Nourish Your Brain or Consume Junk?

Nourish your brain or consume junk?

What Is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?  Nicholas G. Carr, in his best seller ‘The Shallows,’ tells us. 

“Acquiring knowledge is like having sex; it releases dopamine into the pleasure centers of the brain.”  The possibility of addiction seems eminent.  The compulsion to always be playing with our electronic devices becomes an obsession.   I know by experience that is true, because whenever I say, “I wonder…,” it is off to my desk top computer to check it out.  As of yet I am pretty much clueless to the blackberry, lap top, I-Pod, etc.  After listening to the video and reading the other content on this link I am in no rush to acquire these electronics.  As an aside: My sisters won’t communicate with me because I don’t text.  I absolutely love my land line because it is cheap and I like to hear a human being on the other end without having to worry about my minutes. I do carry a cell phone which is off most of the time.

In our primitive history, Carr comments, we needed knowledge for survival.  We have used that knowledge to build upon and be creative and advance civilization.  Here we are, racing to the finish line. Now it is time to slow down because as Carr points out, our brains cannot process information with the intensity it is flowing because the short term working memory cannot process more than two to four pieces of information at a time. Any more info flowing in causes “cognitive overload.”

As a result, the flow of information into our long term memories where we use it to associate new learning to past experience and knowledge, is stunted.  Do you suppose this is why Carr named the book “The Shallows,” because people become intellectually shallow when they can’t associate?  Carr says the richness and depth which is lost leads to the inability to determine what is useful information and that which is trivia.

It is very reasonable to assume there is a loss of productivity if one is on the job and having to succumb to “switching cost” when at one moment they might be texting and another checking something out online, and then actually performing on the job.  The brain has to readjust for each change in focus.

Carr also comments on the loss of deep creativity most likely as a result of the constant lack of long term focus.

Some of the quotes that Carr used on the link were also revealing.  The New Republic, Aug. 4, 2011, Past Tense Pop, implies our present music culture has been wounded by technology.  Our youth are apolitical and music is mundane as a result.  It has lost its subversive energies that help with change. “None of it matters much.  It just streaks by.”  Maybe the “Occupy” movement will stimulate some excitement in that venue. 

Marshall McLuhan has written on the media effects on the brain.  I would like to read more of his opinions and writings. This is from, The Atlantic, July-August 2008, Is Google Making Us Stupid?  “As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And 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."  What a great metaphor.  You can feel the depth versus the shallowness.

From The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, January 7, 2008.  Here the plight of the 99% is equated with the loss of jobs due to technology. “The erosion of the middle class may well accelerate, as the divide widens between a relatively small group of extraordinarily wealthy people - the digital elite - and a very large set of people who face eroding fortunes and a persistent struggle to make ends meet. In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards."  The “digital elite” is an apt description.

From The Guardian, November 22, 2007, Genotyping Goes Mainstream, This quote about Google’s “23 and Me,” actually gave me the chills.  Combining genetic profiling of “23 and Me” with tracking, now that is one terrifying thought!  The implications of this could be devastating to our personal liberties.  I was very surprised to hear Google promotes this app or whatever it is called. 

We are missing out on a real community of real caring.  I thought it was because we had become so over populated but now I think it is because we have distanced ourselves by putting technology between us and others as a bed-board. Without touching our fellowman emotionally and intellectually we will or have become Avatar’s; we can make ourselves up as we go along.  Such lack of structure would lead to a weakening of self efficacy resulting from the loss of deep creative thought.  From Harvard Business Review, 5/1999 "Being Virtual: Character and the New Economy,"  “But every time we reinvent ourselves, we erase the meaning that our past experiences granted us. In place of an ethical sense of ourselves as people with clear attachments, we are left with an ironic sense of ourselves as fabrications. We become unreal, virtual."

One can over eat, or indulge in too much fat or sugar and not enough fiber.  The internet can provide us with the tools to educate and communicate needed information as a social reform tool, nourishing our psyches and society.  It is a choice to nourish your brain or consume junk.   It is all in how you use the tool – brain – internet.