The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

(Norton, 224 pages, $26.95)

Two years ago, Nicholas Carr caused a stir when he wrote an Atlantic Monthly cover story asking if the Internet was “making us stupid,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Carr, a technology writer, had discovered that he was beginning to struggle when reading the kind of long, complex works he once enjoyed. He pinned blame on his daily Internet habit. The Shallows “isn’t one of those all-too-familiar annoyances, the book that should have remained an article.” Carr gathers much fresh empirical evidence that his original suspicion was correct: The human brain is astonishingly plastic. Carr argues convincingly that certain useful mental capacities atrophy when others get all the exercise, even if he never quite spells out the broader consequences of allowing our capacity for focused, linear thinking to wither.

Carr can even explain how the dumbing-down process works, said Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “One key is the brain’s shortage of so-called working memory.” All of us are hit with waves of data, and it turns out that the mechanism that sifts out the important stuff and stores it in long-term memory can only handle two to four items at a time. When we jam that system with pop-up windows and hyperlinks and other distractions, little of use gets put away for later cogitation. The more time we spend online, the more we become “‘mindless’ consumers of data.”

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Carr’s “most disturbing insight” may be that Internet browsing satisfies primitive human instincts better than long-form literature ever could, said Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times. This isn’t simply Carr putting books on a pedestal. He’s saying that because early humans developed a talent for rapid shifts in focus when our survival depended on it, the emergence of the book as a communication technology allowed us to stretch our minds in ways we wouldn’t have otherwise. He’s saying it’s possible, in other words, that “our half-millennium of book-based culture is a historical anomaly.” The Internet, which better serves our caveman impulses, threatens to sweep it all away.