This is Your Brain on Facebook

Pictured at right is a room full of extremely energetic, inattentive and adorable first graders with whom I have the pleasure of “teaching” every Wednesday afternoon. These kids are amped up – released from the control of a school classroom, they come over to the church across the street, where they get Pastor Keith to teach them about Jesus and the Bible for an hour. I do not make for a very productive first grade teacher. Most of my hour is spent trying to get them to sit for longer than ten seconds – make that three. I thought getting them into the sanctuary or the fellowship hall would help, but all I’ve done is give them more space to run, squirm and bounce around like spastic superballs shot out of a machine gun. In a word: chaos. They are always moving and have the attention span of squirrels on crack-cocaine. I have lots of love for these little ones, but I will need a much improved game-plan from here on out if I expect to keep my head from spinning off my neck.

As intriguing as these tiny terrors have been, I have decided to offer you some interesting parallels between these first grade pupils and what is happening to our brains, perhaps even at this very moment, as we utilize the ‘Interweb.’ After deciding to trade ignorance for enlightenment, I took on the intellectual and thoughtful reading of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr.  Maybe you’ve also noticed changes in your mental capacities and practices, or maybe you’ve never given it a second thought, but this subject has become somewhat of a fascination of late, especially as I’ve become immersed in prenatal reading materials discussing how our bodies and brains develop. 

“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.” (The Shallows, page 7)

I think most of us find ourselves on Jet Skis too. For all of the benefits of the web, and don’t get me wrong, there are many, this book has opened to me some startling consequences of our consumption of the Internet’s instant information and stimulation.  Perhaps the most negative affect of our incessant web use is the overall loss of sustained concentration we suffer. Like energetic and inattentive first graders, our brains are constantly distracted, not able to idle for longer than a few seconds before we crave additional stimulation.  Whether you’re on Facebook or Google, we are actually encouraging our brains to succumb to A.D.D.  “Our goal,’ says Irene Au (of Google), ‘is to get users in and out really quickly’…In other words, as author Nicholas Carr puts it, “Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction.” (Page 157)

So what?  What’s the big deal?  I love the ease of Google. I love being able to find just about any answer by typing in a few key words and clicking “Search.” I still can’t believe most of my childhood homework assignments required use of the card catalog. But despite the awesomeness of the internet, I realize there is probably a significant part of me that has been numbed or eroded. “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.” (pg. 116)  Then it dawned on me: do I really want to become a shallow minded thinker? Do I want to lose my ability to ponder and imagine, contemplate and create?

“The constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.” (pg. 140) So, again, with the positives come the negatives. This constant desire to be connected every where, all the time, can be extremely helpful. On the other hand, ‘To be everywhere is to be nowhere.’ (Seneca, ancient Roman philosopher) I know I’m not the first person to make that conclusion - we've all been victims of either our own inattentiveness or others' while multitasking, but the desire for connectedness through our technology and web applications may in fact be leading to the opposite result:

“The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers—as we come to experience more of our lives through the disembodied symbols flickering across our screens—is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines.” (pgs. 207-08)

I could go on and on. The book was really, really interesting. It devotes a chapter on how we formulate memories which had me hooked – it was like a Harry Potter novel, I couldn’t put it down. Did you know that “the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory?” The bottom line is that I want you to at least be aware that time spent online is rewiring your brain, and in not all good ways. I know that sounds dramatic and dreary, but it’s true. For me, staying sharp and having the ability to concentrate, contemplate and be creative is core to who I am as a person, so knowing and understanding a bit more of what happens to my neural circuits and synapses when I make multiple fantasy baseball transactions or check my email every hour is crucial to my future and overall well-being.  The same holds true for those of you online right now, reading this blog post – beware, be disciplined and be “attentive to what we stand to lose. How sad it would be, particularly when it comes to the nurturing of our children’s minds, if we were to accept without question the idea that ‘human elements’ are outmoded and dispensable.” (Pg. 224)

Obviously scaling back our internet use cold turkey is difficult, if not impossible in a culture such as ours. But, we do have choices and we can all make adjustments, and hey, you’re always welcome to join me in the Non-Facebook Club! Finally, if retaining depth and creativity is of importance to you, make sure you get outside for a nature hike now and then or better yet, go spend some time being in-tents!