A Shallow Argument: Nicholas Carr and the Internet

Among its many errors of logic and argument, Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains suggests that the plasticity of the brain — its malleability, means that the generation now heavily involved with, and indebted to the Internet, is having its brains rewired. Aside from the obvious problems in talking about the brain as an electrical system, the supposed plasticity of the human brain is far from being proven although it is in an important area of research in the neurosciences. It is true that the brain is far more capable of adaptation than previously thought, and there is evidence to suggest that learning at all stages of life contributes to a "healthy" brain. However to draw the conclusion, as Carr does, that we are in the midst of a crisis which is redrawing the boundaries of how people think (and most importantly what they do with their thoughts) is alarmist and counter productive.

Carr's panic at what is happening to "us" — distracted multitaskers who no longer read or experience the world with any depth or rigour — perpetuates the century's old hysteria about the effects of new technologies on humans. Stephen Pinker, who actually does research in the neurosciences skewers the simplicity and reductiveness of people like Carr in a recent New York Times article. He says, "Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill, the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience."

Of even greater interest is Carr's transformation of Darwin's theories of evolution into claims about the speed with which the Internet is altering human biology. This fast forward approach to human evolution has its attractions. After all, humans were not around to witness millions of years of evolution, so it is easy to draw simplistic solutions to explain shifts in human activities and modes of thinking.

Carr's moral panic (taken up and reproduced by hundreds of journalists in newspapers and blogs seemingly desperate for some explanation as to why they are hooked to a medium they haven't thought about with enough depth and historical range) suggests that evolution is like Lego blocks. Once you put a few blocks into place, you have a structure, and once you have a structure, presto! you have evolved!

Carr's argument is just a variation on intelligent design. Replace god with the Internet and you have a power so great that humans are not only its victims, they are growing new brains to accommodate its vicissitudes.

Why do balkanized versions of genuinely interesting and important research projects into human adaptability get transformed into this type of discourse? It is probably not sufficient to suggest that every new technology generates panic among those who least understand either its present use or future transformation.

After all, had Carr taken even a minimum peak at the 19th century, he would have noticed that among other assertions, the telephone was described as a killer of conversation and human interaction (an attitude that lasted well into the 1960's). He would also have noticed that the cinema was described as a terrible distraction that among its many effects would probably lead to the death of literature and theatre. Photography was lambasted for its potential to lie and convince the gullible masses that the truth of an event could be found in images.

But, Carr is not the problem here; he is merely symptomatic of an ever growing and worrying trend to ahistoricism among so called public intellectuals. Those who should be the most sensitive to the nuances of change and the shifting relationships among individuals and their communities and the communications technologies they use are now sanctimoniously declaring that the public is being dumbed down. Carr, of course, never spent any time doing an empirical study because it would have taken him years to complete. He accuses internet dwellers of swimming in a sea of illusions without asking any hard questions about how he came to that conclusion.

His lack of attention to history is what he suggests internet users have devolved into, and, in so doing, he imposes on this vast and ever changing community with all of its diversity and multi-national character a superficiality of intent that he himself creates with his own very shallow arguments.

Implanted Neurons Let the Brain Rewire Itself Again

Experiments in mice show that the brain's ability to adapt might not disappear with age.

Transplanting fetal neurons into the brains of young mice opens a new window on neural plasticity, or flexibility in the brain's neural circuits. The research, published today in the journal Science, suggests that the brain's ability to radically adapt to new situations might not be permanently lost in youth, and helps to pinpoint the factors needed to reintroduce this plasticity.

Read more………

We feel, therefore we learn by Daniel Siegel

The neuroscience of social emotion.

Presenting at the Mind and its Potential conference, Dr Daniel Siegel MD speaks about Interpersonal Neurobiology, an interdisciplinary view of life experience that draws on over a dozen branches of science to create a framework for understanding of our subjective and interpersonal lives. Daniel Siegel completed his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and his post-graduate medical education at UCLA. He was the recipient of the UCLA psychiatry department's teaching award and several honorary fellowships for his work as director of UCLA's training program in child psychiatry and the Infant and Preschool Service at UCLA.

A Definition of Continuum

Mistakenly, humans of the postmodern age have assumed that dream worlds are signs of the experience of sleeping. It is more likely that sleep and wakefulness are simply one and the same, with the connections among dreams, daydreams and thoughts being neither as clearly demarcated as we think nor as simply divisible as we might hope.

In the same vein, time does not exist in mind or brain or body. Nor does the brain exist in space. These are arbitrary terms and placeholders that we have devised to explain the incomprehensible activities of consciousness. Consciousness has no defined “place” in the body other than through the residues of dreams, thoughts and language and the pain and pleasure of memories.

Can Machines Dream? (Part Five)

John Avery continues the discussion

"I would like to add my own thoughts about dreaming: I think that one of the things that happens during dreaming is that data is transfered from a temporary mode of storage in the brain to a permanent mode. In this process, connections are made to previously stored associated data. Some of the associations that are tried and rejected are bizarre, and this, I believe, is why dreams often have a bizarre quality, while simultaneously including events stored in the temporary memory before sleep. Probably computers of the future will be able to reorganize their memories and to form associations in much the same way that the brain does. It is possible that computers of the future will also be capable of emotions."

Ron Burnett responds

I am not sure that we fully understand how the brain and the mind "store' memories. This is the difficulty with your comment. Gerald Edelman refers to the brain as part of a 'rich nervous system'. He does see memory as a process of categorization (something that computers could replicate) but then goes on to talk about the dynamic nature of neural populations and the continual process of change that characterizes the operations of the mind. This is important because if change is the main feature of thinking and remembering then it is likely that there is no fixed code for memory. The key question is whether computers could store ambiguous and continually evolving pathways of memory, where even the pathways themselves are open to change and transformation.

The other important question is whether it would be possible for computers to generate new properties, new ways of thinking and remembering. Our minds classify the world around us and then upset the applecart by dynamically combining complex properties gained from experience and the autonomous operations of the brain itself. Autonomy in this case means that the brain maps experiences and then recreates, transforms and recategorizes and then redistributes the entire flow in a way that we don't fully understand.

Further comment from Jan Visser

John's assumption falls in line with my own suggestion in my previous comment that dreaming has something to do with going beyond the immediacy of our perceptions and the processing thereof. This assumption seems to be supported by certain animal studies. It was already known that animals display REM sleep but it had not yet been established if this corresponds to actual dreaming. Recently, though, a 2001 MIT report of the Center for Learning and Memory states that “Animals have complex dreams and are able to retain and recall long sequences of events while they are asleep.? The same report places these findings against the scientific belief that “memories are formed in at least two stages: an initial process that occurs during the experience itself, followed by a consolidation period in which the experience is transformed into long-term memory. The hippocampus is believed to be involved in both stages.? As to the reason why animals dream, the findings in the report seem to suggest that “animals are capable of re-evaluating their experiences when they are not in the midst of them? and that such ability is not too far removed from the reason why humans dream.

According to Latrup’s remarks referred to by John, the emergence of dreaming would be a discontinuity in the evolution. If so, the quality of dreaming - the actual meaning of it from the point of view of conscious contemplation of the world - may equally be a discontinuity that distinguishes human beings from the other animals. However, evolutionary discontinuities do not represent changes of state from pitch black to brilliant white. There is a lot of gray in between and arguments may be construed (e.g. along the line of Michael Shermer’s “The science of good and evil?) to extend the concept of rights accorded to humans progressively to the animal kingdom and, why not, as machines become ever more lifelike, to machines. There would most certainly be an incredible benefit to the ecology of biological and physical resources if we became more conscious of such rights.

I am using the word ‘conscious’ in the above paragraph, thereby suggesting that a discussion of the capacity to dream in humans, animals and machines cannot be separated from questions about the meaning of consciousness in each of these categories, particularly moral consciousness. When I said earlier that “Perhaps we should [first] make machines enjoy the natural rhythm of their being? I was deliberately using language that pertains to the realm of consciousness. I am conscious and thus can enjoy (as well as suffer). The more I am conscious, the more I am able to enjoy and suffer, whence the traumatic experience of death in humans. Again, it’s not black and white and I am pervious to considerations about the suffering we inflict on animals other than ourselves as well as find it difficult to throw an outdated piece of computer equipment in the dustbin. I am also impressed by the display of humanlike emotions in primates when confronted with death, as for instance reported in the work of Frans de Waal of the Living Links Center.

End