An article in the Atlantic by Nicholas Carr: Is Google making us stupid?

In recent work Carr suggests that in there economic interests to drive us to distraction Google may in fact be making us stupid. Creating an entire population of information bite masters none of which have true wisdom. Carr claims that over the past few years he has noticed an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something has been tinkering with his brain, remapping the neural circuitry, Carl feels his mind just isn’t thinking the way it used to he describes his inability to read for long periods of time without being fidgety and losing interest within a few pages and even says that he has friends that are scholars who have complained of the same.

      One controversial point made was Carr’s  implication that  with no one being forced to dove into a subject through deep reading and deep thinking the synapses in our brains will lose their ability to master anything, you will meet people thought to be very intelligent like a deep sea diver of information when in reality they have no deep knowledge of a subject rather they are more of a jet skier skipping across the top of the ocean of knowledge. According to modern neuroscience, thanks to our brains plasticity  the adaptation occurs at a biological level, so they will (as scientific studies show) adapt to the quick fix  of instant information literally re-wiring the brain and the way we take in and store information.

  On the other hand we do not know if this change will be a good thing or a bad thing and studies also show that our brains can make an adaptation rather quickly. In fact it can be argued that this whole thing is paranoia no different than the reaction of Plato to the Idea of written language, he would say it would destroy peoples memory or the introduction of the book, the printing press, the television, type writer, radio, and telephone, All thought by many to be the worst thing for people the world had ever seen even the invention of the clock was not without the skepticism by many thinking it would lead to the destruction of the inner clock. Turns out that with all the fear mongering the thing these people failed to consider was the pay off, while the thought of change scarred many so bad, they never stopped to think about the possibility that the change may be for the better.

       In my opinion, though I can see both sides of the argument, it remains to be seen whether or not the internet will reroute our wiring leaving us all shallow minded zombies that are great  poker players but I will say that to have the ability to spend a few minutes doing the same amount of research that 20 years ago may have taken countless hours in a library seems like a positive evolution to me and as a people we need to take on the challenges that will keep all of our little neurons working on our own.