The Shallows

The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears behind whatever flows through it—facts, entertainment, instruction, conversation. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium’s effects are good or bad, it’s the content they wrestle over. Enthusiasts celebrate it; skeptics decry it. The terms of the argum

The Net has become my all-purpose medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they’re becoming chronic scatterbrains. Several of the bloggers I follow have also mentioned the phenomenon.

The brain is not the machine we once thought it to be. Though different regions are associated with different mental functions, the cellular components do not form permanent structures or play rigid roles. They’re flexible. They change with experience, circumstance, and need. Some of the most extensive and remarkable changes take place in response

At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling.

“We have learned that neuroplasticity is not only possible but that it is constantly in action,” writes Mark Hallett, head of the Medical Neurology Branch of the National Institutes of Health. “That is the way we adapt to changing conditions, the way we learn new facts, and the way we develop new skills.”26

When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.

In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.

Vincent Virga, an expert on cartography affiliated with the Library of Congress, has observed that the stages in the development of our mapmaking skills closely parallel the general stages of childhood cognitive development delineated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.