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Nicholas Carr QUOTES

Nicholas Carr QUOTES

41 " Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext commonplace, indeed ubiquitous, research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

42 " Another experiment, conducted by Pascual-Leone when he was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, provides even more remarkable evidence of the way our patterns of thought affect the anatomy of our brains. Pascual-Leone recruited people who had no experience playing a piano, and he taught them how to play a simple melody consisting of a short series of notes. He then split the participants into two groups. He had the members of one group practice the melody on a keyboard for two hours a day over the next five days. he had the members of the other group sit in front of a keyboard for the same amount of time but only imagine playing the song--without ever touching the keys. Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, Pascual-Leone mapped the brain activity of all the participants before, during, and after the test. he found that the people who had only imagined playing the notes exhibited precisely the same changes in their brains as those who had actually pressed the keys. Their brains had changed in response to actions that took place purely in their imaginations--in response, that is, to their thoughts. Descartes may have been wrong about dualism, but he appears to have been correct in believing that our thoughts can exert a physical influence on, or at least cause a physical reaction in, our brains. We become, neurologically, what we think. (p33) "

― Nicholas Carr

43 " the mind is not sealed in the skull but extends throughout the body. We think not only with our brain but also with our eyes and ears, nose and mouth, limbs and torso. And when we use tools to extend our grasp, we think with them as well. “Thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be,” wrote the American philosopher and social reformer John Dewey in 1916. “Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes in the brain.”51 To act is to think, and to think is to act. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

44 " When our brain is overtaxed, we find “distractions more distracting. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

45 " research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

46 " lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman, argued that Google “has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

47 " The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

48 " our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot,” he wrote. The content of the medium is just “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” P 4 "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

49 " The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick. Many addictions, too, are reinforced by the strengthening of plastic pathways to the brain. Even very small doses of addictive drugs can dramatically alter the flow of neurotransmitters in a person’s synapses, resulting in long-lasting alterations in brain circuitry and function. In some cases, the buildup of certain kinds of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, a pleasure-producing cousin to adrenaline, seems to actually trigger the turning on or off particular genes, bringing even stronger cravings for the drug. The vital path turns deadly. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

50 " Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress’s dead ends. It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions. That’s why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

51 " And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

52 " We should imitate bees,' Seneca wrote, 'and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it was apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.' Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

53 " The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

54 " But except in rare circumstances, you can train until you’re blue in the face and you’d never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time.” What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.” The Roman philosopher Seneca May have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

55 " The ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. With every skill we learn, the world reshapes itself to reveal greater possibilities. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

56 " Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

57 " The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

58 " There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

59 " As McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just 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. Whether I’m online or not, 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. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

60 " Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously. "

― Nicholas Carr , The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains