John Miedema

The Web is Re-Wiring My Brain

4 November 2009 2 Comments

This entry is part 25 of 45 in the series I, Reader

Information Quake, Pt. 3

“Over the past 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.” I resonated strongly with this confession by Nicholas Carr in his already classic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? I have always considered myself a slow reader. I learned later to see that in fact I have always been capable of reading quickly; I just didn’t count scanning as reading. On the web, I scan a lot. The more I do it, the better I am at it. It feels like my brain is being re-wired.

There is evidence that digital technology does change the brain’s wiring. Dr. Abramson, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, found that texting may rewire a child’s developing brain to be more careless (The Globe and Mail, August 17, 2009, L4). Young, heavy cell phone users make more mistakes in tasks involving memory, attention span and learning. There are an increasing number of studies like this, as there are studies showing the benefits of digital literacy. It really should come as no surprise that web use will re-wire our brains. In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf reminds us that we were not born to read, but have re-purposed neural circuitry to that end. What we choose to attend to will ultimately shape the way our brains work.

That a brain can be re-wired may seem fearsome, but to some extent we are robotic that way, capable of being programmed.

Personally, I am optimistic that I can maintain two reading skill sets, that of slow reading and high speed web scanning. In The Man Who Forgot How to Read (see my review), Howard Engel describes how a stroke robbed him of his ability to read. A passionate reader, he refused to accept his condition of non-reader, and learned to read again. Avid readers share a conviction that reading in the classic sense is of measureless value, and will find a way to maintain it. The brain is plastic, and can juggle different complex skills.

Series Navigation«Quantity has a Quality all its OwnHow the Web Works for Readers: Thin Connections Lead to Rich Connections»

2 Comments »

Paul M. Rodriguez said:

Do you know Douglas Englebart’s Augmenting Human Intellect? I’ve been working on something based around this book myself but I think it would help your project. Just the pedigree is interesting: he wrote it as a update to Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think six years before the “Mother of All Demos” in which he debuted the underlying technologies of the Internet. If you look at it you’ll see that the kind of rewiring you’re talking about is not an unforeseen side effect. A section of the book is cast as a dialogue between a neophyte and an experienced user of “augmentation.” Here’s something from fifty years ago:

I found, when I learned to work with the structures and manipulation processes such as we have outlined, that I got rather impatient if I had to go back to dealing with the serial-statement structuring in books and journals, or other ordinary means of communicating with other workers. It is rather like having to project three-dimensional images onto two-dimensional frames and to work with them there instead of in their natural form. Actually, it is much closer to the truth to say that it is like trying to project n-dimensional forms (the concept structures, which we have seen can be related with many many nonintersecting links) onto a one-dimensional form (the serial string of symbols), where the human memory and visualization has to hold and picture the links and relationships. I guess that’s a natural feeling, though. One gets impatient any time he is forced into a restricted or primitive mode of operation–except perhaps for recreational purposes.

# 4 November 2009 at 10:58 pm