Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains

By Nicholas Carr
Illustration by Guy Billout
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? So the supercoputer
!"# pleads with the iplacable astronaut Dave Bowan in a $aous and weirdly
poignant scene toward the end o$ Stanley %ubric&'s 2001: A Space Odyssey . Bowan,
having nearly been sent to a deep(space death by the al$unctioning achine, is cally,
coldly disconnecting the eory circuits that control its arti$icial ) brain. )Dave, y
ind is going, !"# says, $orlornly. )I can $eel it. I can $eel it.
I can $eel it, too. *ver the past $ew years I've had an unco$ortable sense that soeone,
or soething, has been tin&ering with y brain, reapping the neural circuitry,
reprograing the eory. +y ind isn't going,so $ar as I can tell,but it's
changing. I' not thin&ing the way I used to thin&. I can $eel it ost strongly when I'
reading. Iersing ysel$ in a boo& or a lengthy article used to be easy. +y ind would
get caught up in the narrative or the turns o$ the arguent, and I'd spend hours strolling
through long stretches o$ prose. -hat's rarely the case anyore. .ow y concentration
o$ten starts to dri$t a$ter two or three pages. I get $idgety, lose the thread, begin loo&ing
$or soething else to do. I $eel as i$ I' always dragging y wayward brain bac& to the
te/t. -he deep reading that used to coe naturally has becoe a struggle.
I thin& I &now what's going on. 0or ore than a decade now, I've been spending a lot o$
tie online, searching and sur$ing and soeties adding to the great databases o$ the
Internet. -he Web has been a godsend to e as a writer. 1esearch that once re2uired days
in the stac&s or periodical roos o$ libraries can now be done in inutes. " $ew Google
searches, soe 2uic& clic&s on hyperlin&s, and I've got the telltale $act or pithy 2uote I
was a$ter. 3ven when I' not wor&ing, I' as li&ely as not to be $oraging in the Web's
in$o(thic&ets'reading and writing e(ails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching
videos and listening to podcasts, or 4ust tripping $ro lin& to lin& to lin&. 56nli&e
$ootnotes, to which they're soeties li&ened, hyperlin&s don't erely point to related
wor&s7 they propel you toward the.8
0or e, as $or others, the .et is becoing a universal ediu, the conduit $or ost o$
the in$oration that $lows through y eyes and ears and into y ind. -he advantages
o$ having iediate access to such an incredibly rich store o$ in$oration are any, and
they've been widely described and duly applauded. )-he per$ect recall o$ silicon
eory, Wired's 9live -hopson has written, )can be an enorous boon to thin&ing.
But that boon coes at a price. "s the edia theorist +arshall +c#uhan pointed out in
the :;<=s, edia are not 4ust passive channels o$ in$oration. -hey supply the stu$$ o$
thought, but they also shape the process o$ thought. "nd what the .et sees to be doing
is chipping away y capacity $or concentration and conteplation. +y ind now
e/pects to ta&e in in$oration the way the .et distributes it> in a swi$tly oving strea
o$ particles. *nce I was a scuba diver in the sea o$ words. .ow I ?ip along the sur$ace
li&e a guy on a @et S&i.
I' not the only one. When I ention y troubles with reading to $riends and
ac2uaintances,literary types, ost o$ the,any say they're having siilar
e/periences. -he ore they use the Web, the ore they have to $ight to stay $ocused on
long pieces o$ writing. Soe o$ the bloggers I $ollow have also begun entioning the
phenoenon. Scott %arp, who writes a blog about online edia, recently con$essed that
he has stopped reading boo&s altogether. )I was a lit a4or in college, and used to be AaB
voracious boo& reader, he wrote. )What happened? !e speculates on the answer>
)What i$ I do all y reading on the web not so uch because the way I read has changed,
i.e. I' 4ust see&ing convenience, but because the way I -!I.% has changed?
Bruce 0riedan, who blogs regularly about the use o$ coputers in edicine, also has
described how the Internet has altered his ental habits. )I now have alost totally lost
the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print, he wrote earlier
this year. " pathologist who has long been on the $aculty o$ the 6niversity o$ +ichigan
+edical School, 0riedan elaborated on his coent in a telephone conversation with
e. !is thin&ing, he said, has ta&en on a )staccato 2uality, re$lecting the way he 2uic&ly
scans short passages o$ te/t $ro any sources online. )I can't read War and Peace
anyore, he aditted. )I've lost the ability to do that. 3ven a blog post o$ ore than
three or $our paragraphs is too uch to absorb. I s&i it.
"necdotes alone don't prove uch. "nd we still await the long(ter neurological and
psychological e/perients that will provide a de$initive picture o$ how Internet use
a$$ects cognition. But a recently published study o$ online research habits , conducted by
scholars $ro 6niversity 9ollege #ondon, suggests that we ay well be in the idst o$ a
sea change in the way we read and thin&. "s part o$ the $ive(year research progra, the
scholars e/ained coputer logs docuenting the behavior o$ visitors to two popular
research sites, one operated by the British #ibrary and one by a 6.%. educational
consortiu, that provide access to 4ournal articles, e(boo&s, and other sources o$ written
in$oration. -hey $ound that people using the sites e/hibited )a $or o$ s&iing
activity, hopping $ro one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd
already visited. -hey typically read no ore than one or two pages o$ an article or boo&
be$ore they would )bounce out to another site. Soeties they'd save a long article, but
there's no evidence that they ever went bac& and actually read it. -he authors o$ the study
report>
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense7 indeed there are signs
that new $ors o$ )reading are eerging as users )power browse hori?ontally through
titles, contents pages and abstracts going $or 2uic& wins. It alost sees that they go
online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
-han&s to the ubi2uity o$ te/t on the Internet, not to ention the popularity o$ te/t(
essaging on cell phones, we ay well be reading ore today than we did in the :;C=s
or :;D=s, when television was our ediu o$ choice. But it's a di$$erent &ind o$ reading,
and behind it lies a di$$erent &ind o$ thin&ing,perhaps even a new sense o$ the sel$. )We
are not only what we read, says +aryanne Wol$, a developental psychologist at -u$ts
6niversity and the author o$ Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading
Brain. )We are how we read. Wol$ worries that the style o$ reading prooted by the
.et, a style that puts )e$$iciency and )iediacy above all else, ay be wea&ening our
capacity $or the &ind o$ deep reading that eerged when an earlier technology, the
printing press, ade long and cople/ wor&s o$ prose coonplace. When we read
online, she says, we tend to becoe )ere decoders o$ in$oration. *ur ability to
interpret te/t, to a&e the rich ental connections that $or when we read deeply and
without distraction, reains largely disengaged.
1eading, e/plains Wol$, is not an instinctive s&ill $or huan beings. It's not etched into
our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our inds how to translate the sybolic
characters we see into the language we understand. "nd the edia or other technologies
we use in learning and practicing the cra$t o$ reading play an iportant part in shaping
the neural circuits inside our brains. 3/perients deonstrate that readers o$ ideogras,
such as the 9hinese, develop a ental circuitry $or reading that is very di$$erent $ro the
circuitry $ound in those o$ us whose written language eploys an alphabet. -he
variations e/tend across any regions o$ the brain, including those that govern such
essential cognitive $unctions as eory and the interpretation o$ visual and auditory
stiuli. We can e/pect as well that the circuits woven by our use o$ the .et will be
di$$erent $ro those woven by our reading o$ boo&s and other printed wor&s.
Soetie in :DDE, 0riedrich .iet?sche bought a typewriter,a +alling(!ansen Writing
Ball, to be precise. !is vision was $ailing, and &eeping his eyes $ocused on a page had
becoe e/hausting and pain$ul, o$ten bringing on crushing headaches. !e had been
$orced to curtail his writing, and he $eared that he would soon have to give it up. -he
typewriter rescued hi, at least $or a tie. *nce he had astered touch(typing, he was
able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips o$ his $ingers. Words could once
again $low $ro his ind to the page.
But the achine had a subtler e$$ect on his wor&. *ne o$ .iet?sche's $riends, a coposer,
noticed a change in the style o$ his writing. !is already terse prose had becoe even
tighter, ore telegraphic. )Ferhaps you will through this instruent even ta&e to a new
idio, the $riend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own wor&, his )Gthoughts' in usic
and language o$ten depend on the 2uality o$ pen and paper.
Also see:
#iving With a 9oputer 5@uly :;DE8
"-he process wor&s this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the $irst dra$t o$ an
article, I siply type on the &eyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By @aes
0allows
)Hou are right, .iet?sche replied, )our writing e2uipent ta&es part in the $oring o$
our thoughts. 6nder the sway o$ the achine, writes the Geran edia scholar
0riedrich ". %ittler , .iet?sche's prose )changed $ro arguents to aphoriss, $ro
thoughts to puns, $ro rhetoric to telegra style.
-he huan brain is alost in$initely alleable. Feople used to thin& that our ental
eshwor&, the dense connections $ored aong the :== billion or so neurons inside our
s&ulls, was largely $i/ed by the tie we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have
discovered that that's not the case. @aes *lds, a pro$essor o$ neuroscience who directs
the %rasnow Institute $or "dvanced Study at George +ason 6niversity, says that even
the adult ind )is very plastic. .erve cells routinely brea& old connections and $or
new ones. )-he brain, according to *lds, )has the ability to reprogra itsel$ on the $ly,
altering the way it $unctions.
"s we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our )intellectual technologies,
the tools that e/tend our ental rather than our physical capacities,we inevitably begin
to ta&e on the 2ualities o$ those technologies. -he echanical cloc&, which cae into
coon use in the :Ith century, provides a copelling e/aple. In Technics and
i!i"i#ation, the historian and cultural critic #ewis +u$ord described how the cloc&
)disassociated tie $ro huan events and helped create the belie$ in an independent
world o$ atheatically easurable se2uences. -he )abstract $raewor& o$ divided
tie becae )the point o$ re$erence $or both action and thought.
-he cloc&'s ethodical tic&ing helped bring into being the scienti$ic ind and the
scienti$ic an. But it also too& soething away. "s the late +I- coputer scientist
@oseph Wei?enbau observed in his :;C< boo&, o$puter Power and %u$an Reason:
&ro$ 'udg$ent to a"cu"ation, the conception o$ the world that eerged $ro the
widespread use o$ tie&eeping instruents )reains an ipoverished version o$ the
older one, $or it rests on a re4ection o$ those direct e/periences that $ored the basis $or,
and indeed constituted, the old reality. In deciding when to eat, to wor&, to sleep, to rise,
we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the cloc&.
-he process o$ adapting to new intellectual technologies is re$lected in the changing
etaphors we use to e/plain ourselves to ourselves. When the echanical cloc& arrived,
people began thin&ing o$ their brains as operating )li&e cloc&wor&. -oday, in the age o$
so$tware, we have coe to thin& o$ the as operating )li&e coputers. But the changes,
neuroscience tells us, go uch deeper than etaphor. -han&s to our brain's plasticity, the
adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
-he Internet proises to have particularly $ar(reaching e$$ects on cognition. In a paper
published in :;J<, the British atheatician "lan -uring proved that a digital coputer,
which at the tie e/isted only as a theoretical achine, could be prograed to per$or
the $unction o$ any other in$oration(processing device. "nd that's what we're seeing
today. -he Internet, an ieasurably power$ul coputing syste, is subsuing ost o$
our other intellectual technologies. It's becoing our ap and our cloc&, our printing
press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and -K.
When the .et absorbs a ediu, that ediu is re(created in the .et's iage. It in4ects
the ediu's content with hyperlin&s, blin&ing ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it
surrounds the content with the content o$ all the other edia it has absorbed. " new e(
ail essage, $or instance, ay announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest
headlines at a newspaper's site. -he result is to scatter our attention and di$$use our
concentration.
-he .et's in$luence doesn't end at the edges o$ a coputer screen, either. "s people's
inds becoe attuned to the cra?y 2uilt o$ Internet edia, traditional edia have to
adapt to the audience's new e/pectations. -elevision progras add te/t crawls and pop(
up ads, and aga?ines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule
suaries, and crowd their pages with easy(to(browse in$o(snippets. When, in +arch o$
this year, The(ew )or* Ti$es decided to devote the second and third pages o$ every
edition to article abstracts , its design director, -o Bod&in, e/plained that the
)shortcuts would give harried readers a 2uic& )taste o$ the day's news, sparing the
the )less e$$icient ethod o$ actually turning the pages and reading the articles. *ld
edia have little choice but to play by the new(edia rules.
.ever has a counications syste played so any roles in our lives,or e/erted such
broad in$luence over our thoughts,as the Internet does today. Het, $or all that's been
written about the .et, there's been little consideration o$ how, e/actly, it's
reprograing us. -he .et's intellectual ethic reains obscure.
"bout the sae tie that .iet?sche started using his typewriter, an earnest young an
naed 0rederic& Winslow -aylor carried a stopwatch into the +idvale Steel plant in
Fhiladelphia and began a historic series o$ e/perients aied at iproving the e$$iciency
o$ the plant's achinists. With the approval o$ +idvale's owners, he recruited a group o$
$actory hands, set the to wor& on various etalwor&ing achines, and recorded and
tied their every oveent as well as the operations o$ the achines. By brea&ing down
every 4ob into a se2uence o$ sall, discrete steps and then testing di$$erent ways o$
per$oring each one, -aylor created a set o$ precise instructions,an )algorith, we
ight say today,$or how each wor&er should wor&. +idvale's eployees grubled
about the strict new regie, claiing that it turned the into little ore than autoatons,
but the $actory's productivity soared.
+ore than a hundred years a$ter the invention o$ the stea engine, the Industrial
1evolution had at last $ound its philosophy and its philosopher. -aylor's tight industrial
choreography,his )syste, as he li&ed to call it,was ebraced by anu$acturers
throughout the country and, in tie, around the world. See&ing a/iu speed,
a/iu e$$iciency, and a/iu output, $actory owners used tie(and(otion studies
to organi?e their wor& and con$igure the 4obs o$ their wor&ers. -he goal, as -aylor
de$ined it in his celebrated :;:: treatise, The Princip"es of Scientific +anage$ent , was to
identi$y and adopt, $or every 4ob, the )one best ethod o$ wor& and thereby to e$$ect
)the gradual substitution o$ science $or rule o$ thub throughout the echanic arts.
*nce his syste was applied to all acts o$ anual labor, -aylor assured his $ollowers, it
would bring about a restructuring not only o$ industry but o$ society, creating a utopia o$
per$ect e$$iciency. )In the past the an has been $irst, he declared7 )in the $uture the
syste ust be $irst.
-aylor's syste is still very uch with us7 it reains the ethic o$ industrial
anu$acturing. "nd now, than&s to the growing power that coputer engineers and
so$tware coders wield over our intellectual lives, -aylor's ethic is beginning to govern the
real o$ the ind as well. -he Internet is a achine designed $or the e$$icient and
autoated collection, transission, and anipulation o$ in$oration, and its legions o$
prograers are intent on $inding the )one best ethod,the per$ect algorith,to
carry out every ental oveent o$ what we've coe to describe as )&nowledge wor&.
Google's head2uarters, in +ountain Kiew, 9ali$ornia,the Googleple/,is the Internet's
high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is -ayloris. Google, says its
chie$ e/ecutive, 3ric Schidt, is )a copany that's $ounded around the science o$
easureent, and it is striving to )systeati?e everything it does. Drawing on the
terabytes o$ behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries
out thousands o$ e/perients a day, according to the %ar!ard Business Re!iew, and it
uses the results to re$ine the algoriths that increasingly control how people $ind
in$oration and e/tract eaning $ro it. What -aylor did $or the wor& o$ the hand,
Google is doing $or the wor& o$ the ind.
-he copany has declared that its ission is )to organi?e the world's in$oration and
a&e it universally accessible and use$ul. It see&s to develop )the per$ect search
engine, which it de$ines as soething that )understands e/actly what you ean and
gives you bac& e/actly what you want. In Google's view, in$oration is a &ind o$
coodity, a utilitarian resource that can be ined and processed with industrial
e$$iciency. -he ore pieces o$ in$oration we can )access and the $aster we can e/tract
their gist, the ore productive we becoe as thin&ers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and #arry Fage, the gi$ted young en who $ounded
Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in coputer science at Stan$ord, spea&
$re2uently o$ their desire to turn their search engine into an arti$icial intelligence, a !"#(
li&e achine that ight be connected directly to our brains. )-he ultiate search engine
is soething as sart as people,or sarter, Fage said in a speech a $ew years bac&.
)0or us, wor&ing on search is a way to wor& on arti$icial intelligence. In a E==I
interview with (ewswee* , Brin said, )9ertainly i$ you had all the world's in$oration
directly attached to your brain, or an arti$icial brain that was sarter than your brain,
you'd be better o$$. #ast year, Fage told a convention o$ scientists that Google is )really
trying to build arti$icial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.
Such an abition is a natural one, even an adirable one, $or a pair o$ ath whi??es with
vast 2uantities o$ cash at their disposal and a sall ary o$ coputer scientists in their
eploy. " $undaentally scienti$ic enterprise, Google is otivated by a desire to use
technology, in 3ric Schidt's words, )to solve probles that have never been solved
be$ore, and arti$icial intelligence is the hardest proble out there. Why wouldn't Brin
and Fage want to be the ones to crac& it?
Still, their easy assuption that we'd all )be better o$$ i$ our brains were suppleented,
or even replaced, by an arti$icial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belie$ that
intelligence is the output o$ a echanical process, a series o$ discrete steps that can be
isolated, easured, and optii?ed. In Google's world, the world we enter when we go
online, there's little place $or the $u??iness o$ conteplation. "biguity is not an
opening $or insight but a bug to be $i/ed. -he huan brain is 4ust an outdated coputer
that needs a $aster processor and a bigger hard drive.
-he idea that our inds should operate as high(speed data(processing achines is not
only built into the wor&ings o$ the Internet, it is the networ&'s reigning business odel as
well. -he $aster we sur$ across the Web,the ore lin&s we clic& and pages we view,
the ore opportunities Google and other copanies gain to collect in$oration about us
and to $eed us advertiseents. +ost o$ the proprietors o$ the coercial Internet have a
$inancial sta&e in collecting the crubs o$ data we leave behind as we $lit $ro lin& to
lin&,the ore crubs, the better. -he last thing these copanies want is to encourage
leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their econoic interest to drive us
to distraction.
+aybe I' 4ust a worrywart. @ust as there's a tendency to glori$y technological progress,
there's a countertendency to e/pect the worst o$ every new tool or achine. In Flato's
Phaedrus, Socrates beoaned the developent o$ writing. !e $eared that, as people cae
to rely on the written word as a substitute $or the &nowledge they used to carry inside
their heads, they would, in the words o$ one o$ the dialogue's characters, )cease to
e/ercise their eory and becoe $orget$ul. "nd because they would be able to
)receive a 2uantity o$ in$oration without proper instruction, they would )be thought
very &nowledgeable when they are $or the ost part 2uite ignorant. -hey would be
)$illed with the conceit o$ wisdo instead o$ real wisdo. Socrates wasn't wrong,the
new technology did o$ten have the e$$ects he $eared,but he was shortsighted. !e
couldn't $oresee the any ways that writing and reading would serve to spread
in$oration, spur $resh ideas, and e/pand huan &nowledge 5i$ not wisdo8.
-he arrival o$ Gutenberg's printing press, in the :Lth century, set o$$ another round o$
teeth gnashing. -he Italian huanist !ieronio S2uarcia$ico worried that the easy
availability o$ boo&s would lead to intellectual la?iness, a&ing en )less studious and
wea&ening their inds. *thers argued that cheaply printed boo&s and broadsheets would
underine religious authority, deean the wor& o$ scholars and scribes, and spread
sedition and debauchery. "s .ew Hor& 6niversity pro$essor 9lay Shir&y notes, )+ost o$
the arguents ade against the printing press were correct, even prescient. But, again,
the doosayers were unable to iagine the yriad blessings that the printed word would
deliver.
So, yes, you should be s&eptical o$ y s&epticis. Ferhaps those who disiss critics o$
the Internet as #uddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and $ro our hyperactive,
data(sto&ed inds will spring a golden age o$ intellectual discovery and universal
wisdo. -hen again, the .et isn't the alphabet, and although it ay replace the printing
press, it produces soething altogether di$$erent. -he &ind o$ deep reading that a
se2uence o$ printed pages prootes is valuable not 4ust $or the &nowledge we ac2uire
$ro the author's words but $or the intellectual vibrations those words set o$$ within our
own inds. In the 2uiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading o$ a
boo&, or by any other act o$ conteplation, $or that atter, we a&e our own
associations, draw our own in$erences and analogies, $oster our own ideas. Deep reading,
as +aryanne Wol$ argues, is indistinguishable $ro deep thin&ing.
I$ we lose those 2uiet spaces, or $ill the up with )content, we will sacri$ice soething
iportant not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright
1ichard 0orean elo2uently described what's at sta&e>
I coe $ro a tradition o$ Western culture, in which the ideal 5y ideal8 was the
cople/, dense and )cathedral(li&e structure o$ the highly educated and articulate
personality,a an or woan who carried inside theselves a personally constructed
and uni2ue version o$ the entire heritage o$ the West. ABut nowB I see within us all
5ysel$ included8 the replaceent o$ cople/ inner density with a new &ind o$ sel$,
evolving under the pressure o$ in$oration overload and the technology o$ the )instantly
available.
"s we are drained o$ our )inner repertory o$ dense cultural inheritance, 0orean
concluded, we ris& turning into )Gpanca&e people',spread wide and thin as we connect
with that vast networ& o$ in$oration accessed by the ere touch o$ a button.
I' haunted by that scene in 2001. What a&es it so poignant, and so weird, is the
coputer's eotional response to the disassebly o$ its ind> its despair as one circuit
a$ter another goes dar&, its childli&e pleading with the astronaut,)I can $eel it. I can $eel
it. I' a$raid,and its $inal reversion to what can only be called a state o$ innocence.
!"#'s outpouring o$ $eeling contrasts with the eotionlessness that characteri?es the
huan $igures in the $il, who go about their business with an alost robotic e$$iciency.
-heir thoughts and actions $eel scripted, as i$ they're $ollowing the steps o$ an algorith.
In the world o$ 2001, people have becoe so achineli&e that the ost huan character
turns out to be a achine. -hat's the essence o$ %ubric&'s dar& prophecy> as we coe to
rely on coputers to ediate our understanding o$ the world, it is our own intelligence
that $lattens into arti$icial intelligence.
-his article available online at>
http>MMwww.theatlantic.coMaga?ineMarchiveME==DM=CMis(google(a&ing(us(stupidM<D<DM
9opyright N E=:: by -he "tlantic +onthly Group. "ll 1ights 1eserved.