Like most newspapers’ content, what you are about to read was written using a computer connected to the Internet. Obviously, this had no end of benefits, mostly pertaining to the relative ease of my research and the simplicity of contacting the people whose thoughts and opinions you are about to read.
It often feels as if all this frantic activity creates a constant state of twitchy anxiety. Moreover, having read a hotly controversial book about the effect of digital media on the human mind, I may have very good reason to feel scared. Its thesis is simple enough: not only that the modern world’s relentless informational overload is killing our capacity for reflection, contemplation and patience but that our online habits are also altering the very structure of our brains.
The writer then argues that the Internet’s ‘cacophony of stimuli’ and ‘crazy quilt’ of information have given rise to ‘cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning’ – in contrast to the age of the book, when intelligent humans were encouraged to be contemplative and imaginative.
Dr Small, the director of the Memory and Ageing Research Centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a specialist in the effects on the brain of the ageing process. ‘Even an old brain can be quite malleable and responsive to what’s going on with technology,’ he tells me.
When I ask him how I might stop the Internet’s more malign effects on my own brain, he sounds slightly more optimistic than Carr: ‘Try to balance online time with offline time,’ he tells me. ‘What’s happening is, we’re losing the circadian rhythms we’re used to; you go to work, you come home, you spend time talking with your kids.’
‘His argument privileges activities of the skimming and browsing kind. But if you look at research on kids doing this, or exploring virtual worlds such as Second Life,the argument there is about immersion and engagement.’
This all sounds both comforting and convincing, until I return to The Shallows and read a particularly sobering sentence: ‘We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.’ There’s something chilling about those words and even twenty stupid minutes on YouTube and an impulse buy from Amazon cannot quite remove them from my brain.