#632: How the Internet Makes Our Minds Shallow

There's a trade-off involved when we go online—when we use the Internet. On the one hand, we get the benefit of having huge amounts of information delivered very, very quickly from all sorts of different sources and all sorts of overlapping forms—audio, video, text, and so forth. But what we lose is the ability to pay attention because the internet is a distraction machine, so we're constantly shifting our focus and constantly getting interrupted with alerts and notifications. We have more information, but I don't think we're thinking as deeply as we used to because we're so distracted.

Reading and writing are quite new phenomena in human history. They are just a little over 2,000-years-old.

While we certainly can read online... the quality of that reading and the depth of that reading is not the same as we get when we're reading printed material.

What the research suggests is that the richer the store of information you have in your own mind—in your own memory, the more deeply you'll process new information, and as a result, the more thoughtful you'll be, the more analytical you'll be, and the better able you will be to evaluate the worth of some new piece of information. So memory—the store of information in your own head—is very, very tightly linked to the depth and rigor of your thinking.

To think deeply about anything, you have to actually know stuff ... If you really want to think deeply, you have to know things because that's the only way to build the context necessary to connect a new piece of information with a lots of other pieces of information—and it's only at that point that thinking actually becomes really interesting.

With our phones or other computers connected to the Internet, there's a super abundance of information, and it's all streaming by very, very quickly. You have to grab a person's attention and get as much information across as quickly as possible. I think videos, photographs, and certainly memes... I think all of these are a response to the need to make a point very, very quickly because you know that audience is not going to stay focused on one thing for very long.

The medium through which we read influences the way we read.

Our brains are changing at a physical level and anatomical level throughout our entire lives, so that malleability—or as they call it, plasticity—doesn't stop at [age] 20.

When we teach ourselves to read, we're changing the way our visual cortex works in quite a fundamental way. We gain all the benefits that come with the ability to read, but we lose this ability to read the natural world because we've simply rededicated those mental resources to something else.

Reading comprehension and the retention of information from reading—they go down when links are incorporated into text.