remembering

When I began writing this column back in the last century (yikes!), what I thought I was about was finding websites that readers of Asimov’s might like to check out. I’ve lost track of how many URLs I have commended to your attention—probably close to a thousand. But as time passed it became clear that the net was not only a vast digital library, but also a toolset for remaking culture. E-books and webzines and podcasts and blogs and Facebook and Creative Commons and free content have changed the way you and I relate to one another, to this magazine, to science fiction, and, yes, to society in general. So while the emphasis has remained on poking around cyberspace, from time to time we have stepped back to look at trends and technologies that affect everybody, no matter whether your favorite author is Isaac Asimov <asimovonline.com/asimov_home_page.html>, John Updike <achievement.org/autodoc/page/upd0bio-1>, or Dr. Seuss <seussville.com>. Well, here we go again.
In the last installment, you may recall, we considered the proposition that the net is not only changing what we do, but is changing who we are. Nicolas Carr, in a book called The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains<theshallowsbook.com> and a website called Rough Type <roughtype.com>, asserts that, largely unbeknownst to us, the internet is reprogramming our brains and thus privileging certain cognitive abilities over others. While some of his claims are more persuasive than others, his central thesis makes sense not only of social trends but also of some interesting scientific research. If nothing else, Carr’s arguments will tickle your science fiction sensibilities. For over a century now, we SF writers have been thinking hard about what a Posthuman <io9.com/5530409/the-essential-posthuman-science-fiction-reading-list> might look like.
Perhaps all we need do is peer deep into our flatscreens.

brainy

In order to understand the implications of what Carr is saying, let’s divide his argument into three parts and consider each separately. First: is the net really reprogramming our brains? Second: if so, then what exactly is changing? Third: are these changes good or bad?
It may come as a surprise to some readers that our brains can be reprogrammed at all. Until the 1970s, orthodox neuroscience held that the structure of the adult brain was fixed and the only change possible was degenerative. As we aged we would lose mental capacity; the best we could hope for would be to slow the inevitable erosion. This view has been largely discredited. We now know that the brain remains plastic; it can be profoundly remade throughout life. And according to the theory of neuroplasticity, what we experience can change the very structure and functioning of our brains. Connections within our brains are continually being pruned and created. Links can come and go in as little as a week. You will remember during the early days of the world wide web that those annoying Under Construction Icons <textfiles.com/underconstruction> were everywhere? So it is with your cerebral cortex, which is similarly in a state of perpetual overhaul.
A key insight of neuroplasticity theory is that our brains are structured and restructured by our experiences. “It’s what you pay attention to. It’s what’s rewarding to you,” according to Michael Merzenich <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Merzenich>, one of the leading researchers in brain plasticity. In a 2004 TED talk <ted.com/talks/lang/eng/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html>, he goes on to say, “It’s all about cortical processing and forebrain specialization. And that underlies your specialization. That is why you, in your many skills and abilities, are a unique specialist. A specialist who is vastly different in your physical brain, in detail, from the brain of an individual a hundred years ago, enormously different in the details from the brain of an average individual a thousand years ago.”
We interrupt this column for a brief rant. Why doesn’t everyone know about the non-profit TED <ted.com>, the best source of science popularization anywhere? Americans have a huge stake in knowing how the world works and yet our understanding of basic science is abysmal. In a 2009 California Academy of Sciences poll <calacademy.org/newsroom/releases/2009/scientific_literacy.php>, only 53 percent of adults knew how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun, only 59 percent knew that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time and only 47 percent could roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water. Help! Do the world a favor and turn someone on to TED today.
We now return to your regularly scheduled column.
In 2008, neuroscientist Gary Small <drgarysmall.com> released the findings of a study <newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-study-finds-that-searching-64348.aspx> he had conducted at UCLA. His team worked with seniors ranging from fifty-five to seventy-six, half of whom were seasoned net users and half of whom had no net experience. He found that the experienced netizens “registered a twofold increase in brain activation when compared with those with little Internet experience. The tiniest measurable unit of brain activity registered by the fMRI is called a voxel. Scientists discovered that during Internet searching, those with prior experience sparked 21,782 voxels, compared with only 8,646 voxels for those with less experience.” Six days later, Small brought both groups back to repeat the experiment. In the interim he’d had the net novices practice googling around the net for an hour a day. The results? The newbies’ brains now showed increased activity in the same neural circuits as the netizens’. They had effectively rewired their brains.
In five days. Clicking around the net for just one hour a day.
Going back to a point he made in his TED talk, Michael Merzenich posted the following to his blog On The Brain <merzenich.positscience.com/?p=177>, “When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates DIFFERENT brains.” Speaking of Google and the net, he goes on to write, “THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES. No one yet knows exactly what those consequences are.”
Note: Dr. Merzenich isn’t usually quite so heavy handed with the CAPS LOCK key.

who reads Tolstoy?

So what exactly is the net doing to your brain? The prefrontal regions of increased activity in the Small experiment are centers of problem-solving and decision-making. A 2009 New Zealand study <unitec.ac.nz/?1A61532B-FED5-4C57-85C3-60163A08462F> reported that people playing the first person shooter computer game Counter Strike <store.steampowered.com/app/10> for eight hours a week increased their ability to multitask up to two and a half times. Patricia Greenwell, a developmental psychologist at UCLA, cites the New Zealand study in her review of the literature published in Science <tvturnoff.org/images/fbfiles/images/greenfield%20science%202009.pdf>. Researchers have indeed discovered a “new profile of cognitive skills”— including increases in non-verbal IQ and facility at multitasking— among heavy users of “the informal learning environments of television, video games, and the Internet.” But she points to other studies that document the tradeoffs of the ongoing reorganization of our brains. “Although the visual capabilities of television, video games, and the Internet may develop impressive visual intelligence, the cost seems to be deep processing: mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”
Which is apparently what sent Nicolas Carr to his keyboard to write The Shallows. Understand that Carr is no Luddite; he concedes the many wonderful uses of the net. He is himself a blogger and a social networker and logs many hours in front of a screen. When he first began to notice that it was difficult to pay attention for more than a few minutes, he wrote it off to “middle-age mind rot.” But now he attributes the greater part of his lack of concentration, his tendency to skip and skim and, most important, his struggle to read and comprehend entire books, to what the internet is doing to his brain. The internet is transforming us into multitaskers and “heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set” according to a 2009 Stanford University Study <pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/21/0903620106.full.pdf>. Clifford Nass <stanford.edu/~nass/>, lead researcher on the study, put it in layman’s terms in an NPR interview <npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112334449&ft=1&f=5>. “It’s very frightening to us, and I think the reason it’s so frightening is we actually didn’t study people while they were multitasking. We studied people who were chronic multitaskers, and even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.”
So what? says Clay Shirky. You may recall Shirky from the previous installment; he wrote the book Cognitive Surplus, which makes the case that the change that the net is effecting throughout society is mostly benign—and besides, it’s inevitable. Too bad if deep reading has become a lost skill. Get used to the idea that the age of the book is passing. “No one reads War and Peace,” he writes in an Encyclopedia Britannica blog post <britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/why-abundance-is-good-a-reply-to-nick-carr>. “It’s too long, and not so interesting.” Yes, he’s being polemical, but the science suggests that he is half right. It doesn’t matter whether Tolstoy’s books are interesting or not; their real problem is that they are long and that they are books.
If books that are “too long” are passé, then we must consign some of our cherished classics to the dustbin of history. The one volume Lord of the Rings runs 1216 pages. The Fortieth Anniversary edition of Dune is 544 pages. And then there are the works of some of my most talented contemporaries— I’m looking at you, George R.R. Martin <georgerrmartin.com> and Connie Willis <sftv.org/cw> and Kim Stanley Robinson <sfsite.com/lists/ksr.htm> and Susanna Clarke <jonathanstrange.com/>.

exit

Excuse me, I got distracted thinking about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I remember feeling a sense of loss as I read the last page, mourning that my long and lovely encounter with English magic was over. Great book. And so very interesting!
So, what the hell were we talking about. . . ? Was it brains? Something that was supposed to be either good or bad, right? I don’t know why I find it so hard to concentrate these days.
The fact is, we don’t know whether our new brains will be better than the old ones. What we do know is that they are constantly adapting to the cognitive environment we live in. Maybe it’s time to take charge of that environment?
Otherwise it’s definitely going to mess with our heads.

Copyright © 2011 James Patrick Kelly