… A man asked the Zen master Ikkyu  to write down some words of great wisdom.  Ikkyu wrote”attention”.  Not satisfied, the man asked for some more, so Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention”.  Still not satisfied, he demanded more, and Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention, attention”.

    From Ten Zen Questions, by Susan Blackmore.   

I just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, and while I cannot recommend it as an exquisite sample of sparkling prose, I was impressed by the arguments and research provided therein.  A counter to the glib digital cheerleaders from Google to Face Book, The Shallows essentially demonstrates how our addiction to computers and the internet is literally rewiring our brains.

I won’t regurgitate all of Carr’s evidence here.  After all, this is a blog and I have to keep it snappy or you’ll click on to something grabbier.  His conclusions, however, are stunning enough to keep even the most attention-deficited mouse-finger paralyzed for a moment.

Navigating the Web requires a particularly intensive form of mental multitasking.  In addition to flooding our working memory with information, the juggling imposes what brain scientists call “switching costs” on our cognition.  Every time we shift our attention , our brain has to reorient itself, further tasking our mental resources.  As Maggie Jackson explains … “the brain takes time to change goals, remember the new rules needed for the new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous, still-vivid activity.  Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll over look or misinterpret important information.

In short, Web-surfing is a hyperactive exercise in short-term memory.  Carr walks us through some fascinating research that shows our brains do not store memory at all like computers do.

Kobi Rosenblum, who heads the Department of Neurobiology and Ethology at the University of Haifa… has done extensive research on memory consolidation.  One of the salient lessons to emerge … is how different biological memory is from computer memory.  “… Long term memory creation in the human brain,” he says, “is one of the incredible processes which is so clearly different than ‘artificial brains’ like those in a computer.  While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed.”  Biological memory is alive.  Computer memory is not.

Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor.  They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory.  What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency.  It exists in time, changing as the body changes.   Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to from new synaptic terminals.  Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again.  When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context.…   Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal.  The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits, you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were.

Human beings are compelled to impute some version of our own consciousness to nearly anything and everything we see, so long as it appears to change.  Even trees in a breeze can seem eerily aware to us.  One theory holds that on the evolutionary timeline the suspicion of consciousness in other beings actually proceeded full-blown consciousness in ourselves.  That is, we learned to think by first learning to predict what others might be thinking—even if they weren’t actually thinking.  “As if” gave birth to “as is.” (And now my Web-scrambbled brain suddenly retrieves one of The Onion’s most brilliant Point/Counterpoints: My Computer Totally Hates Me! vs. God, Do I Hate That Bitch.)

Carr quotes Jason Mitchell, head of Harvard’s Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience Lab: 

The “chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought” can, writes Mitchell, lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in inanimate objects.”  There’s growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined.

By believing the internet is somehow “intelligent”, we are literally rewiring ourselves to be as stupid, scattered and shallow as it is.  One thing missing from The Shallows is an antidote to the neural degeneration that Carr so assiduously documents.  Can you guess the one I might suggest?

Theatre brooks no distraction. You are trapped in a dark room and forced to impute “intelligence” to the brains of actors.  In the theatre, four dimensions of time and space merge to a singular awareness, and the barrier between “within-you” and “without-you” blurs.  You can zero in on the action or zone out of it, but wherever your attention wanders it eventually has to come back, whether you like it or not, to where you sit and what you see and hear from there.  (This is why bad theatre is so stupendously more excruciating to sit through than bad film or television.)  The light your eyes receive is inextricably bound to the air that vibrates your eardrums, activated as it is by the breath of an actor and shared in the lungs of everyone present.  Shakespeare was wrong—or, more likely, purposefully lying—when he suggested that the stage is a place for illusion.  Theatre is nothing but concentrated actuality.  We should all go once in a while if only to pay ourselves some simple human attention.