“‘Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?’ So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Nicholas Carr writes for The Atlantic. “Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says, forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.'”
“I can feel it, too,” Carr writes. “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
“I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link,” Carr writes.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Samuel K.” for the heads up.]
Not Apple-related per se, however, we do post items from time to time that we feel might be of interest to a majority of our readers.
The answer’s simple. He has Alzheimer’s.
I
@ Wil
I also suggest you check out music by Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Their shortest songs are 12 minutes long.
I tried to read this article but my mind wandered…
I have noticed the exact same thing as Mr. Carr. NIce tips, Wil.
Geez it seems like the internet has the same effect as smoking pot…it makes you…ummm…makes you….ummm….
I’m hungry…..
@ Wil, CrissyOne, et al,
Listen to Brian Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon”. One track, one hour.
Then, listen to John Cage’s immortal “4:33”. 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence performed at a grand piano.
Now, that should sooth any one’s internet addled brain. . .
I like the humor of some posts above but it’s pretty easy to be funny about such a subject. It’s a serious issue, good to see it raised and MDN follow it. The article though offers but a door which you must open and walk through to experience what is the other side.
What you get on the net, and to a great extent from other media, is information. Information is the seed. Nurture information, feed it with other things, information and those to follow here, and a tree grows. We can call the tree knowledge and many people think that knowledge is all, indeed knowledge is thinking.
But above knowledge there is understanding, which for many is a concept that is difficult to understand for lesser things attract the moniker, such is the world. The tree, when all things are right and in season, fruits. These fruits we can call understanding. It is a tiny proportion of the whole, dwarfed by the mass of the tree and the earth beneath, but the fruit is all powerful for it is the essence, food to the body and soul, beauty to the senses, and within it is the seed, of life, the future. This is not the same seed as that from which the tree started, it is a better seed enhanced by the experience of the life of the tree.
For information above you could insert education, for education is not what it seems. Education is deliberately limited, structured, it is not aimed at empowering the individual rather its purpose is to make good workers for the factories and offices of the corporations.
And for the music fans, maybe listen to:
Echoes, Pink Floyd
Terrapin Station, Grateful Dead.
The Seduction Of Claude Debussy, The Art of Noise
For brief interludes I like Calexico and James Morrison from last years KFOG. And some old stuff like Toots and the Maytals.
No time to read this garbage.
The Cure – Carnage Visors = 27 minute instrumental. It will make you want to die at least 6 times.
Synthmeister says: “BTW, I’m 50 and 2001 is a pretentious, boring movie.”
I remember walking out after seeing 2001: A Space Idiocy. I was pissed. It was a watershed moment for science fiction. A major studio had a major director making a large budget SciFi film. But they chose a crap story that was a bad example of the best SciFi fiction and the director botched even that. What a shame and what a waste!!!!
I read more books than ever, but then I commute two hours on a train everyday. I would say that for me, the internet is the primary tool thorough which I handle my finances, buy music (to the extent I can’t rip it for free), and it also serves as a temporary break from work (like right now).
That Carr believes the internet is remapping his brain probably has more to do with the pea-size of it, more than any real effect caused by the ‘net itself.
But I think many of you on this board should revere the internet as your savior, as many of you would have no human interaction without it, you sweaty-palmed geeks, you.
Woah, go Gandalf. Great words.
This is a good thread, and relevant; thanks MDN. You should be able to both scan headline texts and large volumes.
I read a review about the Sonic Youth album Washing Machine. It said it felt like it was feeding and increasing your brain power, rather than turning it to jelly like some mindless music out there.
“I read a review about the Sonic Youth album Washing Machine. It said it felt like it was feeding and increasing your brain power, rather than turning it to jelly like some mindless music out there.”
Ah, I see you’re a fan of The Cramps then.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
@ R5D4 “That Carr believes the internet is remapping his brain probably has more to do with the pea-size of it, more than any real effect caused by the ‘net itself.”
I think that the questions raised by the article are much bigger than this. Carr (‘Pea-brained’ or not) is helping us to see that thinking is not self-evident. We tend to view thought as a constant, it happens automatically, and only one way. What he is helping us to see is that what we take to be monolithic is actually varied. I can ‘read deeply’ or skim the surface. What is in danger is that we will only skim and never dive. Skimming is fun, but we are at risk of losing other things that are important…like wisdom.
@ mac@cam
I’m sorry, but all I take from the article is that the guy finds it harder to read books and articles in depth because of his internet reading habits, whether it be IM, e-mail or what have you.
This is not something I’ve experienced, so I am critical of his observations. These same arguments were no doubt posited at the beginning of the TV age. They hold no more weight now than they did then. But hey, if enough people agree with him, maybe he scores an appearance on the Today show.
I have to read in detail for a living. It is part of my job to read and make sense out of long pieces of even boring writing, so maybe for this reason I am immune to this supposed phenomenon. But more likely, this is mild (and possibly manufactured) histrionics on Carr’s part disguised as a new, real and interesting problem we should all be concerned about. You choose to buy in, I don’t.
I’m now a homo.
While I generally agree with this article, I do have to also make a counterpoint. With the immediate access to nearly unlimited information close at hand via the Internet I am often more likely to dig into a subject that I may otherwise dismiss. Watching a movie and wonder where else you have seen an actor ? Jump on the’net and research it. A word comes up in a conversation and while you know how to use it and its meaning, you can’t explain its origins. Jump on the ‘net and research it. BI (before Internet) one would have to go find the encyclopedia, call your family brainiac or consult the oracles to find an answer. And we all know how all 3 of those ‘sources’ are all too often out-of-date and out-of-touch !
Whoa…excellent post Gandalf though I lost interest halfway through.
Just kidding….I liked it!
This article is as boring as Les Miserables and almost as long. Just because one doesn’t have to rummage to shelves of dusty old books to find some obscure quote anymore doesn’t make the internet a bad for you. I have found that the internet hasn’t added to my knowledge, it’s multiplied it.
The Luddites were wrong–wait let me check Google to see when the Luddites were around–in 1811 and they are wrong now.
Technology is not making us think less or less deeply; it is only making us Think Different.
I was very fortunate to have – read – 2001 A Space Odyssey before the movie was made. My only disappointment with the movie was that is couldn’t contain all the details given in the book. Is there a lesson there?
@ R5D4
I completely agree that the hysteria is out of place. There is nothing apocolyptic about Google.
The point that I find interesting is that a lot of the people who have put effort into thinking about thinking seem to conclude that things that we take for granted about how thought proceedes can change and eventually get burried in the flux of history. One example of this is how since the advent of computers we tend to think of things as systems (immune system, social system, cognitive system). This has not always been so. Before systems, the primary metaphors were hydrolics (Descartes), and before this tools, and much before this the rays of the sun (Euclid). We tend to see the world through the lens of our latest technology. What does the world as Google and iMac look like ?
Yes, 2001 is a slow-paced movie, but I think that’s what makes it great, totally unlike any other. No wham-bam fast action in space, with photon-torpedo-laden warships turning on a dime. As I recall, Kubrick had it vetted by some of the astronauts, and they only inauthentic detail they could find was liquid dropping back down the straw when Heywood Floyd stopped drinking.
I am 41 and I also thought 2001 sucked when I watched it (in my 20s).
Anyway, the thing you got to know is, it pioneered a lot of stuff for its time.
Like the space ship coming down (and space ships in fact) into its “hangar” – that whole landing base thing is now standard in Japanese anime, American Sci Fi, etc. but they did it first there. All the stuff, video conferencing, etc. etc. etc.
So that is why people 30 years older than me were so Wow Wow over that boring movie.
It’s like trying to play Galaxian today.
(I prefer Galaga
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
I actually noticed a phenomenon way before the net was popular that I think contributes to this situation, and that is MTV. When MTV first made it’s appearance, I notice right away that the images given only lasted 1-4 seconds before a new image was given. That is common still for a lot of music videos.