At 35, Friedrich Nietzsche could barely write. In fragile health, it pained him horribly to stare at the paper. In 1882, he received a Malling-Hansen, a forerunner of ball-shaped typewriters, into his home. Thanks to the gadget, the German philosopher returned to reflect his ideas. His best works would come out of that machine, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil or Ecce Homo. But his literature had changed. As the author himself admitted to a friend, his style had become more telegraphic and, as if the iron of the keys had slipped into the writer's mind, more forceful and hard. Technology was modulating his message, in the style of Marshall McLuhan's aphorism that the medium is the message. A century later, the internet seems to be doing the same thing, this time to millions of people. But the result is not being so fruitful. According to the American Nicholas Carr, the endless stimuli that reach the brain from the network are making us superficial.
Carr has published this week the work Superficiales. What is the internet doing to our brains? (Taurus Thought). Published in English last summer, it is generating great controversy both in the US and in Europe. The author maintains in the work that the network, so full of advantages, is altering our cognitive abilities. Reviewing the history of technology, from the invention of the watch to the book, passing through Nietzsche's writing ball, shows that each of them has left its mark on the mind. Support the review with the most recent experiments in the field of neurology. His conclusion is clear: the Internet, the latest great technology, is weakening some of the highest brain functions, such as deep thought, the capacity for abstraction or memory.
The risk of delegating memory is "starting to lose humanity"
The author starts from an idea that he already raised in a famous article in The Atlantic magazine in 2008. With the provocative title Is Google making us stupid?, he recounted his personal inability to concentrate. The book, in fact, is an extension of that idea. 'It used to be very easy for me to get immersed in a long book or article. My mind would get caught up in narrative devices or plot twists, and I would spend hours plowing through vast expanses of prose. That rarely happens today. Now my concentration starts to wane after a page or two. I lose my calm and the thread, I begin to think what else to do', he writes in the first chapter of the work. He blames the internet for his oversight. He no longer concentrates. When you're in front of your computer reading an article, every once in a while you have to leave it to check your email or send a message. Worse yet, when you return to the text, you skim over it and get lost in a tide of links. And he's not the only one it happens to.
An experiment by web designer Jakob Nielsen shows that content on a site is surfed rather than read in depth. He fitted 232 volunteers with a mini camera to record their eye movements and put them before an online text. Almost none read line after line. They would actually read the first paragraph, then scan the right side of the page, stop at the center lines, and surf the page again. It is the opposite of what is done with a book.
'It's the eternal fear of the new,' replies a researcher
Carr argues that the web encourages a kind of superficial reading. The consequence is that it trains visual-spatial intelligence but, in turn, weakens deep processing. There is, he maintains, a direct relationship between the number of links and comprehension due to cognitive overload.
However, consultant and specialist in new media Juan Varela assures that 'no technology makes us stupider, but problems abound when using it now and before. Digital technologies make available to citizens a more open, participatory, social and efficient model of information management, but clear criteria are often lacking to take advantage of it. Therein lies the main problem. The key is not the technology, but having the right skill and will to harness it.' It would then be a matter of a lack of training.
Carr supports his thesis in neuroplasticity. Modern neurology considers it proven that the brain is modified by the process of acquiring a new skill and by its own exercise. In addition, it continues to generate new neurons and connections between them, synapses, throughout life. According to neurologist Maryanne Wolf, the Sumerians, inventors of writing, were the first to establish intense interconnections between the areas of the brain related to vision, conceptualization, spatial analysis, and decision-making. His work would be completed by the Greeks by perfecting the alphabet created by the Phoenicians. This meant the transition from oral to written tradition.
The technology that has shaped the human being is the book, according to the author
For the author, the great technology that has shaped the modern human being has been the book. At the beginning of the first millennium, the first grammars appeared in Europe. The motley continuous script gave way to separate, stressed phrases and words. For the first time, it was done for the eyes and not for the ears. Although it spelled the end of official scribes and readers, this change made private writing possible, freeing inventiveness, alternative, and even heretical thinking. But it also allowed for in-depth reading, disconnection from the world around us. Gutenberg's invention generalized change. Now, 550 years later, "the printing press and its products are being displaced from the center of our cultural life to the margins," Carr writes, by electronic media.
The neurophysiologist at Neurocom of the University of A Coruña and expert in computational neuroscience Xurxo Mariño recognizes that technology and culture shape the brain. The problem is knowing how much, how and if it will continue. "It is unlikely that the Internet will produce evolutionary change," he explains.
In the short term, two factors should come together. On the one hand, a cultural use that modifies the nervous system. This is what could be happening with the internet. 'Different languages, for example, create different minds'. But it remains to discover the existence of genes with a previous susceptibility that can take advantage of this new technology and that are extended in successive generations.
A web expert says tech savvy is the key
Among the capacities that deteriorate the internet would be memory. We delegate more and more to calculators, cell phones and other machines data and information to remember. Many have resorted to the metaphor of seeing the mind as a computer and the internet as a great collective memory. The problem here, according to Carr, is that biological memory is not like artificial memory. Every time a memory is retrieved, it is recreated in a kind of brain fitness. Without exercise, neural synapses would shrink. The risk we run by delegating the most human, such as thought and intellect to computers, says Carr, "is that we can start to lose our humanity."
'These are arguments as old as comics,' alleges the professor of philosophy of science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, David Casacuberta. This researcher on the social and cognitive impact of technology recovers a passage from Plato's Phaedrus to dismantle Carr's fears. Precisely, the same passage that the author collects in his book. In it, King Thamus reproaches the god Thoth for having granted writing to humans. 'It will implant oblivion in their souls,' says Thamus. But writing gave us new skills. "It is the eternal fear of the new," adds Casacuberta.
The professor agrees with Carr that the Internet is displacing other cultural media, such as books. But he denies that it has to be harmful. 'Our brain does not work sequentially, page by page, but linking concepts, like hyperlinks on the Internet.'
Nicholas Carr. Author of ‘Superficials’
The book's technology caused positive changes in the brain. Why not the internet? It provokes them. There is evidence that as more time is spent online, visual skills strengthen. But, at the same time, it seems to weaken the capacity for contemplation and attention, which are important for conceptual, critical, and creative thinking. The juggler improves with training. Couldn't the same thing happen with multitasking? Multitasking ability affects several deeper cognitive processes. In the book I quote the neuroscientist Jordan Grafman: "The more you multitask, the less deliberative we will be, the less capable of thinking and reasoning." What will happen when today's children become adults? The effects on young and old are the same. I believe that the distinction between digital trainees and immigrants is an illusion. Will they back down as you ask in the book? We will witness a rebellion against the cultural hegemony of the Internet.