Sheltering from this Virus Can Help Make You Smart Again (Or Maybe for the First time)
By: Charles Gray
Tags: Studying, Brain, Cognition, Learning, Reading

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

In a now famous 2008 Atlantic essay, Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

His answer at that time was something like, “Well, not exactly stupid, but something less focussed than what we were, especially if you are my age or older.”

It seems that Carr had begun noticing a shortening of his attention span that was manifesting itself in a reduced ability to read more than a few paragraphs of text without experiencing urges to check his email or the latest news headlines. Sitting down to an evening’s indulgence in the text of War and Peace or Moby-Dick, as he might have done in years past, seemed impossible, and his friends were reporting similar experiences to his own.

Ironically, Carr used a tense sequence from Stanley Kubric’s iconic but famously plodding film 2001: A Space Odyssey to illustrate his perceptions concerning his developing attention predicament. The sequence takes place on an automated spaceship headed for one of Jupiter’s moons, and the onboard supercomputer, HAL, is pleading with the only remaining conscious human, Dave, to stop the process of shutting it down.

Floating in front of a large number of HAL’s memory cells, Dave slowly turns a key in one cell after another, shutting each one down in sequence. HAL reports that it can feel its mind “going,” and keeps repeating its pleas for Dave to stop. Eventually, the formidable HAL is reduced in capacity to the extent that it can only sing a simple song as it fades into oblivion.

Kubrick’s riveting portrayal of HAL’s “consciousness” slowly fading is an ironic choice for Carr’s illustration, as its visual brilliance exemplifies his claim while supporting it conceptually.

Carr recognized in 2008 that the Internet was becoming the universal medium, replacing television, which had already replaced print. And, as Marshall McLuhan had argued in the 1960’s, the medium does much more than carry the messages: it shapes the message. The medium, in fact, is the message.

The Internet’s colossal kineticism, Carr concluded, was “chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation,” leaving him a sorrowing observer of the demise of his own cognitive abilities.

Carr lined up 21st-century neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and sociologists to augment McLuhan’s profound 1960’s insight about the medium shaping the message and adumbrated a brighter cognitive future.

He alluded in a couple of places to Maryanne Wolf’s fascinating book on the history and neuroscience of reading, Proust and the Squid, in which she argues that since writers of ideographic writing systems, such as Chinese, show different neural patterns from writers of alphabetic writing systems, such as English, we can expect that different media will cause us to use and develop different brain circuitry.

Carr went on to describe the work of George Mason University neuroscientist James Olds, who claims that, unlike our muscles’ slow and incremental adjustment to weight training, for instance, “the brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

To this, Carr added the more subjective observation of sociologist Daniel Bell, who claims that we take on the characteristics of our intellectual technologies. Presumably that means that we become more precise in some way as our timepieces become more accurate, or we get more mentally scattered as we monitor high-velocity visual media.

All of these writers contributed to Carr’s conclusion that the Internet was programming us, and one of the detrimental effects of this was that we were losing our ability to sustain concentration over extended periods.

A striking irony in all of this is that our current circumstance of sheltering in place as we fight this coronavirus, is probably causing many of us to spend even more time than ever engaging with digital media. I find this ironic because that is certainly my current plight, being a college instructor, whose classes are now all online, yet, I have discovered that I am again reading much as I did in pre-Internet days.

And that observation: that I am reading as I did before Google, has caused me to remember Carr’s rhetorical question from 2008 and allows me to give a very hopeful answer.

To the question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I would answer, “It kind of is, in a way,” because I agree with Maryanne Wolf that “we are how we read” and “deep reading is deep thinking.” And the Internet (not just Google) is causing us to read in a less sustained, less concentrated way then we did when books were books, and they didn’t jump around, twinkle, rotate, beep, or break into song spontaneously.

I studied English Literature and philosophy in the seventies, and I had to read for hours daily to keep up with course work and do research for the writing required of a graduate student. I didn’t think much of it at the time because that was what the study of humanities had always been, and that is what I wanted for myself.

But in the years since the World-Wide-Web took over as the dominant medium, I have read not less, but less intensively. I have read entire novels or books of nonfiction mostly because I was teaching them in my classes; less as a normal part of my day, as I had done for most of my life. When I had free time, I watched films or TV series such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, and other high quality shows that suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

Exactly what Nicholas Carr described in 2008 had happened to me. I had become an English instructor who rarely read novels outside of work. But, with the current coronavirus restrictions, I have found that it is not very difficult to go back to the old, old ways: the ways before Internet (BI).

Now, you would not be blamed for thinking something like, “Oh, sure, but you’re an old guy who already had those habits. It’s no big thing for you to go back to something you used to do. What about all of us who have grown up online? There is no way we are going to be able to sit around for hours doing pretty close to nothing.”

But that is the real message of Carr’s famous article: the brain’s plasticity is what is making it seem as though we are getting stupider (more distracted), when what is really happening is that we are adjusting to the media we are experiencing. And since research indicates that we make these adjustments on the fly, there seems no reason why we can’t adjust back to print, if that is what we really want to do.

I am not claiming that this adjustment is effortless; it is going to hurt a little, just as it would hurt a little (more than a little) if you decided to do 100 pushups a day for three months. Your body has to adjust; that is the point of the challenge. But you will be stronger and more aware of your real capacities when you have taken the challenge.

So, here is the challenge; it is not complicated. Set yourself the task of finishing one novel and one nonfiction book every month for three months. Then reduce the time frame from two books in a month to two books in three weeks, and do that for three cycles. Then reduce the time frame to two weeks, and maintain that pace forever.

That is a lifetime practice of reading two novels and two nonfiction books per month. Your brain will rewire itself for deep reading during the “training” period, and you will see positive changes in your confidence, mood, and general approach to life. Oh, and incidentally, you will find that more and more, you will be the smartest person in the room. There has to be a smartest person in every room, and no one else is going to be on your reading regime, so that person is going to be you.

So, what should you read? Anything you like, is the best answer. I am an English teacher, so I recommend googling “best American novels” and starting with the first one that grabs your interest.

On the nonfiction side, I would go to Wikipedia and look up “Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.” There you will find a list going back several decades. I would start with 2019 and work backwards until you find something that grabs your attention.

Alternatively, you could think of a subject that interests you; let’s say “car racing” as an example. You can google “10 best books on car racing” and see what books others have found interesting.

Most of the really accomplished people alive now, and all of the ones from previous generations have been serious readers. It takes time to read; there is no getting around that, but it makes you smarter (by wiring your brain for sustained engagement with complex ideas, and it makes you feel good in several ways.

If you start this challenge now, instead of binge-watching Tiger King or Breaking Bad, or whatever, you will get past the hard part while we are in this current coronavirus mess, and you will enter your post-virus life a smarter and more confident person.

I challenge you!