This is your brain on Google

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” inquiring minds at the Atlantic Monthly (July/August) want to know.

Google’s power and appeal (or powerful appeal or appealing power?) cannot be ignored. But while Google does put a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, it, at the same time, closes off even more from consideration. Yes, they have been trying to remedy this by scanning every book they can get their electric mitts on (copyright be damned), but they make it too easy for students, scholars, and writers to neglect all the source information that is hidden in archive boxes and bookshelves in out of the way libraries. Not to mention that there is something tactile and satisfying in touching and reading an original letter that has long been hidden away and all but forgotten about that you just can’t get from keyboard clicks and the glow of a computer monitor.

All that being said, the folks at the Atlantic Monthly are getting at something more basic and elemental. All that quick reading that we are doing by flipping through Google snippets and flitting from Web page to Web page is having a physical effect on our brains. (As McCoy once said, “They’ve got Jim’s brain!”) Only it’s not the aliens, we’ve done it to ourselves by how we now read. As the Atlantic Monthly’s Nicholas Carr puts it, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

As it turns out, reading is not as hardwired into our brains as speech and oral communication is. This is evident, clearly, in the history of communication. We were speakers and listeners long before we were writers and readers. And we brought the instinct for oral communication, according to researchers at Cornell University, along with us on our evolutionary journey from the sea.

Reading, apparently, is not that fundamental.