Future Minds

How the Digital Age Is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters and What We Can Do About It
Author: Richard Watson
Genre: nonfiction
Publication info: Nicholas Brealey, 2010
Pages: 213

I wish everybody would read this book, and I mean everybody. If I had the money to do it, I would buy a copy for everyone I know. Anyone who knows me is welcome to borrow this from me. This is a topic that I care deeply about, especially lately, and I wish everyone would give it some thought.

The subject of the book is clear enough from the subtitle: the omnipresence of digital devices and social media in today's society is fundamentally changing the way we think and interact with other people. I've talked about this before in my review of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (which Watson references multiple times in this book). Basically, we are so constantly filling up our time with instant information and digital diversions that we leave no time for deep, reflective thinking.

And it is deep, reflective, original, creative thinking that sets us apart as humans. Here is the scary thing that Watson points out. We know that computers are getting smarter. Google and Facebook know who you are. They can identify you in photographs and can figure out where the pictures were taken. But they became that smart only because humans made them that way. As capable as computers are, they are only good at solving predefined problems and processing data that is given to them. But they have no ability for dreaming up new ideas or asking original questions. As Watson puts it, "In the future a computer might be able to recognize a picture and tell you that it was painted in 1643 by Jan Josephsz. van Goyen [actually, it probably already can], but even then, you are unlikely to get an emotional response and even less likely to find that the computer becomes inspired and rushes off to paint something itself." It's the humans' place to do that.

But we are forfeiting our own thinking. We are increasingly relying on computers to do all our thinking and remembering for us, and we are always frantically searching for the next new bit of information. We're pulling out our phones in the middle of conversations, at the dinner table, in every quiet moment that we have. With all this, there is no time for original thinking, and without original thinking, there is nothing to set us apart from machines. Our obsession with the digital world is destroying what makes us who we are.

The point is that we need to scale back our fanaticism with everything digital. That isn't to say, as Watson states, that everything electronic is intrinsically evil, but we shouldn't be so eager to let it replace analogue forms of media and real, physical interaction with people. There needs to be a balance. There is an important role for physical books. Say what you will about how much more convenient ebooks are, you simply will not do the same calm, reflective thinking with those as you will with print media. Your mind is just not in the same state. Call me crazy, but physical books are irreplaceable. Just because something is more convenient doesn't always mean that it's better.

The great thing about this book is that it gives us ideas for what we can do about this crisis. The most important, I think, is that we just give ourselves time and space to think. That means putting away the phone, turning off the computer, and just thinking. When was the last time you just looked out the window in the car (when you're not driving, of course)? When was the last time you went for a walk and did nothing but look at the world around you? When was the last time you just sat and daydreamed? We need more of this as humans, but the trend is that these activities are diminishing.

Watson expresses all this much better than I do (although he does seem to ramble a bit sometimes, and possibly contradict himself), so I will end with another quote from him: "Given the fact that we seem to be capable of inventing more or less anything these days, perhaps a question we should be asking ourselves more frequently in the future is not whether we can invent something but whether we should."

Please, please read this book. And even more important, after you've read it, think about it.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Author: Nicholas Carr
Genre: nonfiction, popular science
Publication info: W. W. Norton, 2010
Pages: 276 (including notes and other supplemental material)

I feel like a hypocrite writing about this on a blog, but I need to get the word out. In The Shallows, author Nicholas Carr brings together the history of technology and neurology to explore how the World Wide Web is changing the way we read and write—and think. What he finds is not pretty.

Actually, it's more than not pretty. It's downright disturbing. If you're reading this blog, you're probably a frequent user of the Internet, so let me ask you: When you are reading a book, do you often get distracted and want to do something else after only two pages? Heck, do you even read books anymore? Do you find it difficult to go walking for any substantial length of time without pulling out your phone, even if nobody is calling or texting you? Your Internet use may be to blame. And it probably is.

You see, the Internet is changing the way our brains work. A few decades ago scientists began discovering that the human brain, even in adults, can be "rewired" to accommodate changing behaviors, both physical and mental. Basically, the brain gets better and faster at what it does the most. And since it's more than likely that most of us are using the Internet with increasing frequency, our brains are adjusting themselves to a style of thinking better suited to the Internet.

What style is that? It's fast. It's superficial. It's distracted. If you haven't noticed, Web pages are designed to distract you. They're full of snippets of information here, a navigation bar there, pictures and a video you can play over there. Not to mention your browser's multiple tabs and all the alerts it's set to give you for e-mails, blog posts, or Twitter updates. I'm not accusing Web designers of sinister motives, but the plain fact is that the Web is made for giving you an onslaught of information all at once.

And our brains are burdened with processing all that information. With every link we come across, our brains have to decide whether to follow it. We have to skim pages to get the information we need fast. (My guess is this blog post already looks too long for frequent blog readers.) And since our brains are "plastic," or adaptable, they rewire themselves to be more efficient at this kind of thinking.

What gets sacrificed as a result is our ability to think deeply and creatively. Yes, maybe our brains are faster at processing a lot of information fast, but only at a superficial level. By frequently taking advantage of what the Web has to offer, we are denying ourselves the ability to synthesize the information we receive and produce original thought. Doesn't that sound scary to you? I guess it all depends on what's important to you, but I certainly place a high value on deep and creative thinking.

Everybody please, please read this book. I hate to be an alarmist, but I feel this is very important. Carr does an excellent job describing relevant research and presenting a coherent argument, much better than I've done here. Plus, by reading a book like this, you're doing a brain a favor. Because the good news is that since our brains can adjust to more frequent Internet use, they can also be trained back. With a lot of discipline, we can become free thinkers again.