
"The Net quickly came to be seen as a replacement for, rather than just a supplement to, personal memory. Today, people routinely talk about artificial memory as though it's indistinguishable from biological memory."
This fundamentally misunderstands human memory. Biological memory doesn’t have a fixed size like a hard drive; neurons can form new connections to create new memories.
And memory is not simply a tool for recalling knowledge; it is a critical component of intelligence. Unlike the seemingly limitless capacity of long-term memory, working memory—the mental scratchpad where we process information—is severely limited. When concepts are part of long-term memory, we can utilize them without taxing our working memory, but by outsourcing memory to the internet, using those concepts eats up precious space in working memory. This is the whole point of a curriculum at school: to gradually build upon already learned concepts. Without this gradual internalization of concepts and knowledge, it makes it difficult to reason about complex topics.
The Overloaded Mind
Even if we don’t want to outsource our memory, the internet, with its barrage of stimuli, overwhelms our working memory, making it harder to learn.
"When the load exceeds our mind's ability to store and process the information... we're unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory...Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow."
Tools like calculators can aid memory by reducing the load on working memory, facilitating transfer to long-term memory. The Web, however, does the opposite. Every link evaluated, every notification processed, taxes our limited cognitive resources. This leaves less mental space for actual understanding and learning.
Furthermore, what we call multitasking online is just rapid task-switching, each switch incurring "switching costs" that further strain our cognitive resources and lead to shallower thinking.
Conclusion: An Enduring Warning
"The Shallows" serves as a powerful reminder that our tools are not neutral. They actively shape our minds. While Carr wrote before the explosive rise of smartphones and social media, his core arguments about neuroplasticity, attention, cognitive load, and memory offer a crucial framework for understanding our relationship with digital technology today. He wasn't arguing for abandoning the internet, but for awareness, recognizing the trade-offs and consciously cultivating the deep thinking that the online world tends to discourage. As Carr himself experienced, disconnecting allowed his brain to "breathe again," highlighting the ongoing tension between the incredible utility of the net and the value of a focused, contemplative mind.
Next Time
While Carr's warnings focused on the internet of 2010, how do they hold up in today's world dominated by AI, smartphones, and ever-present social media? In my next post, I'll delve into the latest research and consider whether our cognitive landscape has shifted even further into the shallows.