is the internet killing our brains essay

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• World Psychiatry
• v.18(2); 2019 Jun

The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition

Joseph firth.

1 NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University, Westmead, Australia

2 Division of Psychology and Mental Health, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

3 Centre for Youth Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

John Torous

4 Division of Digital Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Brendon Stubbs

5 Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK

6 Physiotherapy Department, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

Josh A. Firth

7 Department of Zoology, Edward Grey Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

8 Merton College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Genevieve Z. Steiner

9 Translational Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia

10 Cambridge Centre for Sport and Exercise Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

Mario Alvarez‐Jimenez

11 Orygen, The National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

John Gleeson

12 School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

Davy Vancampfort

13 Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

14 University Psychiatric Center, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Christopher J. Armitage

15 NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, Manchester, UK

16 NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, Manchester, UK

Jerome Sarris

17 Professorial Unit, The Melbourne Clinic, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia

The impact of the Internet across multiple aspects of modern society is clear. However, the influence that it may have on our brain structure and functioning remains a central topic of investigation. Here we draw on recent psychological, psychiatric and neuroimaging findings to examine several key hypotheses on how the Internet may be changing our cognition. Specifically, we explore how unique features of the online world may be influencing: a) attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources, at the expense of sustained concentration; b) memory processes, as this vast and ubiquitous source of online information begins to shift the way we retrieve, store, and even value knowledge; and c) social cognition, as the ability for online social settings to resemble and evoke real‐world social processes creates a new interplay between the Internet and our social lives, including our self‐concepts and self‐esteem. Overall, the available evidence indicates that the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in each of these areas of cognition, which may be reflected in changes in the brain. However, an emerging priority for future research is to determine the effects of extensive online media usage on cognitive development in youth, and examine how this may differ from cognitive outcomes and brain impact of uses of Internet in the elderly. We conclude by proposing how Internet research could be integrated into broader research settings to study how this unprecedented new facet of society can affect our cognition and the brain across the life course.

The Internet is the most widespread and rapidly adopted technology in the history of humanity. In only decades, Internet use has completely re‐invented the ways in which we search for information, consume media and entertainment, and manage our social networks and relationships. With the even more recent advent of smartphones, Internet access has become portable and ubiquitous to the point at which the population of the developed world can be considered “online” 1 , 2 , 3 .

However, the impact that this new channel for connection, information, communication, and screen time is having on our brains and cognitive functioning is unclear. Prior to the Internet, a large body of research had convincingly demonstrated that the brain is somewhat malleable to environmental demands and stimuli, particularly with regards to learning new processes, due to its capacity for neuroplasticity 4 . Various scenarios have been observed to induce long‐term changes in the neuronal architecture of the human brain, including second‐language acquisition 5 , learning new motor skills (such as juggling) 6 , and even formal education or exam preparation 7 . The widespread use of the Internet across the globe has introduced, for many, the necessity and opportunity to learn a myriad of new skills and ways to interact with society, which could bring about neural changes. As an example, even simple interactions with the Internet through the smartphone's touchscreen interface have been demonstrated to bring about sustained neurocognitive alterations due to neural changes in cortical regions associated with sensory and motor processing of the hand and thumb 8 . Beyond this, the Internet also presents a novel platform for almost‐endless learning of new information and complex processes, relevant to both the online and offline world 9 .

Along with neuroplastic mechanisms, other environmental and biological factors can also cause changes in the brain's structure and function, resulting in cognitive decline 10 . In aging samples, for instance, there is evidence to indicate that age‐related cognitive decline may be partly driven by a process of atrophy. Some studies have shown that adopting a less engaging lifestyle across the lifespan may accelerate loss of cognitive function 11 , due to lower “cognitive reserve” (the ability of the brain to withstand insult from age and/or pathology) 12 . Some emerging evidence indicates that disengaging from the “real world” in favor of virtual settings may similarly induce adverse neurocognitive changes. For example, a recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) 13 found that six weeks of engaging in an online role playing game caused significant reductions in grey matter within the orbitofrontal cortex – a brain region implicated in impulse control and decision making. However, the study did not address the extent to which these results were specific to online gaming, rather than general internet usage. Nonetheless, this raises the possibility that various types of Internet usage could differentially affect the brain and cognitive processes – in both adverse and beneficial ways. This may be of particular relevance to the developing brains of children and adolescents, as many cognitive processes (particularly those relevant to higher executive functions and social cognition) are not entirely innate, but rather are strongly influenced by environmental factors 14 .

Although only recently emerging, this possibility has led to a substantial body of research empirically investigating the multiple potential pathways through which the Internet could affect our brains’ structure, function, and cognitive development. Specifically, the bulk of existing research can be separated into three specific domains, examining how the internet is affecting: a) attention (i.e., how the constant influx of online information, prompts and notifications competing for our attention may encourage individuals to displace their concentration across multiple incoming media streams – and the consequences this may have for attentional‐switching versus sustained‐attention tasks); b) memory and knowledge (i.e., the extent to which we rely on the Internet as our primary informational resource, and how unique properties of online information access may affect how we process new memories and value our internal knowledge); c) social cognition (along with the personal and societal consequences of increasingly embedding our social networks, interactions, and status within the online world).

In this state‐of‐the‐art review, we present the current leading hypotheses of how the Internet may alter these cognitive processes, subsequently examining the extent to which these hypotheses are supported by recent findings from psychological, psychiatric and neuroimaging research. In this way, we aggregate the contemporary evidence arising from multiple fields of research to produce revised models on how the Internet may be affecting our brains and cognition. Furthermore, whereas studies to date have focused upon only specific age groups, we examine the effects of the Internet on the human brain across the entire life course. In particular, we explore how the potential benefits/drawbacks of extensive Internet integration with cognitive processes may differ among children and older adults. Finally, we identify important gaps in the existing literature to present key priorities for future research in order to gain new insights for minimizing detrimental effects of the Internet, while capitalizing on this new feature of our societies to potentially influence neurocognitive processes in a beneficial way.

“DIGITAL DISTRACTIONS”: A HIJACK OF ATTENTION ON THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY?

How does the internet gain and sustain our attention.

The Internet consumes a considerable chunk of our attention on a day‐to‐day basis. The vast majority of adults go online daily, and over a quarter report being online “almost constantly” 2 . Within this, one in five American adults are now “smartphone‐only” Internet users 1 . Importantly, the introduction of these Internet‐enabled mobile devices has also reduced the “digital divide” previously experienced by lower and middle income countries 15 . The amount and frequency of Internet usage is even more pronounced amongst younger people. Most adults today witnessed the beginning of the transition from “Internet‐free” to “Internet‐everywhere” societies. However, younger generations (termed “digital natives” 16 ) have been brought up entirely within a “connected world” , particularly in developed countries. Consequently, digital natives are often the first to adopt new online technologies as they arise 16 , and engage extensively with all existing features of the Internet. For instance, 95% of US teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% are online “almost constantly” 3 .

Multiple factors are driving the rapid uptake and extensive usage of Internet‐enabled technologies across the globe. This is partly due to the Internet now being unavoidable, ubiquitous, and a highly functional aspect of modern living. For instance, Internet use is now deeply entwined with education, travel, socializing, commerce, and the majority of workplaces. Along with pragmatic uses, the Internet also offers an endless array of recreational and entertainment activities, through podcasts, e‐books, videos, streaming movies and gaming. However, the ability of the Internet to capture and hold attention is not solely due to the quality of media content available online. Rather, it is also driven by the underlying design and presentation of the online world. One such example is the self‐evolving “attraction mechanism”; whereby aspects of the Internet that fail to gain attention are quickly drowned out in the sea of incoming information, while the successful aspects of the adverts, articles, apps or anything that does manage to capture our attention (even superficially) are logged (through clicks and scrolls), noticed (through online shares), and subsequently proliferated and expanded upon. Alongside this, leading technology companies have been accused of intentionally capitalizing on the addictive potential of Internet, by studying, testing, and refining the attention‐grabbing aspects of their websites and applications (“apps”) to promote extremely high levels of engagement, without due concern for user well‐being 17 .

Furthermore, even when not using the Internet for any specific purpose, smartphones have introduced widespread and habitual “checking” behaviours, characterized by quick but frequent inspections of the device for incoming information from news, social media, or personal contacts 18 . These habits are thought to be the result of behavioural reinforcement from “information rewards” that are received immediately on checking the device 19 , potentially engaging the cortico‐striatal dopaminergic system due to their readily available nature 20 . The variable‐ratio reinforcement schedule inherent to device checking may further perpetuate these compulsive behaviours 21 .

Cognitive consequences of the attention‐grabbing Internet

The unprecedented potential of the Internet to capture our attention presents an urgent need for understanding the impact that this may have on our thought processes and well‐being. Already, education providers are beginning to perceive detrimental effects of the Internet on children's attention, with over 85% of teachers endorsing the statement that “today's digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation” 22 . The primary hypothesis on how the Internet affects our attentional capacities is through hyperlinks, notifications, and prompts providing a limitless stream of different forms of digital media, thus encouraging us to interact with multiple inputs simultaneously, but only on a shallow level, in a behavioural pattern termed “media multi‐tasking” 23 , 24 .

The seminal study by Ophir et al 23 was among the first to explore the sustained impact of media multi‐tasking on cognitive capacities. This was a cross‐sectional study of individuals who engaged in “heavy” (i.e., frequent and extensive) media multi‐tasking compared to those who did not. Cognitive testing of the two groups produced the then‐surprising finding that those involved in heavy media multi‐tasking performed worse in task‐switching tests than their counterparts – contrary to the authors’ expectation that the “extra practice” afforded by frequent media multi‐tasking would confer cognitive benefit in task‐switching scenarios. Closer inspection of findings suggested that the impeded task‐switching ability in heavy media multi‐tasking individuals was due to their increased susceptibility to distraction from irrelevant environmental stimuli 23 .

Since these initial findings, the effects of media multi‐tasking on cognition have come under increasing scrutiny, because the increasingly diverse forms of entertainment and activities available through the online world can further our capabilities (and temptation) of engaging in media multi‐tasking 25 , even on single devices. For instance, Yeykelis et al 26 measured participants’ media multi‐tasking between different types of online media content while using just one device (personal laptops), and found that switches occurred as frequently as every 19 seconds, with 75% of all on‐screen content being viewed for less than one minute. Measures of skin conductance during the study found that arousal increased in the seconds leading up to media switching, reaching a high point at the moment of the switch, followed by a decline afterward 26 . Again, this suggests that the proclivity for alternating between different computer windows, opening new hyperlinks, and performing new searches could be driven by the readily available nature of the informational rewards, which are potentially awaiting in the unattended media stream. Supporting this, the study also found that, whereas switching from work‐related content to entertainment was associated with increased arousal in anticipation of the switch, there was no anticipatory arousal spike associated with entertainment to work‐content switches 26 .

The growing concern around the increasing amount of media multi‐tasking with the spread of ubiquitous Internet access has resulted in further empirical studies. These have produced conflicting findings, with some failing to find any adverse effects on attention 27 , and others indicating that media multi‐tasking may even be linked to increased performance for other aspects of cognition, such as multisensory integration 28 . Nonetheless the literature, on balance, does seem to indicate that those who engage in frequent and extensive media multi‐tasking in their day‐to‐day lives perform worse in various cognitive tasks than those who do not, particularly for sustained attention 25 .

Imaging studies have shed light onto the neural differences which may account for these cognitive deficits. Functionally, those who engage in heavy media multi‐tasking perform poorer in distracted attention tasks, even though exhibiting greater activity in right prefrontal regions 29 . As right prefrontal regions are typically activated in response to distractor stimuli, the observed increases in recruitment of these regions alongside poorer performance suggests that heavy media multi‐taskers require greater cognitive effort to maintain concentration when faced with distractor stimuli 29 . Structurally, high levels of Internet usage 30 and heavy media multi‐tasking 31 are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions associated with maintaining goals in face of distraction (such as the right frontal pole and anterior cingulate cortex). However, the findings to date must be interpreted with caution, as various confounding factors may be affecting the results of these cross‐sectional imaging studies. Although the differences persist when controlling for general digital media use and other simple confounders (age, gender, etc.), further research is required to examine if the observed neural differences are specifically attributable to heavy vs. light media multi‐tasking, or in fact driven by broader differences in lifestyle between the two groups.

Given the amount of time that people now spend in media multi‐tasking via personal digital devices, it is increasingly relevant to consider not only sustained changes which arise in those who engage in large amounts of media multi‐tasking, but also the acute effects on immediate cognitive capacities. A meta‐analysis of 41 studies showed that engaging in multi‐tasking was associated with significantly poorer overall cognitive performance, with a moderate‐to‐large effect size (Cohen's d=–0.71, 95% CI: –0.86 to –0.57). This has been confirmed by more recent studies, further showing that even short‐term engagement with an extensively hyperlinked online environment (i.e., online shopping for 15 minutes) reduces attentional scope for a sustained duration after coming offline, whereas reading a magazine does not produce these deficits 32 .

Overall, the available evidence strongly indicates that engaging in multi‐tasking via digital media does not improve our multi‐tasking performance in other settings – and in fact seems to decrease this cognitive capacity through reducing our ability to ignore incoming distractions. Much of the multi‐tasking investigations so far have been focusing on personal computers. However, smartphone technologies may even further encourage people to engage in media multi‐tasking through high rates of incoming prompts from emails, direct messages and social media notifications occurring while both using and not using the device. Thus, along with determining long‐term consequences of media multi‐tasking, future research should examine how the constant multi‐tasking made possible by Internet‐enabled mobile devices may impact daily functioning through acute but high frequency effects.

Furthermore, both the immediate and chronic effects of media multi‐tasking are relatively unexplored in children and adolescents, who are the prime users of such technologies 33 and are at a phase of development that is crucial for refining higher cognitive abilities 14 . The first longitudinal study of media multi‐tasking in young people has recently found that frequent multi‐tasking behaviours do predict the development of attentional deficits specifically in early adolescents, but not in older teens 34 . Additionally, extensive media multi‐tasking during childhood and adolescence could also negatively impact cognitive development through indirect means, by reducing engagement with academic and social activities, as well as by interfering with sleep 35 , or reducing the opportunity to engage in creative thinking 36 , 37 . Clearly, further research is necessary to properly measure the effects of ubiquitous computing on children's cognitive development, and to find practical ways for ameliorating any detrimental impact this may be having.

“iFORMATION”: NEUROCOGNITIVE RESPONSES TO ONLINE INFORMATION GATHERING

The internet and transactive memory.

In response to the question “How has the Internet changed your life?” , some common answers include finding new friends, renewing old friendships, studying online, finding romantic relationships, furthering career opportunities, shopping, and travel 38 . However, the most common answer is people stating that the Internet has “changed the way in which they access information” 38 . Indeed, for the first time in human history, the majority of people living in the developed world have access to almost all factual information in existence literally at their fingertips.

Along with the obvious advantages, this unique situation also introduces the possibility of the Internet ultimately negating or replacing the need for certain human memory systems – particularly for aspects of “semantic memory” (i.e., memory of facts) – which are somewhat independent from other types of memory in the human brain 39 . An initial indication of Internet information gathering affecting typical memory processes was provided by Sparrow et al 40 , who demonstrated that the ability to access information online caused people to become more likely to remember where these facts could be retrieved rather than the facts themselves, indicating that people quickly become reliant on the Internet for information retrieval.

It could be argued that this is not unique to the Internet, but rather just an example of the online world acting as a form of external memory or “transactive memory” 40 , 41 . Transactive memory has been an integral part of human societies for millennia, and refers to the process by which people opt to outsource information to other individuals within their families, communities, etc., such that they are able to just remember the source of the knowledge, rather than attempting to store all of this information themselves 41 . Although beneficial at a group level, using transactive memory systems does reduce an individual's ability to recall the specifics of the externally stored information 42 . This may be due to individuals using transactive memory for “cognitive offloading” , implicitly reducing their allocation of cognitive resources towards remembering this information, since they know this will be available for future reference externally. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in multiple contexts, including those of team work 43 and other “non‐Internet” technologies (e.g., photography reducing individuals’ memories of the objects they photographed) 44 .

However, it is becoming clear that the Internet actually presents something entirely novel and distinct from previous transactive memory systems 45 , 46 . Crucially, the Internet seems to bypass the “transactional” aspect that is inherent to other forms of cognitive offloading in two ways. First, the Internet does not place any responsibility on the user to retain unique information for others to draw upon (as would typically be required in human societies) 45 . Second, unlike other transactive memory stores, the Internet acts as a single entity that is responsible for holding and retrieving virtually all factual information, and thus does not require individuals to remember what exact information is externally stored, or even where it is located. In this way, the Internet is becoming a “supernormal stimulus” 46 for transactive memory – making all other options for cognitive offloading (including books, friends, community) become redundant, as they are outcompeted by the novel capabilities for external information storage and retrieval made possible by the Internet.

How does a supernormal stimulus interact with normal cognition?

Unfortunately, the rapid methods of acquisition and constant availability of information afforded by the Internet may not necessarily lead to better use of information gained. For instance, an experimental study 47 found that individuals instructed to search for specific information online completed the information gathering task faster than those using printed encyclopedias, but were subsequently less able to recall the information accurately.

During Internet and encyclopedia information gathering tasks, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine activation in the ventral and dorsal streams. These regions are referred to as the “what” and “where” streams, respectively, due to their indicated roles in storing either the specific content (ventral stream) or external location (dorsal stream) of incoming information 47 . Although there was no difference in activation of the dorsal stream, results showed that the poorer recall of Internet‐sought information compared to encyclopedia‐based learning was associated with reduced activation of the ventral (“what”) stream during online information gathering. These findings further support the possibility, initially raised by Sparrow et al 40 , that online information gathering, while faster, may fail to sufficiently recruit brain regions for storing information on a long‐term basis.

The potential for online searching to produce a sustained impact upon our cognitive processes has been investigated in a series of studies examining pre‐post changes following a six‐day Internet search training paradigm. In these studies, young adults were given an hour per day of Internet search tasks, and undertook an array of cognitive and neuroimaging assessments pre‐ and post‐training. Results showed that the six‐day Internet search training reduced regional homogeneity and functional connectivity of brain areas involved in long‐term memory formation and retrieval (e.g., temporal gyrus) 48 . This indicates that a reliance on online searching may impede memory retrieval by reducing the functional connectivity and synchronization of associated brain regions 48 . Furthermore, when faced with new questions after the six days, the training had increased participants’ self‐reported impulses towards using the Internet to answer those questions, which was reflected in a recruitment of prefrontal brain areas required for behavioural and impulse control 49 . This increased propensity for relying on Internet searches for gathering new information has been replicated in subsequent studies 50 , and is in keeping with the “supernormal stimulus” nature of the Internet, potentially suggesting that online information gathering quickly trains people to become dependent on this tool when faced with unknown issues.

However, despite the possible adverse effects on regular “offline” memory, the six‐days training did make people more efficient at using the Internet for retrieving information, as participants became faster at the search tasks, with no loss of accuracy 51 . Search training also produced increases in white matter integrity of the fiber tracts connecting the frontal, occipital, parietal and temporal lobes, significantly more than the non‐search control condition 52 . In other studies, cognitive offloading via digital devices has also been found to improve people's ability to focus on aspects that are not immediately retrievable, and thus remember these better in the future 53 .

These findings seem to support the emergent hypotheses that relying on the Internet for factual memory storage may actually produce cognitive benefit in other areas, perhaps by “freeing up” cognitive resources 54 , and thus enabling us to use our newly available cognitive capacities for more ambitious undertakings than previously possible 45 . Researchers advocating this view have pointed to multiple domains of collective human endeavor that have already been transformed by the Internet's provision of supernormal transactive memory, such as education, journalism and even academia 55 . As online technologies continue to advance (particularly with regards to “wearables”), it is conceivable that the performance benefits from the Internet, which are already visible at the societal level, could ultimately become integrated within individuals themselves, enabling new heights of cognitive function 56 .

Unfortunately, however, a more sobering finding with regards to the immediate possibility of ubiquitous Internet access enabling new heights of human intelligence is provided by Barr et al 57 , who observed that analytical thinkers, with higher cognitive capacities, actually use their smartphone less for transactive memory in day‐to‐day situations compared to individuals with non‐analytical thinking styles. Furthermore, the reduced smartphone usage in analytical versus non‐analytical thinkers was specific to online information searching, with no differences in social media or entertainment usages, thus indicating that the differences are likely due to the Internet furthering “cognitive miserliness” among less analytical thinkers 57 .

Alongside this, the increasing reliance on the Internet for information may cause individuals to “blur the lines” between their own capabilities and their devices’ 58 . In a series of experiments, Fisher et al 59 investigated how the Internet influences our self‐perceived knowledge. Results showed that online searching increases our sense of how much we know, even though the illusion of self‐knowledge is only perceived for the domains in which the Internet can “fill in the gaps” for us. The experiments also demonstrated how quickly individuals internalized the Internet's external knowledge as their own – as even immediately after using the Internet to answer the task questions, participants attributed their higher quality explanations to “increased brain activity” . More recent studies have shown that illusions of self‐knowledge similarly persist when using smartphones to retrieve online information 58 . As individuals become more and more connected with their personal digital devices (which are also always accessible), it seems inevitable that the distinction between self and Internet's abilities will become increasingly elusive, potentially creating a constant illusion of “greater than actual knowledge” among large portions of the population.

Overall, the Internet clearly can provide a “superstimulus” for transactive memory, which is already changing the way we store, retrieve, and even value knowledge. However, with popular online information sources such as Google and Wikipedia less than 20 years old, it is currently not possible to ascertain how this may eventually be reflected in long‐term changes to the structure and function of the human brain. Nonetheless, our constant connection with the online world through personal devices (i.e., smartphones), along with the emerging potential for more direct integration through wearable devices, certainly indicates that we are set to become more reliant on the Internet for factual information as time goes on. Also, whereas the studies described above have focused on factual knowledge, the Internet is also now becoming a superstimulus for spatial information (through providing constant access to online maps and global positioning system). As spatial memory is somewhat independent from semantic memory in the human brain 60 , further research should investigate the multitude of ways in which extensive use of these external memory systems may reduce, enhance or alter our cognitive capacities.

ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS: FAULTY CONNECTIONS, OR FALSE DICHOTOMY?

Human sociality in the online world.

Social relationships and having a sense of connection are important determinants of happiness and stress relief 61 , 62 , mental and physical well‐being 63 , 64 , and even mortality 65 . Over the past decade, the proportion of an individual's social interactions that take place online within social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) has grown dramatically 66 , 67 , and our connection with these sites is now strongly meshed with the offline world. The real‐world implications of this are perhaps best evidenced by the critical role that social media have played in multiple global affairs, including reportedly starting and precipitating the London Riots, the Occupy movement 68 , and even the Arab Spring 69 , along with potentially influencing the outcomes of the UK's European Union Referendum (“Brexit”) 70 and the 2016 US elections 71 . Clearly, understanding the shift from real‐world interactions into the online social environment (and vice versa) holds significance to almost all aspects of people's lives.

Our motivations towards using social media is broadly similar to the instinctual desires underlying “real world” social interactions, as people are drawn to online sociality in order to exchange information and ideas, along with gaining social support and friendships 72 . However, whether or not these virtual interactions engage the human brain in ways analogous to real‐world socialization remains a topic of debate since the turn of the century 73 . Whereas it would be highly beneficial if social media sites could fulfil the implicit human needs for social connection, it may be that the distinction between online and offline networks is so great that entirely different cognitive domains are involved in navigating these different environments 74 , 75 .

How does the online environment affect our fundamental social structures?

To investigate the neuroimaging correlates of offline and online networks, the seminal study by Kanai et al 74 collected real‐world social network size, online sociality (i.e., Facebook friends) and magnetic resonance imaging scans from 125 participants. Results showed that both real‐world social network size and number of Facebook friends were significantly associated with amygdala volume. As this has previously been established as a key brain region for social cognition and social network size 76 , these results present a strong case for the overlap between online and offline sociality in the human brain.

However, those authors also found that the grey matter volume of other brain regions (specifically, posterior regions of the middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, and the right entorhinal cortex) were predicted by the numbers of participants’ Facebook friends, but held no relationship to their real‐world social networks. This suggests that certain unique aspects of social media implicate aspects of the brain that are not central in “real‐world” social settings. For instance, the tendency for online networks to encourage us towards holding many weak social connections, involving thousands of face‐to‐name pairs, could require high associative memory capacities, which is not typically required in real‐world networks (as these are comprised of fewer, but more familiar, relationships) 74 . As associative memory formation for name‐face pairs involves the right entorhinal cortex 77 , 78 , this could explain the exclusive relationship that this region holds with online social (but not real‐world) network size 74 .

Indeed, one key difference which may separate how the brain handles online and offline social networks is the unique capacity afforded by the Internet for people to hold, and simultaneously interact with, millions of “friendships” 79 , 80 . Empirical testing of this hypothesis is a most fruitful area of investigation stemming from research into the fundamental similarities and differences between these two social worlds at a biological level 66 . When defining “friendships” under a broad context (people who maintain contact and share an emotional bond) 66 , two patterns are prominent across a diverse range of real‐world social networks: a) the average individual has around 150 “friendships” (but this is highly variable between individuals), and b) this is made up of five hierarchical layers, consisting of primary partners, intimate relationships, best friends, close friends, and all friends, which follow a size‐scaling ratio of around 3 (i.e., each cumulative layer is 3 times bigger than the last), and therefore have set average (cumulative/inclusive) sizes of 1.5, 5, 15, 50 and 150 respectively 66 . The patterns of the average number of 150 total friendship connections, and the scaling sizes of the five hierarchical layers of relationships making this up, have been found across regions and time periods within various human organizations, ranging from hunter‐gatherer societies 81 , 82 and historical village populations 83 , armies 66 , residential camps 84 , to personal networks of modern Europeans 85 .

Thus, given the unprecedented potential that online social networks allow in terms of number of connections, and the varied contexts these take place over 79 , 80 , it is imaginable that this extraordinary environment may allow these two apparently set aspects of real‐world social networks to be bypassed. However, recent findings have confirmed that user‐to‐user friendship connections, posting patterns and exchanges within Twitter, Facebook, and even online gaming platforms, all indicate a similar average number of general friendships (around 150, despite high skew), along with maintaining the same scaled sizes of the hierarchical structure of the five distinct friendship layers (as determined by reciprocal communication exchanges) 86 , 87 , 88 , 89 . Therefore, even within the unique realms of online social networks, the most fundamental operations of human social networks appear to remain relatively unchanged 88 , 89 . So, it is highly conceivable that the social connections formed in the online world are processed in similar ways to those of the offline world, and thus have much potential to carry over from the Internet to shape “real‐world” sociality, including our social interactions and our perceptions of social hierarchies, in ways that are not restricted to the context of the Internet.

The driving forces that sustain the set structural patterns of social networks, even when faced with the immense connective potential of the online world, may be broadly explained by two overlapping mechanisms. First, constraints on social cognition within the human brain seem to carry over across social contexts 66 . For instance, humans struggle to engagingly interact with more than three individuals simultaneously in the real world, and this limitation on attention also appears to apply online 90 , 91 . This evidence is in agreement with the hypothesis that circumventing the cognitive constraints on social relationships may be difficult even when technology affords unnatural opportunities to do so 88 .

The second driver of set boundaries on social activity is that simple underlying factors may produce social constraints, even within online settings. Most obviously, investment in social relationships is limited by time constraints, and this may contribute to the set patterns of both the number and type of social connections 93 , 94 . In line with this, analyses across various social contexts have shown that temporal limitations govern the number of social interactions that individuals engage in, and how they distribute these across their different kinds of relationships 93 , 94 . Again, these general interaction rates remain similar within online social networks 87 , 88 .

The possibility that the parameters on all social networks (online or offline) are governed by basic underlying factors is further supported by research showing that similar structures also exist within simpler social systems, such as animal societies 66 , 95 . For instance, the sizes and scaling of hierarchical “friendship” layers found in online and offline human networks are also found in dolphins, elephants, and various primate species 96 , and the phenomena of humans increasing the number and strength of their social networks connections following the death of a friend on Facebook 97 is also seen in wild birds, which show compensatory up‐regulation of their social network connections upon experiencing the loss of a social associate 98 .

Supporting the idea that limited cognitive capacities govern our social structures is research showing that the brain regions predicting individual variation in social network size in humans also do so for macaques 99 . Strong support for simple underlying factors (such as time) governing our general patterning of social interactions can be found in studies demonstrating that entirely computationally simulated systems replicate some of the apparent complexities of human social networks, even under relatively simple rules 100 , 101 . Examples include agent‐based models generating similar social layering structures as humans when sociality is defined as time‐limited 100 .

In light of the current evidence regarding how the Internet may have affected human thinking surrounding social networks, it is undeniable that the online environment poses unique potential and context for social activity 79 , 80 , 102 , 103 , which may invoke some non‐identical cognitive processes and brain areas in comparison to the offline world 74 , 75 . Nevertheless, aside from these comparatively fine‐scale differences, it appears that our brains process the online and offline social networks in surprisingly similar ways, as demonstrated by the shared cognitive capacities and simple underlying factors ultimately governing their fundamental structure 87 , 88 . As such, the online social world has very significant implications for not only measuring and understanding human sociality, but also for governing the outcomes of social processes across various aspects of life.

Social cognitive responses to the online social world

Given the evidence above, an appropriate metaphor for the relationship between online and real‐world sociality could be a “new playing field for the same game” . Even beyond the fundamental structure, emerging research suggests that neurocognitive responses to online social occurrences are similar to those of real‐life interactions. For instance, being rejected online has been shown to increase activity in brain regions strongly linked with social cognition and real‐world rejection (medial prefrontal cortex 104 ) in both adults and children 105 , 106 , 107 . However, within the “same old game” of human sociality, online social media is bending some of the rules – potentially at the expense of users 17 . For instance, whereas real‐world acceptance and rejection is often ambiguous and open to self‐interpretation, social media platforms directly quantify our social success (or failure), by providing clear metrics in the form of “friends” , “followers” , and “likes” (or the potentially painful loss/absence of these) 107 . Given the addictive nature of this immediate, self‐defining feedback, social media companies may even capitalize upon this to maximally engage users 17 . However, growing evidence indicates that relying on online feedback for self‐esteem can have adverse effects on young people, particularly those with low social‐emotional well‐being, due to high rates of cyberbullying 108 , increased anxiety and depression 109 , 110 , and increased perceptions of social isolation and exclusion among those who feel rejected online 111 .

Another process common to human social behaviour in both online and offline worlds is the tendency to make upward social comparisons 112 , 113 . Whereas these can be adaptive and beneficial under regular environmental conditions 112 , this implicit cognitive process can also be hijacked by the artificial environmental manufactured on social media 113 , 114 , which showcases hyper‐successful individuals constantly putting their best foot forward, and even using digital manipulation of images to inflate physical attractiveness. By facilitating exposure to these drastically upward social comparisons (which would rarely be encountered in everyday life), online social media can produce unrealistic expectations of oneself – leading to poor body image and negative self‐concept, particularly for younger people 107 , 111 , 115 , 116 . For instance, in adolescents (particularly females), those who spent more time on social media and smartphones have a greater prevalence of mental health problems, including depression, than those who spent more time on “non‐screen” activities 116 , with greater than 5 hrs/day (versus 1 hr/day) associated with a 66% increased risk of one suicide‐related outcome 117 .

However, a causal relationship between high levels of social media use and poorer mental health is currently difficult to establish, as there is most likely a complex interaction between several confounding factors, including reduced sleep and in‐person social interaction, and increased sedentary behaviour and perceived loneliness 116 , 118 . Nonetheless, given the large amounts of social media use observed among young people, future research should thoroughly examine the potentially detrimental effects that this new setting for sociality may have on health and well‐being, along with aiming to establish the driving factors – such that adjustments can be made in subsequent iterations of social media in order to produce more positive outcomes.

Whereas young people with mental disorders may be the most vulnerable to negative input from social media, these media may also present a new platform for improving mental health in this population, if used correctly. In future, social media may also be exploited to promote ongoing engagement with Internet‐based interventions, while addressing key (but frequently neglected) targets such as social connectedness, social support and self‐efficacy, to aim to bring about sustained functional improvements in severe and complex mental health conditions 119 . To achieve these goals, online social media‐based interventions need to be designed to promote engagement by harnessing, in an ethical and transparent manner, effective strategies used by the industry. For instance, developing technologies which are increasingly adopted by online marketing and tech companies, such as natural language processing, sentiment analyses and machine learning, could be capitalized upon, for example making it possible to identify those at increased risk for suicide or relapse 120 , and rationalizing human driven support to those who need it most at the time they need it 121 . In addition, online systems will be able to learn from what helps individuals and when, opening a window into personalized, real time interventions 121 .

While the use of online social media‐based interventions is in its infancy, pioneering efforts indicate that these interventions are safe, engaging, and have the potential to improve clinical and social outcomes in both patients and their relatives 122 , 123 , 124 , 125 , 126 , 127 . That said, online interventions have failed up to now to be adopted by mental health services 128 , 129 . The main reasons include high attrition rates, poor study designs which reduce translational potential, and a lack of consensus around the required standards of evidence for widespread implementation of Internet‐delivered therapies 130 , 131 , 132 . Efforts are currently underway to determine the long‐term effects of the first generation of social media‐based interventions for mental illness via large randomized controlled trials 133 , 134 . Alongside this clinical use, developing public health strategies for young adults in the general population to avoid the potential adverse effects and negative aspects of typical social media are also warranted.

CONCLUSIONS AND DIRECTIONS

As digital technologies become increasingly integrated with everyday life, the Internet is becoming highly proficient at capturing our attention, while producing a global shift in how people gather information, and connect with one another. In this review, we found emerging support for several hypotheses regarding the pathways through which the Internet is influencing our brains and cognitive processes, particularly with regards to: a) the multi‐faceted stream of incoming information encouraging us to engage in attentional‐switching and “multi‐tasking” , rather than sustained focus; b) the ubiquitous and rapid access to online factual information outcompeting previous transactive systems, and potentially even internal memory processes; c) the online social world paralleling “real world” cognitive processes, and becoming meshed with our offline sociality, introducing the possibility for the special properties of social media to impact on “real life” in unforeseen ways.

However, with fewer than 30 years since the Internet became publicly available, the long‐term effects have yet to be established. Within this, it seems particularly important that future research determines the impact of the Internet on us throughout different points in the lifespan. For instance, the Internet's digital distractions and supernormal capacities for cognitive offloading seem to create a non‐ideal environment for the refinement of higher cognitive functions in critical periods of children and adolescents’ brain development. Indeed, the first longitudinal studies on this topic have found that adverse attentional effects of digital multi‐tasking are particularly pronounced in early adolescence (even compared to older teens) 34 , and that higher frequency of Internet use over 3 years in children is linked with decreased verbal intelligence at follow‐up, along with impeded maturation of both grey and white matter regions 135 .

On the other hand, the opposite may be true in older adults experiencing cognitive decline, for whom the online environment may provide a new source of positive cognitive stimulation. For instance, Internet searching engaged more neural circuitry than reading text pages in Internet savvy older adults (aged 55‐76 years) 9 . Furthermore, experimental studies have found that computer games available online and through smartphones can be used to attenuate aging‐related cognitive decline 136 , 137 , 138 . Thus, the Internet may present a novel and accessible platform for adults to maintain cognitive function throughout old age. Building from this, successful cognitive aging has previously been shown to be dependent upon learning and deploying cognitive strategies, which can compensate for aging‐related decline in “raw” memory capacities 139 . This has previously been referred to as optimizing internal cognitive processes (e.g., through mnemonic strategies), or taking advantage of cognitive offloading in traditional formats (list making, transactive memory, etc.) 139 . Nonetheless, as Internet‐based technologies become more deeply integrated with our daily cognitive processing (through smartphones, wearables, etc.), digital natives could feasibly develop forms of “online cognition” in the aging brain, whereby older adults can increasingly take advantage of web‐based transactive memory and other emerging online processes to fulfil (or even exceed) the typical capacities of a younger brain.

Although it is an emerging area of study, the same could apply for social aspects of the online world. Whereas young people seem particularly prone to the rejections, peer pressure, and negative appraisals this world may induce 107 , older adults may ultimately be able to harness social media in order to overcome isolation and thus continue to benefit from the diverse range of physical, mental and neurocognitive benefits associated with social connection 73 . Viewed collectively, the nascent research in this area already indicates that equivalent types of Internet usage may have differential effects on individuals’ cognitive and social functioning depending on their point in the lifespan.

For better or for worse, we are already conducting a mass‐scale experiment of extensive Internet usage across the global population. A more fine‐scale analysis is essential to gaining a fuller understanding of the sustained impact of this usage across our society. This could include measuring frequency, duration and types of Internet usage as a standard part of national data projects, for instance through collecting Internet data (from either device‐based or self‐report measures) in “biobank” assessment protocols. Combining this with the extensive genetic, socio‐demographic, lifestyle and neuroimaging data gathered by some ongoing projects, researchers could be able to establish the impact of Internet usage on psychological well‐being and brain functioning across entire populations (rather than the currently limited study samples), while also controlling for multiple confounders.

Overall, this early phase of the Internet's introduction into our society is a crucial period for commencing rigorous and extensive research into how different types of Internet usage interact with human cognition, in order to maximize our opportunities for harnessing this new tool in a beneficial manner, while minimizing the potentially adverse effects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

J. Firth is supported by a Blackmores Institute Fellowship. J. Sarris is supported by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Clinical Research Fellowship (APP1125000). B. Stubbs is supported by the Health Education England and the National Institute for Health Research Integrated Clinical Academic Programme Clinical Lectureship (ICA‐CL‐2017‐03‐001). G.Z. Steiner is supported by an NHMRC‐Australian Research Council (ARC) Dementia Research Development Fellowship (APP1102532). M. Alvarez‐Jimenez is supported by an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (APP1082934). C.J. Armitage is supported by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Manchester Biomedical Research Centre and NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the above‐mentioned entities.

Popular Services

• Patient & Visitor Guide

Committed to improving health and wellness in our Ohio communities.

Health equity, healthy community, classes and events, the world is changing. medicine is changing. we're leading the way., featured initiatives, helpful resources.

• Refer a Patient

How does the internet affect brain function?

Author: Rawan Tarawneh, MD

• Health and Wellness
• Neurological Institute

• Limit the time you spend on the internet. During your working and non-working hours, schedule specific times to use the internet (unless your job directly involves use of the internet or you have an important deadline.) 
• Set aside a certain time of the day when you check your email inbox. After work, schedule your internet time at home so that you can spend more time with your family and friends. While I was in the habit of having my email open throughout the time I was in the office, I’ve learned to only check it at scheduled times of the day so that I can focus on other things that also need my attention.
• Make sure your use of the internet isn’t taking time away from your family. Perhaps time you’re spending scrolling through websites, social media and email could be better spent in other healthy endeavors, such as physical activity, socializing or reading a book. These are all activities that are important for your brain health. 
• Acknowledge the fact that not every email has to be addressed immediately. While some issues are urgent, others may be less urgent. Try to “triage” your inbox so that important and urgent messages are addressed right away, and others can be addressed later, according to their urgency.  
• “Snooze” your sent messages so that they’re delivered at specific times. That way, you can ensure your coworkers get the non-urgent email you typed late at night or over the weekend during their work hours.
• Disable unnecessary notifications. It can be very distracting to be alerted each and every time an email arrives in your inbox. 
• Unsubscribe from any unnecessary newsletters that you no longer need. This will help reduce the “clutter” in your inbox and allow to focus on other things that matter. 
• Avoid discussing major issues or topics by email unless absolutely necessary. Some issues are better handled in face-to-face meetings. 
• Find out why screen-time limits are especially important for children and adolescents. Read more

More from Ohio State

Online price list gives you clarity for your health care

Online hospital charge lists can give you clarity for your healthcare costs, but like our medical care – we want to personalize it to you.

Sen. Brown tours COVID-19 testing site at CAS

Sen. Brown talks with members of the Ohio National Guard who’ve joined health care workers across the state on the front lines in the battle against COVID-19.

Decades of leadership experience prove vital in the state’s fight against COVID-19

Dr. Andrew Thomas and his decades of leadership experience at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center have been vital in the state’s fight against COVID-19.

Visit Ohio State Health & Discovery for more stories on health, wellness, innovation, research and science news from the experts at Ohio State.

Check out health.osu.edu

Subscribe. Get just the right amount of health and wellness in your inbox.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

How the internet is altering your mind

L ike nearly all the Guardian's content, what you are about to read was – and this will hardly be a revelation – written using a computer connected to the internet. Obviously, this had no end of benefits, mostly pertaining to the relative ease of my research and the simplicity of contacting the people whose thoughts and opinions you are about to read. Modern communications technology is now so familiar as to seem utterly banal, but set against my clear memories of a time before it arrived, there is still something magical about, say, optimistically sending an email to a scientist in southern California, and then talking to him within an hour.

But then there is the downside. The tool I use to write not only serves as my word processor and digital postbox, but can also double as – among other things – a radio, TV, news-wire portal and shop. Thus, as I put together the following 2,000-ish words, I was entertained in my more idle moments by no end of distractions. I watched YouTube videos of Manic Street Preachers, Yoko Ono, and the Labour leadership candidates. Via Amazon, I bought a £4.99 teach-yourself-to-spell DVD-Rom for my son, which turned out to be rubbish. And at downright stupid hours of the day – 6am, or almost midnight – I once again checked my email on either my phone or computer. Naturally, my inbox was usually either exactly how I had left it, or newly joined by something that could easily have waited – though for some reason, this never seems to register.

Obviously, I am not alone in this affliction. Yesterday, scores of headlines focused on a new report by the media regulator Ofcom, which found that Britons spend more than seven hours a day watching TV, going online, sending texts and reading newspapers, and that web-capable smartphones are now a fixed part of millions of people's lives. Superficially, all this hardly seemed revelatory – but at the lower end of the age range lurked evidence of the world to come. Among 16-to-24-year-olds, television was not nearly as dominant: half their "media time" was devoted to mobile phones and computers – and in turn, two-thirds of that time was spent doing two digital things at once. The younger you are, it seems, the more your media consumption finds you multitasking; I'm a relatively ancient 40, but my habits are increasingly similar.

It often feels as if all this frantic activity creates a constant state of twitchy anxiety, as any addiction usually does. Moreover, having read a freshly published and hotly controversial book about the effect of digital media on the human mind, I may have very good reason to feel scared. Its thesis is simple enough: not only that the modern world's relentless informational overload is killing our capacity for reflection, contemplation, and patience – but that our online habits are also altering the very structure of our brains.

The Shallows is a 250-page book by American writer Nicholas Carr, just published in the US, about to appear in the UK, and already the focus of a noisy debate. Two years ago, Carr wrote an essay for the Atlantic magazine entitled "Is Google making us stupid?" This is the full-length version: an elegantly written cry of anguish about what one admirer calls "the uneducating of Homo sapiens", and a rewiring of neural pathways and networks that may yet deprive the human race of the talents that – ironically enough – drove our journey from caves to PC terminals.

In the book, Carr looks back on such human inventions as the map, the clock and the typewriter, and how much they influenced our essential modes of thought (among the people whose writing was changed by the latter were Friedrich Nietszche and TS Eliot). By the same token, he argues that the internet's "cacophony of stimuli" and "crazy quilt" of information have given rise to "cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning" – in contrast to the age of the book, when intelligent humans were encouraged to be contemplative and imaginative.

But here is the really important thing. Carr claims that our burgeoning understanding of how experience rewires our brain's circuits throughout our lives – a matter of what's known as "neuro- plasticity" – seems to point in one very worrying direction. Among the most hair-raising passages in the book is this one: "If, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the internet."

Surprisingly little research has looked into the internet's effects on the brain, but the work that forms Carr's holy grail was carried out in 2008, by a trio of psychiatrists at UCLA led by Dr Gary Small, himself the co-author of a book titled iBrain: surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind. Under their supervision, 12 experienced web users and 12 digital newcomers used Google, while their brains were scanned. The results, published under the title Your Brain On Google, pointed up a key initial difference between the two groups: in an area of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which deals with short-term memory and decision-making, the rookies showed hardly any activity, whereas the web veterans were really firing.

Six days later, the novices having been told to spend an hour a day online, the two groups' brains were scanned again – and this time, things got even more interesting: in images of both sets of brains, the pattern of blobs representing mental activity was virtually identical. As Small put it: "After just five days of practice, the exact same neural circuitry in the front part of the brain became active in the internet-naive subjects. Five hours on the internet, and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains."

Small is the director of the Memory and Ageing Research Centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, a specialist in the effects on the brain of the ageing process, and the co-inventor of the first brain-scanning technology to detect the physical evidence of Alzheimer's disease. "Even an old brain can be quite malleable, and responsive to what's going on with technology," he tells me.

He goes on: "It's a basic principle that the brain is very sensitive to any kind of stimulation, and from moment to moment, there is a very complex cascade of neurochemical electrical consequences to every form of stimulation. If you have repeated stimuli, your neural circuits will be excited. But if you neglect other stimuli, other neural circuits will be weakened." This is the nub of Carr's argument: that the online world so taxes the parts of the brain that deal with fleeting and temporary stuff that deep thinking becomes increasingly impossible. As he sees it: "Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow."

Small is only too aware of what too much time spent online can do to other mental processes. Among the young people he calls digital natives (a term first coined by the US writer and educationalist Marc Prensky), he has repeatedly seen a lack of human contact skills – "maintaining eye contact, or noticing non-verbal cues in a conversation". When he can, he does his best somehow to retrain them: "When I go to colleges and talk to students, I have them do one of our face-to-face human contact exercises: 'Turn to someone next to you, preferably someone you don't know, turn off your mobile device.' One person talks and the other one listens, and maintains eye contact. That's very powerful. One pair of kids started dating after they'd done it."

He also fears that texting and instant messaging may already be dampening human creativity, because "we're not thinking outside the box, by ourselves – we're constantly vetting all our new ideas with our friends." He warns that multitasking – surely the internet's essential modus operandi – is "not an efficient way to do things: we make far more errors, and there's a tendency to do things faster, but sloppier." Of late, he has been working with big US corporations – Boeing is the latest example – on how they might get to grips with the effects of online saturation on their younger employees, and reacquaint them with the offline world.

When I ask him how I might stop the internet's more malign effects on my own brain, he sounds slightly more optimistic than Carr: we have the capacity to pull ourselves back from the mental brink – though only if we know what's at stake. "The brain can right itself if we're aware of these issues," he says. "But we have to make decisions as to what we can do about it. Try to balance online time with offline time," he tells me. "What's happening is, we're losing the circadian rhythms we're used to; you go to work, you come home, you spend time talking with your kids."

What about the idea of calming down when you're online? I'm actually pretty good at offline time, but as soon as I'm back at my desk, it's all YouTube and compulsive email checking, and it's rather doing my head in.

"It's hard," he says. "There's a pull. The internet lures us. Our brains become addicted to it. And we have to be aware of that, and not let it control us."

Among the people with walk-on roles in The Shallows is Scott Karp, the editor of a renowned American digital media blog called Publish2, whose reading habits are held up as proof of the fact that plenty of people's brains have long since been rewired by their enthusiastic use of the internet.

Despite a degree from New York University in English and Spanish literature, Carr claims that Karp has given up reading books altogether, perhaps because of what a working life spent online seems to have done to his mental makeup. One of Karp's online posts is quoted as follows: "I was a lit major in college, and used to be a voracious book reader. What happened? What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed . . . but because the way I THINK has changed?"

As it turns out, Karp has only stopped reading non-fiction. Contrary to Carr's thesis, he says he still has no problem reading novels, and thinks his long-term memory is in as good shape as ever. What he attests to, though, is a radical shift in the way he consumes information, which may or may not have caused his mental circuits to change.

This, he tells me, is all down to his appetite for connecting multiple bits – and, it seems, only bits – of information, rather than digesting big chunks of stuff from single sources, one at a time. "I thrive on that connectedness of information," he says, "so now, I maybe read a given author's argument in much briefer form than a 10,000 word article or a book – and then jump to another author's argument, and follow that train of thought. And sometimes I find that I make leaps in thinking by reading things from different perspectives, and going from lily pad to lily pad."

He assures me he understands any argument's strengths and weaknesses before flitting to the next one, but I'm not so sure. Aren't there thousands of books that have to be read in their entirety before we can really get our head round the author's point of view? The last thumping great book I read was the biography of Barack Obama by David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker – and the idea of boiling it down to a skimmable extract seems almost offensive. The same applies to, say, any number of books by Marx and Engels, or even (possibly) Ozzy Osbourne's autobiography.

"Absolutely," he says, rather guiltily. "I completely agree with that. And I'm sure that I have come up shallow, if you use Nicholas Carr's argument. But I've only got a finite amount of time."

Whatever, Karp is not fazed by the idea that heavy internet use might be reshaping his brain. "Everything changes our brain," he says. " Everything . That's what the brain does. It's constantly changing and adapting to every experience. It's almost axiomatic to say: 'The internet has changed our brain, and its processes.' Yes, we spend less time concentrating on single sources of information. But when it comes to making value judgements, it becomes difficult to say, 'And we are worse off because of that.'" As we end our conversation, I have a vision of him frantically pinging from blog to website to pdf, and I'm really not so sure.

I get a more convincing antidote to the Carr thesis from Professor Andrew Burn of the University of London's Institute of Education, who has long specialised in the way that children and young people use what far too many people still call "new media", and its effects on their minds. Equating the internet with distraction and shallowness, he tells me, is a fundamental mistake, possibly bound up with Carr's age (he is 50). "He's restricting what he says to the type of activities that the middle-aged blogosphere-addict typically engages in," says Professor Burn. "Is there anything in his book about online role-playing games?"

Not much, I tell him, and he's off. "Carr's argument privileges activities of the skimming and browsing kind. But if you look at research on kids doing online gaming, or exploring virtual worlds such as Second Life, the argument there is about immersion and engagement – and it's even about excessive forms of immersion and engagement that get labelled as addiction. The point is, to play successfully in an online role-playing game, you have to pay an incredible amount of attention to what your team-mates are doing, to the mechanics of the game. You can set up a thesis for The Depths, just as much as The Shallows."

And what of all these worries about the transformation of the human brain? "Temporary synaptic rewiring happens whenever anybody learns anything," he says. "I'm learning a musical instrument at the moment, and I can feel my synapses rewiring themselves, but it's just a biological mechanism. And it seems to me that to say that some neural pathways are good and some are bad – well, how can you possibly say that? It could be a good thing: people are becoming adaptive, and more supple in their search for information." Carr, he reckons, is guilty of a "slippage into an almost evolutionary argument", and he's not having it at all.

He's also not impressed by the way Carr contrasts the allegedly snowballing stupidity of the internet age with the altogether more cerebral phase of human progress when we all read books. "What if the book is Mein Kampf? What if it's Jeffrey Archer? Or Barbara Cartland? Am I not better off playing a well-constructed online game, or reading Aristotle's poetics online? I really don't see why books should particularly promote worthwhile thought, unless they're worthwhile books. And the same applies to what's on the internet."

This all sounds both comforting and convincing, until I return to The Shallows, and a particularly sobering sentence on page 222 (contrary to Carr's darker predictions, I easily made it to the end). "We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls," he writes. There's something chilling about those words, and even 20 stupid minutes on YouTube and an impulse buy from Amazon cannot quite remove them from my brain.

More on this story

Are phone Apps killing the web's original spirit of fresh discovery?

Are the iphone and ipad killing the world wide web.

The internet: is it changing the way we think?

Can apps save news journalism?

Comments (…), most viewed.

How the Internet is Changing Your Brain? Essay

Introduction, why people use the internet, challenges between the internet and people, to support or disregard the internet, reference list.

One of the most evident things that can be observed nowadays is that the Internet has a considerable impact on people, the development of relations, the ways of how information is exchanged, etc. However, people are not always sure if the Internet has enough powers to change the way of how a human brain works. For example, the BBC’s author, Tom Stafford admits that everything can change the brain, and the Internet rewiring it as well. 1

Many researchers want to find out if the Internet has a negative or positive impact on the brain, some people are eager to share their opinions, and writers try to gather as many interesting points of view as possible and introduce a clear picture.

The current achievements in the sphere of science and psychology show that the Internet influences people’s way of thinking, understanding information, and even the possibility to store information for a long period of time: people become more forgetful but can generate information better, lose the required portion of concentration but have high IQ results.

The current paper aims at discussing these controversies not to identify the quality of impact the Internet may have on the human brain but to understand how the Internet can influence people and their abilities to survive in a new technologically developed world.

Before asking the question about how the Internet can influence the brain, it is necessary to identify why people continue using it even if they know or, at least, guess about some threats. One of the goals people want to achieve is to get more time for living and deprive themselves of the necessity to do simple things like making notes, writing letters, searching for information at libraries, etc.

The Internet is a good chance to store and share information, search for the facts and answers in a short period of time, and observe the changes that take place globally. The Internet provides people with an opportunity to practice certain things the same way TV or reading does. People want to know more, that is why they try to use different options to achieve their goal.

The Internet cannot be regarded by people as a threat. It is a helpful tool that should be used. However, it is enough to deprive people of the Internet for a certain period of time to observe how dependent people and their actions on the Internet are. It means that human brain, as well as a person, depends on the Internet.

One of the most provocative things is the impossibility to feel the condition of the human brain. The brain that is packed neatly in the skull (that is a symbolic bone-crate) cannot send a sensory signal to a person. 2

It is hard to realise if the brain can feel changes and demonstrate the appropriate reactions. At the same time, people know a lot about the effects brain has on a human organism. That is why the reactions that can be observed in a person can serve as the explanation of the changes that can happen in the brain.

For example, the observations show that people start forgetting more using the opportunities of the Internet. 3 The human brain does not find it necessary to remember information. It is evident that people do not want to remember as much information as possible if they know that they can use the Internet and find the required piece in a short period of time.

Long-term memory of people who do not use the Internet from their childhood may be not under threat. However, if the first memories are connected to the Internet, it is possible that not only short-term memory can be under threat. 4

At the same time, the Internet itself does not make people use it. People themselves make decisions and invite the Internet to their lives. Is it possible that the human brain creates something that can damage it? Gregoire, Stafford, and Harris say “Yes” in their articles. They rely on the works of successful scientists and researchers to prove that the Internet does change the human brain, but these changes turn out to be abstract.

It is stated that the Internet continues supporting the ideas of innovations, opportunities, and growth in different spheres of life. 5 It means that no terrible impacts of the Internet on the human brain can be observed. Still, it is impossible to neglect the fact that the Internet continues promoting changes, and people need to know the nature of such changes.

The Internet is the source of mixed information: people can enter Facebook, listen to the music, watch pictures, and communicate. The brain has to be ready to be adapted to different sources of information and perceive it at the necessary level. 6

That is why it is hard to pay full attention to all tasks complete only. The Internet is also the possibility to use Google and find any kind of information. Current students should not waste their brains memorising different historical facts and dates. They can use Google and find the necessary answer quickly. It means that the Internet helps to facilitate the work of brain and does not overload it.

The list of the chosen topic’s contradictions is far from over. On the one hand, the Internet helps the brain to search information and understand the worth of abstract information. On the other hand, the possibility to use the Internet substitutes any other types of work (e.g. visiting libraries and reading the books, visiting museums and observing the historical artifacts, etc.). People lose the connection between what is material and what is abstract and make themselves weak in regards to the necessity to use evidence to prove their points of view. 7

Finally, from a purely observational point of view, it is possible to suggest that the use of the Internet reduces the necessity of physical activities. People do not need to walk and search for answers. People may not even leave their beds and earn money.

At the same time, the human brain works perfectly. It means that the brain can be better trained with the help of the Internet at the expense of the body activities. The only parts of a human body that can move are the eyes and hands. 8

In general, the Internet may positively influence the human brain and the possibility to comprehend and evaluate information. Still, people should understand that their brain cannot exist for a long time if the body gets worse. That is why the Internet should not be used as an absolute substitution of various physical activities and changes. The Internet is just a source of information created by and for people.

Carr, N 2010, The Shallows: how the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Atlantic Books, London.

Easton, T 2011, Taking sides: clashing views in science, technology and society , McGraw Hill, Dubuque, Iowa.

Gregoire, C 2015, ‘ The internet may be changing your brain in ways you’ve never imagined ”, Huffpost , Web.

Harris, J 2010, ‘ How the internet is altering your mind ”, The Guardian, Web.

Stafford, T 2012 ‘ Does the internet rewire your brain ?’ BBC , Web.

• Tom Stafford, 2012 “Does the internet rewire your brain?” BBC. Web.
• Nicolas Carr, 2010, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, London: Atlantic Books, 23.
• Carolyn Gregoire, 2015, “The internet may be changing your brain in ways you’ve never imagined”, Huffpost. Web.
• John Harris, 2010, “How the internet is altering your mind”, The Guardian, Web.
• Tomas Easton, 2011, Taking sides: clashing views in science, technology and society , Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw Hill, 46.
• Carolyn Gregoire, 2015, “The internet may be changing your brain in ways you’ve never imagined”, Huffpost, Web.
• Nicolas Carr, 2010, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, London: Atlantic Books, 93.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, May 8). How the Internet is Changing Your Brain? https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-the-internet-is-changing-your-brain/

"How the Internet is Changing Your Brain?" IvyPanda , 8 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/how-the-internet-is-changing-your-brain/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'How the Internet is Changing Your Brain'. 8 May.

IvyPanda . 2020. "How the Internet is Changing Your Brain?" May 8, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-the-internet-is-changing-your-brain/.

1. IvyPanda . "How the Internet is Changing Your Brain?" May 8, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-the-internet-is-changing-your-brain/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "How the Internet is Changing Your Brain?" May 8, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-the-internet-is-changing-your-brain/.

• Brain and Memory
• Memory Systems of the Brain
• Internet Rewires Our Brain
• Long and Short Term Memory
• Effect of the Internet on Our Brains
• Views on Internet and the Human Brain by Nicholas Carr
• Communication Technology as a Novel Environment for Human Brain
• How Digitalization of Society Affects the Human Brain
• Memory Formation and Maintenance
• Strategies of the Memory
• How Does Technology Affect the Economy?
• Technologies: High-Speed Internet vs. the Cable Television
• Social Networks and Online Communities
• How Technology Changes Society
• “It’s a Flat World, After All” by Thomas Friedman

How the Internet is Changing Your Brain

Given the ubiquity of Google, is memory obsolete? Academic Earth dares to ask, how is such easy access to information affecting our brains as we rely less and less on memory and more on technology?

About the Video

The average number of Google searches per day has grown from 9,800 in 1998 to over 4.7 trillion today. 1  This may not be surprising, since we've all come to appreciate the thrill of instant information. But while it's certainly convenient to have the sum of all knowledge at our fingertips, studies show that the "Google effect" is changing the way we think.

In a 2011 experiment published in Science Magazine, college students remembered less information when they knew they could easily access it later on the computer. 2  With 49% of Americans now toting around Google on their smart phones, researchers concluded that the effect is the same. We're relying on Google to store knowledge long-term, instead of our own brains. 3

Neuroimaging of frequent Internet users shows twice as much activity in the short term memory as sporadic users during online tasks. 4  Basically, our brain is learning to disregard information found online, and this connection becomes stronger every time we experience it. So the more we use Google, the less likely we are to retain what we see.

Our brains use information stored in the long-term memory to facilitate critical thinking. We need these unique memories to understand and interact with the world around us. If we rely on Google to store our knowledge, we may be losing an important part of our identity.

1 " Google Annual Search Statistics."  Statistic Brain . N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.

2 Sparrow, B, J Liu, and D M. Wegner. " Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. "  Science . 333.6043 (2011): 776-778. Print.

3 " Smartphones Account for Half of All Mobile Phones, Dominate New Phone Purchases in the US. " Newswire.  Nielsen.com . The Nielsen Company, 29 Mar. 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.

4 Small, G.W, T.D Moody, P Siddarth, and S.Y Bookheimer. " Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation During Internet Searching. "  The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry : Official Journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry . 17.2 (2009): 116-126. Print.

How does the human memory work? Twenty years ago you might have found your answer in a book, or by asking a friend. But today, you’ll Google it. There were 3.5 million searches in 1998, now, there are 4.7 trillion search queries everyday. 1  When something changes our lifestyle so monumentally, you can bet it’s changing us as well.

Google has become our external hard drive. In a recent experiment, college students remembered less information when they thought they could easily access it later. We used to rely on friends and family members for this method of memory outsourcing, remembering who knew what rather than the information itself. 2  But now, Google is the friend with all of the expertise. If the sum of all knowledge is constantly available in our pockets, is it any wonder that we’ve stopped bothering to keep it in our heads?

“ Neurons that fire together, wire together.” And the same goes for those that fire apart. Neuroimaging of frequent Internet users shows twice as much activity in the prefrontal cortex as sporadic users. 3  This part of the brain is reserved for short-term memory and quick decision-making. Essentially, our brains recognize that most of the flood of online information is trivial, and doesn’t deserve our full attention. The problem is, the brain does what we train it to do. And every time we open a browser, we prepare for skimming instead of learning. So even if we really want to remember something from Google, our brains are predisposed to forget. Everything we ever wanted to know is available to us, and we have conditioned ourselves to ignore it.

What do we actually know? If the goal is to forge a creative mind through critical thinking, our Google amnesia may be problematic. The information and experience that gets encoded into our long-term memory is the basis of our unique intelligence. 4  Still, we may be able to mitigate the impact to our long-term memory by adapting our response to this new reality. After all, we can’t stop the sea change of the information age. In recent years, American schools have focused less on fact memorization and more on teaching students how to make innovative connections between the curriculum and real life. 5  This way, it’s less about the knowledge you have, and more about how you use the information at hand.

1 “ Google Annual Search Statistics.”  Statistic Brain . N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.

2 Khazan, Olga. “ In the Era of ‘Google Effects,’ Why Memory Matters. ”  Forbes . Forbes.com LLC, 20 July 2011. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.

3 Small, G.W, T.D Moody, P Siddarth, and S.Y Bookheimer. “ Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation During Internet Searching. ”  The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry : Official Journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry . 17.2 (2009): 116-126. Print.

4 Guenther, S. Garrity. “ A Tale of Two Memories: Long-Term Memory and ‘Google Memory’ ”  WhatAreTheseIdeas.com . What Are These Ideas?, 21 Sept. 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.

5 Mount, Harry. “ Children Can’t Think If They Don’t Learn Facts.”  Telegraph.co.uk . Telegraph Media Group Limited, 20 Mar. 2013. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.

Share/Embed

Share video, explore free online college courses from our featured universities, massachusetts institute of technology.

Stanford University

University of California, Berkeley

Most Popular Playlists

First Day of Freshman Year

Relive the first day of your freshman year with a series of first lectures from introductory college courses at MIT, Yale, and Stanford.

Laws of Nature

Introduce yourself to the laws of nature with these free online college lectures from Yale, Harvard, and MIT.

Living a Good Life

Related degrees.

• Bachelor's in Life Coaching
• Master's in Life Coaching

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Author Interviews

'the shallows': this is your brain online.

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption -- and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

Chronic Distraction

Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate.

"I'd sit down with a book, or a long article," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, "and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check e-mail, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page."

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains By Nicholas Carr Hardcover, 276 pages W.W. Norton & Co. List price: $26.95

This chronic state of distraction "follows us" Carr argues, long after we shut down our computers.

"Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," Carr explains. "They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."

Would You Process This Information Better On Paper?

The book cites many studies that indicate that online reading yields lower comprehension than reading from a printed page. Then again, reading online is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a generation of readers who grow up consuming everything on the screen may simply be more adept at online reading than people who were forced to switch from print.

Still, Carr argues that even if people get better at hopping from page to page, they will still be losing their abilities to employ a "slower, more contemplative mode of thought." He says research shows that as people get better at multitasking, they "become less creative in their thinking."

The idea that the brain is a kind of zero sum game -- that the ability to read incoming text messages is somehow diminishing our ability to read Moby Dick -- is not altogether self-evident. Why can't the mind simply become better at a whole variety of intellectual tasks?

Carr says it really has to do with practice. The reality -- especially for young people -- is that online time is "crowding out" the time that might otherwise be spent in prolonged, focused concentration.

"We're seeing this medium, the medium of the Web, in effect replace the time that we used to spend in different modes of thinking," Carr says.

Nicholas Carr is also the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and Does IT Matter? He blogs at Rough Type . Joanie Simon hide caption

Nicholas Carr is also the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and Does IT Matter? He blogs at Rough Type .

The Natural State Of Things?

Carr admits he's something of a fatalist when it comes to technology. He views the advent of the Internet as "not just technological progress but a form of human regress."

Human ancestors had to stay alert and shift their attention all the time; cavemen who got too wrapped up in their cave paintings just didn't survive. Carr acknowledges that prolonged, solitary thought is not the natural human state, but rather "an aberration in the great sweep of intellectual history that really just emerged with [the] technology of the printed page."

The Internet, Carr laments, simply returns us to our "natural state of distractedness."

The Shallows

Buy featured book.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?

• Independent Bookstores

Excerpt: 'The Shallows'

September 11, 2018

Are Digital Devices Altering Our Brains?

Some say our gadgets and computers can help improve intelligence. Others say they make us stupid and violent. Which is it?

By Elena Pasquinelli

Do video games make people more aggressive, or are they beneficial—improving certain abilities, such as reaction time? Probably a bit of both, according to recent research, although any benefits are modest.

John Lund Getty Images

Ten years ago technology writer Nicholas Carr published an article in the Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He strongly suspected the answer was “yes.” Himself less and less able to focus, remember things or absorb more than a few pages of text, he accused the Internet of radically changing people’s brains. And that is just one of the grievances leveled against the Internet and at the various devices we use to access it–including cell phones, tablets, game consoles and laptops. Often the complaints target video games that involve fighting or war, arguing that they cause players to become violent.

But digital devices also have fervent defenders—in particular the promoters of brain-training games, who claim that their offerings can help improve attention, memory and reflexes. Who, if anyone, is right?

The answer is less straightforward than you might think. Take Carr’s accusation. As evidence, he quoted findings of neuroscientists who showed that the brain is more plastic than previously understood. In other words, it has the ability to reprogram itself over time, which could account for the Internet’s effect on it. Yet in a 2010 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, psychologists Christopher Chabris, then at Union College, and Daniel J. Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rebutted Carr’s view: “There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one’s ability to focus,” they wrote. And the debate goes on.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

The Case for Stupidity

Where does the idea that we are becoming “stupid” come from? It derives in part from the knowledge that digital devices capture our attention. A message from a friend, an anecdote shared on social networks or a sales promotion on an online site can act like a treat for the human brain. The desire for such “treats” can draw us to our screens repeatedly and away from other things we should be concentrating on.

People may feel overwhelmed by the constant input, but some believe they have become multitaskers: they imagine they can continually toggle back and forth between Twitter and work, even while driving, without losing an ounce of efficiency. But a body of research confirms that this impression is an illusion. When individuals try to do two or more things at once that require their attention, their performance suffers. Moreover, in 2013 Stéphane Amato, then at Aix-Marseille University in France, and his colleagues showed that surfing Web pages makes people susceptible to a form of cognitive bias known as the primacy effect: they weight the first few pieces of information they see more heavily than the rest.

Training does not improve the ability to multitask. In 2009 Eyal Ophir, then at Stanford University, and his colleagues discovered that multitasking on the Internet paradoxically makes users less effective at switching from one task to another. They are less able to allocate their attention and are too vulnerable to distractions. Consequently, even members of the “digital native” generation are unlikely to develop the cognitive control needed to divide their time between several tasks or to instantly switch from one activity to another. In other words, digital multitasking does little more than produce a dangerous illusion of competence.

The good news is that you do not need to rewire your brain to preserve your attention span. You can help yourself by thinking about what distracts you most and by developing strategies to immunize yourself against those distractions. And you will need to exercise some self-control. Can’t resist Facebook notifications? Turn them off while you’re working. Tempted to play a little video game? Don’t leave your device where you can see it or within easy reach.

Evidence for Aggression

What about the charge that video games increase aggression? Multiple reports support this view. In a 2015 review of published studies, the American Psychological Association concluded that playing violent video games accentuates aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior while diminishing empathy for victims. The conclusion comes both from laboratory research and from tracking populations of online gamers. In the case of the gamers, the more they played violent games, the more aggressive their behavior was.

The aggression research suffers from several limitations, however. For example, lab studies measure aggressiveness by offering participants the chance to inflict a punishment, such as a dose of very hot sauce to swallow—actions that are hardly representative of real life. Outside the lab, participants would probably give more consideration to the harmful nature of their actions. And studies of gamers struggle to make sense of causality: Do video games make people more violent, or do people with a fundamentally aggressive temperament tend to play video games?

Thus, more research is needed, and it will require a combination of different methods. Although the findings so far are preliminary, researchers tend to agree that some caution is in order, beginning with moderation and variety: an hour here and there spent playing fighting games is unlikely to turn you into a brainless psychopath, but it makes sense to avoid spending entire days at it.

Gaming for Better Brains?

On the benefit side of the equation, a number of studies claim that video games can improve reaction time, attention span and working memory. Action games, which are dynamic and engaging, may be particularly effective: immersed in a captivating environment, players learn to react quickly, focus on relevant information and remember. In 2014, for example, Kara Blacker of Johns Hopkins University and her colleagues studied the impact games in the Call of Duty series—in which players control soldiers—on visual working memory (short-term memory). The researchers found that 30 hours of playing improved this capacity.

The assessment consisted of asking participants a number of times whether a group of four to six colored squares was identical to another group, presented two minutes earlier. Once again, however, this situation is far from real life. Moreover, the extent to which players “transfer” their learning to everyday activities is debatable.

This issue of skill transfer is also a major challenge for the brain-training industry, which has been growing since the 2000s. These companies are generally very good at promoting themselves and assert that engaging in various exercises and computer games for a few minutes a day can improve memory, attention span and reaction time.

Posit Science, which offers the BrainHQ series of brain training and assessment, is one such company. Its tools include UFOV (for “useful field of view). In one version of a UFOV-based game, a car and a road sign appear on a screen. Then another car appears. The player clicks on the original car and also clicks on where the road sign appeared. By having groups of objects scroll faster and faster, the activity is supposed to improve reaction time.

The company’s Web site touts user testimonials and says its customers report that BrainHQ “has done everything from improving their bowling game, to enabling them to get a job, to reviving their creativity, to making them feel more confident about their future.” Findings from research, however, are less clear-cut. On one hand, Posit Science cites the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Elderly (ACTIVE) Study to claim that UFOV training can improve overall reaction time in elderly players and reduce the risk that they will cause car crashes by almost 50 percent. But in a 2016 analysis of research on brain-training programs, Simons and his colleagues are far less laudatory. The paper, which includes an in-depth analysis of the ACTIVE study, says that the overall risk of having an accident—the most relevant criterion—decreased very little. Several reviews of the scientific literature come to much the same conclusion: brain-training products enhance performance on tasks that are trained directly, but the transfer is often weak.

Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Traininggame, released by Nintendo in the mid-2000s, provides another example of contrary results. In addition to attention and memory exercises, this game has a player do calculations. Does the program improve overall arithmetic skills? No, according to work done in 2012 by Siné McDougall and Becky House, both at Bournemouth University in England on a group of seniors. A year earlier, though, Scottish psychologists David Miller and Derek Robertson found that the game did increase how fast children could calculate.

Overall then, the results from studies are mixed. The benefits need to be evaluated better, and many questions need answering, such as how long an intervention should last and at what ages might it be effective. The answers may depend on the specific interventions being considered.

No Explosive Growth in Capacity

Any cognitive improvements from brain-training games probably will be marginal rather than an “explosion” of human mental capacities. Indeed, the measured benefits are much weaker and ephemeral than the benefits obtained through traditional techniques. For remembering things, for example, rather than training your recall with abstract tasks that have little bearing on reality, try testing your memory regularly and making the information as meaningful to your own life as possible: If you memorize a shopping list, ask yourself what recipe you are buying the ingredients for and for which day’s dinner. Unlike brain-training games, this kind of approach involves taking some initiative and makes you think about what you know.

Exercising our cognitive capacities is important to combating another modern hazard: the proliferation of fake news on social networks. In the same way that digital devices accentuate our tendency to become distracted, fake news exploits our natural inclination to believe what suits us. The solution to both challenges is education: more than ever, young people must be taught to develop their concentration, self-control and critical-thinking skills.

Elena Pasquinelli is a project manager at La Main à la Pâte Foundation, which works to improve science instruction in higher education, and an associate member of the Jean Nicod Institute, a cognitive science laboratory in Paris.

How the Internet may be changing the brain

An international team of researchers from Western Sydney University, Harvard University, Kings College, Oxford University and University of Manchester have found the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in specific areas of cognition, which may reflect changes in the brain, affecting our attentional capacities, memory processes, and social interactions.

In a first of its kind review, published in World Psychiatry -- the world's leading psychiatric research journal, the researchers investigated leading hypotheses on how the Internet may alter cognitive processes, and further examined the extent to which these hypotheses were supported by recent findings from psychologi¬cal, psychiatric and neuroimaging research.

The extensive report, led by Dr Joseph Firth, Senior Research Fellow at NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University and Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, combined the evidence to produce revised models on how the Internet could affect the brain's structure, function and cognitive development.

"The key findings of this report are that high-levels of Internet use could indeed impact on many functions of the brain. For example, the limitless stream of prompts and notifications from the Internet encourages us towards constantly holding a divided attention -- which then in turn may decrease our capacity for maintaining concentration on a single task," said Dr Firth.

"Additionally, the online world now presents us with a uniquely large and constantly-accessible resource for facts and information, which is never more than a few taps and swipes away.

"Given we now have most of the world's factual information literally at our fingertips, this appears to have the potential to begin changing the ways in which we store, and even value, facts and knowledge in society, and in the brain."

The recent introduction and widespread adoption of these online technologies, along with social media, is also of concern to some teachers and parents. The World Health Organization's 2018 guidelines recommended that young children (aged 2-5) should be exposed to one hour per day, or less, of screen time. However, the report also found that the vast majority of research examining the effects of the Internet on the brain has been conducted in adults -- and so more research is needed to determine the benefits and drawbacks of Internet use in young people.

Dr Firth says although more research is needed, avoiding the potential negative effects could be as simple as ensuring that children are not missing out on other crucial developmental activities, such as social interaction and exercise, by spending too much time on digital devices.

"To help with this, there are also now a multitude of apps and software programs available for restricting Internet usage and access on smartphones and computers -- which parents and carers can use to place some 'family-friendly' rules around both the time spent on personal devices, and also the types of content engaged with," he said.

"Alongside this, speaking to children often about how their online lives affect them is also important -- to hopefully identify children at risk of cyberbullying, addictive behaviours, or even exploitation -- and so enabling timely intervention to avoid adverse outcomes."

Professor Jerome Sarris, Deputy Director and Director of Research at NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University and senior author on the report, is concerned over some of the potential impacts of increasing Internet use on the brain.

"The bombardment of stimuli via the Internet, and the resultant divided attention commonly experienced, presents a range of concerns," said Professor Sarris.

"I believe that this, along with the increasing #Instagramification of society, has the ability to alter both the structure and functioning of the brain, while potentially also altering our social fabric.

"To minimise the potential adverse effects of high-intensity multi-tasking Internet usage, I would suggest mindfulness and focus practice, along with use of 'Internet hygiene' techniques (e.g. reducing online multitasking, ritualistic 'checking' behaviours, and evening online activity, while engaging in more in-person interactions)," said Professor Sarris.

Co-author and director of the digital psychiatry program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School, Dr John Torous added: "The findings from this paper highlight how much more we have to learn about the impact of our digital world on mental health and brain health. There are certainly new potential benefits for some aspects of health, but we need to balance them against potential risks."

Oxford research fellow and study co-author, Dr Josh Firth added: "It's clear the Internet has drastically altered the opportunity for social interactions, and the contexts within which social relationships can take place. So, it's now critical to understand the potential for the online world to actually alter our social functioning, and determine which aspects of our social behaviour will change, and which won't."

• Relationships
• Learning Disorders
• Child Development
• Communications
• Computers and Internet
• Educational Technology
• Social cognition
• Cognitive bias

Story Source:

Materials provided by NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Joseph Firth, John Torous, Brendon Stubbs, Josh A. Firth, Genevieve Z. Steiner, Lee Smith, Mario Alvarez‐Jimenez, John Gleeson, Davy Vancampfort, Christopher J. Armitage, Jerome Sarris. The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition . World Psychiatry , 2019; 18 (2): 119 DOI: 10.1002/wps.20617

Cite This Page :

Explore More

• New Circuit Boards Can Be Repeatedly Recycled
• Collisions of Neutron Stars and Black Holes
• Advance in Heart Regenerative Therapy
• Bioluminescence in Animals 540 Million Years Ago
• Profound Link Between Diet and Brain Health
• Loneliness Runs Deep Among Parents
• Food in Sight? The Liver Is Ready!
• Acid Reflux Drugs and Risk of Migraine
• Do Cells Have a Hidden Communication System?
• Mice Given Mouse-Rat Brains Can Smell Again

Trending Topics

Strange & offbeat.

How Internet Use Is Shaping Our Brains

Researchers say the more you use the internet, the less you use your own mind.

Posted September 17, 2016

Easy access to the information highway via the Internet is changing our ability to learn, recall, and solve problems using our brains, say researchers at UC Santa Cruz and University of Illinois. The more we rely on the Internet for one type of information, they add, the more we are likely to continue using technology to gather new information in the future. With so much information so freely available, it is difficult for those who are studying this phenomenon to sort out just how much information comes from our brains these days, and how much is retrieved online.

In general, we develop habits that help us solve problems the same ways we have in the past. These days, however, instead of holding on to information in our memories, we place technological bookmarks where we can easily find the information in the future. The time between posing a question and finding the answer is much quicker when using the internet than using memory , and we are becoming increasingly reliant on technology to perform any tasks that involve information collection, storage, and retrieval.

The UCSC and UI researchers gave student participants sets of trivia questions, and asked some to answer the questions from their memories and others to use the Internet to find the answers. The first sets of questions were considered to be more difficult. (For instance, “Who was the King of England during the American Revolution?”) The students were then given questions that were considered easier (“How many zodiac signs are there?”) along with the choice of using either their memories or their technology to come up with the answers. Not surprisingly, those who used Google to find the answers to difficult questions were also much more likely to search the internet to find the answers to less difficult questions. This was true even when the researchers made it less convenient for the students to access a computer. The researchers found that those students who initially relied on Google for answers spent less time trying to search their own memories, even to answer easier questions, than those students who were first asked to use their own memories.

Scary as it may sound, this may not be such a bad thing, however, since search engine technology is extremely efficient, and information accessed through appropriate Internet searches can be more accurate and up-to-date than information accessed through our own memories. The researchers themselves question whether and how relying on Internet searches differs from relying on books or any other traditional source of information. They speculate that as long as an Internet search is available, and used appropriately when a question arises, it may actually be preferable to using and relying on personal memory. In this study, the participants who turned to Google for answers did indeed come up with more accurate responses to the questions they were asked than those who relied on their own memories.

Storm BC, Stone SM, Benjamin AS. Using the Internet to access information inflates future use of the Internet to access other information. Memory. 18 July 2016

Susan McQuillan is a food, health, and lifestyle writer.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Teletherapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Subscribe or renew today

Every print subscription comes with full digital access

Science News

Book review: the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains by nicholas carr.

Review by Rachel Zelkowitz

Share this:

By Science News

August 13, 2010 at 12:47 pm

In 2008, science and technology writer Nicholas Carr asked in The Atlantic if Google is “making us stupid.” His latest book is an effort to answer that question and, more broadly, to explore how the tools of the Internet age are altering the way people find and use information.

Carr spends much of the book exploring how technology has shaped human habits of information consumption. Written language, for instance, made the poet-historian’s memory less crucial. With Gutenberg’s printing press, reading became widespread and the human brain, ever plastic, adapted to new demands. Now, the shift to online information is causing further neural changes but, Carr argues, mostly to ill effect.

Carr maintains that the Internet encourages distraction and superficiality. The sheer volume of information overwhelms anyone’s ability to absorb it. So instead of becoming absorbed, users browse from link to link to Twitter feed, gaining a broad but shallow appreciation of the available information. Carr cites psychology and neuroscience experiments to illustrate how vulnerable the human brain is to distraction and how such inattention can reduce comprehension and memory.

While Carr’s social history of an information revolution is solid, his concerns about how the Internet may alter neural mechanics are based on data that are still sparse. His take on the problems of the plugged-in brain is sure to spur debate, though — both online and off.

Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.

Not a subscriber? Become one now .

Is the Internet Warping Our Brains?

The Internet is no doubt changing modern society. It has profoundly altered how we gather information, consume news, carry out war, and create and foster social bonds. But is it altering our brains? A growing number of scientists think so, and studies are providing data to show it.

What remains to be seen is whether the changes are good or bad, and whether the brain is, as one neuroscientist believes, undergoing unprecedented evolution.

Texting and instant messaging, social networking sites and the Internet in general can certainly be said to distract people from other tasks. But what researchers are worrying more about are the plastic brains of teens and young adults who are now growing up with all this, the "digital natives" as they're being called.

"My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment," said Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, in The Daily Mail today. "I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf."

Odd analogy, but one worth pondering.

Inevitable brain change

Every generation adapts to change, and the brain gets used for different purposes. For ancient man there was the spear, the mammoth, and the rock to hide behind. Agriculture changed the world, as did writing . Then came gunpowder , the Industrial Revolution , radio, and TV dinners. Man would never be the same. Adapt or die, hiding behind a rock with no friends, no family.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

The pace picked up. Cell phones changed everything. Smart phones made them seem quaint. Our brains adapted. I used to have dozens of phone numbers committed to memory. Now that they're all in my Blackberry (and before that the Palm, going back a decade now) I can remember only those I'd memorized when I was a child. I don't even know my wife's cell phone or work number. I'm not sure what all that brain capacity is being used for now, other than struggling to focus on writing columns like this while checking email several times and surfing from valid research sites to unrelated pages detailing the latest condition of Jane Goody, who I'd never heard of until recently, to reaching for my hip when my stomach gurgles but I think my phone is vibrating (a modern condition called phantom vibration syndrome ).

But I digress. And I'm touching on the " Google is making us stupid " notion, written about last summer in the Atlantic by Nicholas Carr, who notes how he used to "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."

Carr blames the lack of concentration on a decade of being online.

But forget us old folks. What about the kids, whose online use we, er, monitor?

The Daily Mail article today points out that students tend no longer to plan essays before starting to write: Thanks to computers and MS Word, they can edit as they go along. I grew up learning to do an outline on paper before writing any essay or story, a habit that was reinforced in journalism school. I rarely do so anymore (though when the writing doesn't go well, it's still a great tactic). Good or bad? I'm not sure. Change, yes. Nowadays I think with my fingers, and my brain bounces around a lot more when I write, outlining on the fly.

Yet I worry about my children and what skills they'll develop spending hours a day either on a computer, using a cell phone to talk or text or surf (while driving?!) or watching TV, and whether all that activity will enhance their well being, help them make lifelong friendships, find a mate, get a job. Teens have always hidden out (in the woods, under the grandstands, or in their rooms), but now, thanks to their various electronic social networks, a cell phone and perhaps a laptop tuned to Hulu, they can truly become hermits, harder than ever to coax out. The dinner bell, long ago replaced with a shout down the hallway, has now given way to an evening SMS.

Learning experience

On the assumption that technological progress can't be stopped, the flip-side to the inevitable digitalization of life is the simple argument that kids need to learn new digital skills to survive and thrive in our fast-changing society.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota last year asked 16- to 18-year-olds what they learn from using social networking sites. The students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, then being open to new or diverse views and communication skills.

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher at the university and leader of the study.

One example Greenhow gave: A student might take up video production after seeing a cool video on MySpace. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout," she explained. "They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential."

It's up to educators [and parents?], Greenhow believes, to figure out how to leverage all this.

Evolution of a new human brain?

Meanwhile, much more research needs to be done to determine if social networking sites, and the Internet in general, are good or bad for children and teens, or neither. Studies going back to the late 1990s have flip-flopped on this as often as new social networking sites pop up.

For now, there are only hints and indications that all this change may indeed lead to young brains that work differently than those of previous generations. But evidence is indeed mounting.

"We are seeing children's brain development damaged because they don't engage in the activity they have engaged in for millennia," says Sue Palmer, author of "Toxic Childhood" (Orion, 2007). "I'm not against technology and computers. But before they start social networking, they need to learn to make real relationships with people."

Others think a profound evolutionary change is underway.

UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small thinks the dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate has touched off a rapid evolution of the brain.

"Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," Small contends . "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

(Can you keep up? That may depend in part on how your brain is wired. People who welcome new experiences have stronger connections between their brain centers associated with memory and reward than people who tend to avoid anything new, scientists recently reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience .)

Small, author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind" (Collins Living, 2008), puts people into two categories: digital natives (your kids) and digital immigrants (the rest of us who cope with varying degrees of success with all this). The former are better at snap decisions and juggling lots of sensory input; the latter are great at reading facial expressions.

"The typical immigrant's brain was trained in completely different ways of socializing and learning, taking things step-by-step and addressing one task at a time," Small says.

Interestingly, while Internet use causes changes in brain activity and wiring among people of any age, as a brain-scan study showed, the changes are most pronounced among digital natives. As Small puts it, just searching the Internet " appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading — but only in those with prior Internet experience."

For the sake of balance, perhaps we should require all children to learn how to skin and butcher an animal.

Robert Roy Britt is the Editorial Director of Imaginova . In this column, The Water Cooler, he takes a daily look at what people are talking about in the world of science and beyond.

Robert is an independent health and science journalist and writer based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is a former editor-in-chief of Live Science with over 20 years of experience as a reporter and editor. He has worked on websites such as Space.com and Tom's Guide, and is a contributor on Medium , covering how we age and how to optimize the mind and body through time. He has a journalism degree from Humboldt State University in California.

Can faking a smile make you feel happier?

AI pinpoints where psychosis originates in the brain

World's thinnest gold leaf, dubbed 'goldene,' is just 1 atom thick

Most Popular

• 2 Giant, 82-foot lizard fish discovered on UK beach could be largest marine reptile ever found
• 3 Global 'time signals' subtly shifted as the total solar eclipse reshaped Earth's upper atmosphere, new data shows
• 4 Scientists discover once-in-a-billion-year event — 2 lifeforms merging to create a new cell part
• 5 NASA's downed Ingenuity helicopter has a 'last gift' for humanity — but we'll have to go to Mars to get it
• 2 'We were in disbelief': Antarctica is behaving in a way we've never seen before. Can it recover?
• 3 George Washington's stash of centuries-old cherries found hidden under Mount Vernon floor
• 4 Scientists create 'toxic AI' that is rewarded for thinking up the worst possible questions we could imagine
• 5 5 catastrophic megathrust earthquakes led to the demise of the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacan, new study suggests

• Random article
• Teaching guide
• Privacy & cookies

Artwork: If you were to cut vertically through the middle of your head, from top to bottom, through a line that passes through the center of your nose, you'd see a cross-section of the brain's main functional areas like this. Image courtesy of National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) .

Picture: Moving house by packet switching: you'd dismantle your home and mail the bricks separately. After they traveled in parallel by (potentially) separate routes, you'd reassemble them once they reached their destination. Read more in our article on how the Internet works .

Photo: A neural network recognizes patterns using interconnected layers of input units (red), hidden units (blue), and output units (yellow). The weights of the connections between the units represent, in distributed form, the things the network learns.

Photo: Self-awareness: Is there anybody out there? It's easy to comprehend things smaller than you are, but harder to grasp that you're part of something bigger—like a galaxy of stars or even the entire universe. Would we, could we, be aware of the Internet's or Web's self-awareness, if it ever did occur? Photo of stellar swarm M80 (NGC 6093), a dense star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and courtesy of NASA on the Commons .

If you liked this article...

Find out more, on this website.

You might like these other articles on our site covering similar topics:

• Artificial intelligence
• Computer memory
• Introduction to psychology
• Neural networks
• Science of happiness
• World Wide Web (WWW)

Other websites

Notes and references.

Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2012, 2020. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use .

Rate this page

Tell your friends, cite this page, more to explore on our website....

• Get the book
• Send feedback

I’m Too Lazy to Come Up With a Good Title: How the Internet Makes Your Brain Lazy

This anonymous student writer is a Computer Science major and a Massachusetts resident who describes himself as “interested in everything but passionate about nothing” — except not divulging any personal information. He presently spends his days secluded, enjoying living his ideal lifestyle enshrouded “in the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet.” He wrote this paper for a Composition II research assignment in order to rationalize a “terrible memory.” He is currently “overcoming(?) perfectionism after a long 4-year battle.”

It’s becoming increasingly harder for me to remember things. When I was younger, I used to remember a lot of things, such as people’s ages, their birthdays, their favorite foods, their favorite colors, their phone numbers, and even their license plates. Unfortunately, that’s all changed. Nowadays, I can barely remember their names without looking through my meticulously crafted stalkery profile of them on my phone. Before I jump to the glaring conclusion that I’ve reached a fairly early case of cognitive decline, I think it’s important to take a step back and think about what has changed since then.

When I was younger, I didn’t have a phone to take note of people’s birthdays or phone numbers or even their names. I just remembered them. I stored all of that information in a seemingly infinite directory that was my brain. What’s changed since then isn’t necessarily that directory, but rather where it’s kept. That phone that I have now, in which I store all of that information – the birthdays and phone numbers and names that I would never be able to remember today – has made it so that there’s not much reason to remember things like that anymore. That directory that once existed in my brain is now my phone.

But if my phone is now that directory, then what of my actual brain? Surely my brain exists and I can still memorize things to a lesser degree and with an increased effort, but how else has this change in location affected my brain? Searching just the terms “internet” and “brain” on the Internet leads to a pretty concentrated array of results, most, if not all, alluding to the many cognitive functions such as memory and attention that are being utterly obliterated by the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet. Not something I want to be reading at three o’clock in the morning.

But for the sake of knowledge, and quite possibly for the sake of scaring myself into cutting down the unhealthy amount of Internet I consume each day, I think it’s important that I educate myself on this matter. Matthew Hennessey, author of “The Cost of Our Digital Addictions,” cites psychologists from Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin that review four studies testing people’s information recall with access to a computer, concluding that the test subjects performed poorly when they knew that the information was accessible on the computer. (Hennessey) This made enough sense. The Internet provides an abundance of quality information in a very convenient and easily accessible manner. It makes sense to rely on it because of that. The Internet makes it unnecessary for the brain to work so hard. And just like when you stop using your muscles and your muscles become weaker, the brain will perform poorly the less you use it.

Dean Burnett, author of “Is the Internet Killing Our Brains?,” offers some insight as well. His stance on how the Internet may affect our brain provides some relief but feels inconclusive. He declares that damage from information overload is “unlikely” and cites sources both supporting and opposing the notion that Google is destroying memory. For things like attention span deficiency and social media addictions, he shifts the blame to how humans are wired. It makes sense how we’re to blame for our own Internet usage, but it seems as if Burnett’s trying everything to make it seem as if the Internet is not to blame.

Being let down by the seemingly pro-Internet Dean Burnett, and my increasing interest in the connection between social media and memory, I checked out Andrew Gregory’s “How Social Media Is Hurting Your Memory”. He cites a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that shows how people who shared their experiences via social media often had “less precise” memories of those experiences. In addition, he describes three studies led by Diana Tamir from Princeton University that researched this phenomenon, testing how the memory of experiences are affected by recording them through various external formats such as taking pictures or notes, finding that “those who wrote down, recorded, or shared their experiences performed about 10% worse on memory tests across all experiments.” (Gregory) The researchers concluded that it was the act of “externalizing their experience” that led them to ultimately forget the details of those very same experiences. (Gregory) This also makes sense because when we’ve externalized something, it shouldn’t be necessary for us to keep storing that information in our memory when we can fill that space up with other more important things such as how Grimmsnarl can’t learn the move Snarl, despite being both dark type and having the word “snarl” in its name. Weird, huh?

Being devastated by the sudden realization that my precious cherished memories were being utterly obliterated by the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet, I needed some respite that could only be found by reading some reassuring articles on the Internet. As if it was some sort of magical coincidence, I just nearly stumbled across godsend “Good News: Using a Computer Does Not Rot Your Brain” by Alice G. Walton and was met with immediate gratification at just the very sight of the headline. Walton discusses a study by the Mayo Clinic alluding to computer usage having positive effects on the brain. Just as I was getting my hopes up however, I was met with the crushing detail that the test subjects were aged 70-93 and that the study only showed correlation between computer usage and the lack of brain deterioration. (Walton) Just as I should’ve expected from the devastating abomination that we all know to be the Internet.

This was quite honestly the last straw. Being let down by the seemingly exploitative Alice G. Walton and overall disappointed in my pursuit to understand why the Internet was hacking at my already meager cognitive functions, I needed to understand more. What is it about the Internet that makes my brain rot? How does social media factor into that? The only insight I was able to get was from Matthew Hennessy who explained that because the Internet provided reliable and accessible information, the brain would naturally rely on it to make less work for itself and Andrew Gregory who weighed in with how externalizing information is effective in not forgetting the more important things in life. But even so, I was still left with some questions. Why does the brain decide to take the lazy route and why does the brain externalize information?

When it seemed as if all hope was lost, I looked back at Hennessey’s article and did a little digging. I thought that the study he cited on information recall might give me some additional insight on my inquiries so I used my expert sleuthing skills to locate the study, eventually finding Psychology professor Betsy Sparrow and other’s “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Whilst reading through this study, I came across the term “transactive memory.” They explain this to be a “combination of memory stores held directly by individuals and the memory stores they can access because they know someone who knows that information” (Sparrow, 776). Or to put simply, transactive memory is a term used to describe a system of memory that relies on others to store and retrieve information from. Now how does this relate to Google? Sparrow and others go on to explain that search engines like Google have become our “primary transactive memory.” (Sparrow, 776) This concept could explain why it’s so difficult to remember things that can easily be found with the click of a few buttons. If we treat others as databases of information in which we can store and retrieve information from, then the Internet can be treated as just another one of those databases of information, but a lot more easily and readily accessible, and in a lot of cases, more expert. To create a central location where all information can easily be found through a search engine is much easier to use than the sometimes unreliable experts you may be acquainted with. This seems to be an automatic process and thus it makes perfect sense for the brain to choose the Internet, a place where you can find high-quality and easily accessible information, to rely on as its primary transactive memory.

This answers my question on why we externalize information. In short, it’s just a way for us to store information elsewhere to compensate for our limited memory capacity. But even still, it almost seems as if information received from the Internet is forgotten more than information received elsewhere. Is the Internet responsible for our brains becoming lazier and if so, how? From “Behavioural and brain responses related to Internet search and memory” by Dr. Guangheng Dong and Marc N. Potenza, they studied information recall with “Internet-based or book-based searches” finding that “Internet searching was associated with lower accuracy in recalling information” (Dong and Potenza, 2553). This means that information received from the Internet is in fact forgotten more and that the Internet is in fact responsible for our brains becoming lazier. But I still don’t understand why that’s the case.

To my rescue was mental health researcher Joseph Firth and other’s “The ‘Online Brain’: How the Internet May be Changing Our Cognition.” Whilst reading through this article, I came across “cognitive offloading” a term they describe to be people “implicitly reducing their allocation of cognitive resources towards remembering this information, since they know this will be available for future reference externally” (Firth, et al., 122). To put another way, cognitive offloading is a term used to describe an automatic (unconscious) process of recognizing where to find information for future reference that people use to lessen the “load” of remembering information. (Firth, et al., 122) This concept could explain why it’s so difficult to remember things that can easily be found with the click of a few buttons. If high-quality information is so easily and readily accessible, it doesn’t make sense for our mind to do more than is necessary. The Internet has made our memory so obsolete to the point where it makes more sense to forget something. To create a central location where all information can easily be found through a search engine is much easier to reference than notes you’d have to flip through to find something. And if it’s an automatic process then it makes perfect sense for the brain to take the lazy route. The brain was designed to be lazy and the Internet just puts the laziness on full blast. This is what explains why the Internet makes us forget information received from it. And there’s a cute interplay between cognitive offloading and transactive memory. They work in conjunction with each other. With the Internet being one’s primary transactive memory, people choose to offload their memory onto that primary transactive memory. This is how the act of externalizing information to the Internet creates a more lazier brain as a result of the Internet.

Through this exploration I’ve learned of two new concepts—cognitive offloading and transactive memory—and the cute interplay between them. This interplay helps me better understand why the Internet is eating away at my memory. Before this exploration, I had already kind of guessed that the Internet was responsible for my gradually deteriorating memory but I didn’t know how or what I could do to stop it. The answers I found through this inquiry would have never been found by a simple glossing of the first few articles that showed up on Google and I probably would’ve never remembered the contents of those articles anyway. Unfortunately, what I’m missing is how to utilize my research to prevent my memory’s deterioration. The Internet is an indispensable tool for information acquisition and to be rid of it is near impossible. Heck, all of that research—the information that I acquired in order to write this inquiry-driven essay—was through the aid of the Internet. My findings and my research was all possible because of the Internet; so to step away from that just isn’t practical. But I’m still reluctant to believe that there’s nothing that can be done or that there’s no cognitive function which can benefit from using the Internet. Ultimately, though the Internet is to blame for my lack of information recall, it is not practical for me to stop using it.

Works Cited Burnett, Dean. “Is the Internet Killing Our Brains?” The Guardian , Guardian News and Media, 8 Oct. 2016.

Dong, Guangheng, and Marc N. Potenza. “Behavioural and Brain Responses Related to Internet Search and Memory.” European Journal of Neuroscience , vol. 42, no. 8, 6 Aug. 2015, pp. 2546–2554.

Firth, Joseph, et al. “The ‘Online Brain’: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition.” World Psychiatry , vol. 18, no. 2, 5 June 2019, pp. 119–129.

Gregory, Andrew. “How Social Media Is Hurting Your Memory.” Time , 8 May 2018.

Hennessey, Matthew. “The Cost of Our Digital Addictions.” National Review , 4 Sept. 2018

Sparrow, Betsy, et al. “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science , vol. 333, no. 6043, 5 Aug. 2011, pp. 776–778.

Walton, Alice G. “Good News: Using a Computer Does Not Rot Your Brain.” The Atlantic , Atlantic Media Company, 12 June 2012.

The internet is tricking our brains

Every now and then, Adrian Ward likes to test himself against the internet’s most-used search engine. 

“There are times when I have the impulse to Google something, and I don’t,” said Ward, who studies psychology as an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. 

“Because,” he said, “I want to see if I can drag that up from memory.” 

It’s a challenge that’s familiar to anyone with a smartphone in their pocket who can’t quite remember the year that a favorite album came out or the name of an actor in an old movie. Take out the phone? Or rack the brain? 

But that choice is more than a way to test our recollection of trivia. People who lean on a search engine such as Google may get the right answers but they can also end up with a wrong idea of how strong their own memory is, according to a study that Ward published in August. That’s because online search is so seamless and always available that people often don’t have the chance to experience their own failure to remember things, the study found.

The findings are part of a wave of new research in recent years examining the intersection of the internet and human memory. The implications could be far-reaching, including for the spread of political misinformation, Ward said. He cited years of research into how people make decisions, showing that people who are overconfident in their knowledge become more entrenched in their views about politics and science and also can make questionable financial and medical decisions. 

“The larger effect is people thinking, ‘I am smart. I am responsible for this. I came up with this info,’” Ward said in an interview. 

A cadre of cognitive scientists, psychologists and other researchers are trying to understand what it means to remember when memories have been shaped by technology sometimes in many different ways. It amounts to a rethinking of how memory is going to work with each new iteration of digital devices — blurring the line between mind and the internet into something that one day might be thought of as an “Intermind,” Ward said.  

The tech industry is working to blur the line further. Companies such as Apple and Facebook are exploring glasses and headsets to make it easier for someone to always have a computer in front of their face, while Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is aiming to roll out brain implants for humans after already testing them in monkeys. 

The potentially far-reaching consequences aren’t yet known, but research is giving clues into what it means to rely so heavily on the internet to remember. 

A study in 2019 found that the spatial memory used for navigating through the world tends to be worse for people who’ve made extensive use of map apps and GPS devices. Multiple studies have examined how memory may be altered by the act of posting on social media, sometimes improving recall and other times inducing forgetfulness . 

In Ward’s research, published in October in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he used a series of eight experiments to test how people used and thought about their own knowledge as they completed short quizzes of general knowledge. Some participants had access to Google while answering the questions — “What is the most widely spoken language in the world?” was one — while others did not. They also completed surveys. 

He found that people who used Google were more confident in their own ability to think and remember, and erroneously predicted that they would know significantly more in future quizzes without the help of the internet. 

Ward attributed that to Google’s design: simple and easy, less like a library and more like a “neural prosthetic” that simulates a search in a human brain. 

“The speed makes it so you never understand what you don’t know,” Ward said. 

The findings echo and build on earlier research, including a widely cited 2011 paper on the “ Google effect ”: a phenomenon in which people are less likely to remember information if they know they can find it later on the internet. 

Researchers aren’t suggesting that people quit apps — a recommendation that would be futile, anyway. And it’s not clear how closely Google or other companies are following the latest research or if they would make any changes to their products as a result. In a statement this week, Google said its mission was to organize the world’s information and make it accessible. “This helps people with a range of things in their everyday lives,” the company said. 

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have debated ways to define human memory. For many modern scholars, it’s not as simple as what a person can recollect in a given moment. 

“The lay public and even professional computational scientists have this habit of thinking of minds as sitting inside individual brains,” said Steven Sloman, a Brown University professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences. 

But in reality, “we use much more than our own brains to think and to remember.” 

To help with memory, humans have always relied on family, friends and other people as well as external resources like written material, said Sloman, co-author of the book “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.” He said it’s best to think about memory and knowledge in terms of community, not individuals. 

“The internet strikes me as an extension of what we’ve been doing for millennia, which is making use of the world, and it’s now in electronic form,” Sloman said. 

Sometimes that amounts to what cognitive scientists call “offloading”: giving the brain a break by storing information elsewhere. Keeping phone numbers on a mobile phone or on paper is a classic example. 

But the internet isn’t just storing information. It’s providing information nearly instantaneously at any time, without asking any questions in return and generally without fail. And it’s providing ways to shape memories. 

In a review of recent studies in the field, published in September, researchers at Duke University found that the “externalization” of memories into digital spheres “changes what people attend to and remember about their own experiences.” Digital media is new and different, they wrote, because of factors such as how easily images are edited or the huge number of memories at people’s fingertips. 

Each photographic cue means another chance for a memory to be “updated,” maybe with a false impression, and each manipulation of a piece of social media content is a chance for distortion, wrote the researchers, doctoral student Emmaline Drew Eliseev and Elizabeth Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of a lab dedicated to studying memory. 

“These questions and others are about memory — but they arise because of a social context that could not have been envisaged two decades ago,” they wrote. 

David Ingram covers tech for NBC News.

It appears you are using an older browser. Please consider a upgrading to a modern version of your browser to best enjoy this website.

Mandala Collections Sources

Explore is the internet killing our brains | education | the guardian.

• Burnett, Dean (Author)

• The Magazine
• Stay Curious
• The Sciences
• Environment
• Planet Earth

Is the Internet Rotting Our Brains? Yes.

The internet makes deep thought difficult, if not impossible, says nicholas carr..

For well over 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’s 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 the pithy quote I was after. I use my browser to pay my bills, schedule my appointments, book flights and hotel rooms, renew my driver’s license, send invitations and greeting cards. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the web’s data thickets—reading and writing e-mail, scanning headlines and blog posts, following Facebook updates, watching video streams, downloading music, or just tripping lightly from link to link to link.

The boons are real. But they come at a price. As Marshall McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. 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.

Sometime in 2007 I began to notice that the net was exerting a much stronger and broader influence over me than my old stand-alone PC ever had. It wasn’t just that I was spending so much time staring into a computer screen. It wasn’t just that so many of my habits and routines were changing as I became more accustomed to and dependent on the sites and services of the net. The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. At first I figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected. The internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data-processing machine.

I missed my old brain.

What can science tell us about the actual effects that Internet use is having on the way our minds work? No doubt this question will be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and web designers point to the same conclusion: 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.

One thing is very clear: If, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book.

In the course of a day, most of us with access to the web spend at least a couple of hours online—sometimes much more. And during that time, we tend to repeat the same or similar actions over and over again, usually at a high rate of speed and often in response to cues delivered through a screen or a speaker. We tap the keys on our PC keyboard. We drag a mouse and click its left and right buttons and spin its scroll wheel. We rotate our iPhones, iPods, and iPads to shift between “landscape” and “portrait” modes while manipulating the icons on their touch-sensitive screens.

As we go through these motions, the net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory, and auditory cortices. There are the sensations that come through our hands and fingers as we click and scroll, type and touch. There are the many audio signals delivered through our ears, such as the chime that announces the arrival of a new e-mail or instant message and the various ringtones that our mobile phones use to alert us to different events. And of course there are the myriad visual cues that flash across our retinas as we navigate the online world—not just the ever-changing arrays of text and pictures and videos but also the hyperlinks distinguished by underlining or colored text, the cursors that change shape depending on their function, the new e-mail subject lines highlighted in bold type. The net engages all of our senses (except, so far, those of smell and taste), and it engages them simultaneously.

The net also provides a high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards— “positive reinforcements,” in psychological terms—that encourage the repetition of both physical and mental actions. When we click a link, we get something new to look at and evaluate. When we Google a keyword, we receive, in the blink of an eye, a list of interesting information to appraise. When we send a text or an instant message or an e-mail, we often get a reply in a matter of seconds or minutes. The net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

Our use of the internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: The net seizes our attention only to scatter it. We focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli. Whenever and wherever we log on, the net presents us with an incredibly seductive blur. Human beings “want more information, more impressions, and more complexity,” writes Torkel Klingberg, a Swedish neuroscientist. We tend to “seek out situations that demand concurrent performance or situations in which [we] are overwhelmed with information.”

Not all distractions are bad. As most of us know from experience, if we concentrate too intensively on a tough problem, we can get stuck in a mental rut. Our thinking narrows, and we struggle vainly to come up with new ideas. But if we let the problem sit unattended for a time—if we “sleep on it”—we often return to it with a fresh perspective and a burst of creativity. Research by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who heads the Unconscious Lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. But Dijksterhuis’s work also shows that our unconscious thought processes don’t engage with a problem until we’ve clearly and consciously defined it. If we don’t have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, “unconscious thought does not occur.”

The constant distractedness that the net encourages—the state of being, to borrow a phrase from Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” “distracted from distraction by distraction”—is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking when we’re weighing a decision. The net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

In a 2005 interview, neuroscientist and brain plasticity expert Michael Merzenich ruminated on the internet’s power to cause not just modest alterations but fundamental changes in our mental makeup. Noting that “our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability,” he described the net as the latest in a series of “modern cultural specializations” that “contemporary humans can spend millions of ‘practice’ events at, [and that] the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to.” He concluded that “our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure.” He returned to this theme in a post on his blog in 2008, resorting to capital letters to emphasize his points. While acknowledging that it’s now hard to imagine living without the internet and online tools like the Google search engine, he stressed that “THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES.”

John Sweller, an Australian educational psychologist, has spent three decades studying how our minds process information and, in particular, how we learn. His work illuminates how the net and other media influence the style and the depth of our thinking. Our brains, he explains, incorporate two very different kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. We hold our immediate impressions, sensations, and thoughts as short-term memories, which tend to last only a matter of seconds. All the things we’ve learned about the world, whether consciously or unconsciously, are stored as long-term memories, which can remain in our brains for a few days, a few years, or even a lifetime. One particular type of short-term memory, called working memory, plays an instrumental role in the transfer of information into long-term memory and hence in the creation of our personal store of knowledge. Working memory forms, in a very real sense, the contents of our consciousness at any given moment. “We are conscious of what is in working memory and not conscious of anything else,” Sweller says.

Brain scientists have come to realize that long-term memory is actually the seat of understanding. It stores not just facts but complex concepts, or schemas. By organizing scattered bits of information into patterns of knowledge, schemas give depth and richness to our thinking. “Our intellectual prowess is derived largely from the schemas we have acquired over long periods of time,” Sweller says. “We are able to understand concepts in our areas of expertise because we have schemas associated with those concepts.”

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in transferring information from working memory into longterm memory. By regulating the velocity and intensity of information flow, media exert a strong influence on this process. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas. With the net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next. We’re able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source.

Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that 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. “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” Grafman says. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” You become more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions, he argues, rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.

David Meyer, a University of Michigan neuroscientist and one of the leading experts on multitasking, makes a similar point. As we gain more experience in rapidly shifting our attention, we may “overcome some of the inefficiencies” inherent in multitasking, he says, “but except in rare circumstances, you can train until you’re blue in the face and you’d never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time.” What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.” The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

The net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope and makes it easy for us to sort through that library—to find, if not exactly what we were looking for, at least something sufficient for our immediate purposes. What the net diminishes is the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence.

Reprinted from The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains , by Nicholas Carr. Copyright 2010 by Nicholas Carr. With the permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Co.

Already a subscriber?

Register or Log In

Keep reading for as low as $1.99!

Sign up for our weekly science updates.

Save up to 40% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine.

• Generative AI
• Office Suites
• Collaboration Software
• Productivity Software
• Augmented Reality
• Emerging Technology
• Remote Work
• Artificial Intelligence
• Operating Systems
• IT Leadership
• IT Management
• IT Operations
• Cloud Computing
• Computers and Peripherals
• Data Center
• Enterprise Applications
• Vendors and Providers
• Enterprise Buyer’s Guides
• United States
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• New Zealand
• Newsletters
• Foundry Careers
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Member Preferences
• About AdChoices
• E-commerce Affiliate Relationships
• Your California Privacy Rights

Our Network

• Network World

Nicholas Carr: The Internet is hurting our brains

How familiar is this? You’re reading an online newspaper article on the Gulf oil spill, but before you get half through, you’ve clicked on links that lead you to fascinating pieces about marine biology, Sarah Palin, and Moby Dick. As you return to the original story, a pair of alerts tells you that a buddy has updated his Facebook page and your son has Tweeted something from the ballpark, which in turn links to a really cool video about Barry Bonds. Got to check those, of course, and by the time you return to the newspaper article, you’ve forgotten the point of the story and don’t bother to finish it.

In an often-quoted, 2008 essay in The Atlantic, author Nicholas Carr asked “ Is Google Making Us Stupid .” At the time, my feeling was, yes, the Web can distract us and keep us from doing important work, but stupid? No way.

Now I’m not so sure. Carr has expanded his essay into a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains that delves into the structure of the brain and the effect that constant stimulation has on our ability to concentrate, remember, reason and even empathize. As you probably assumed, he doesn’t think the Internet is making us smarter.

“Over the last 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,” he writes.

And Google, says Carr, is a big part of the problem.

Your Brain on Google

“Every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention — and it’s in Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible,” he writes. “Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction.”

Before I go further, I should say that The Shallows is not an anti-technology rant or Luddite manifesto. Indeed, if the book has a very obvious failing, it’s the lack of direction or solutions for readers who agree with the conclusion. Carr, a prolific blogger and commentator on technology, is hardly pining for some golden age of contemplative intellectualism, and notes that major new communication-related technologies, from Gutenberg’s press to television are disruptive and invariably met with cries of alarm.

Consider this complaint made more than 400 years ago: “One of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world,” the English writer Barnaby Rich moaned in 1600.

If Carr had only talked about the Internet and digital technology as distractions, his book might still be interesting, but not very significant. It’s no great insight to realize that texting while driving is stupid , or that responding to every Tweet and clicking on every link will keep you from getting anything done.

Carr marshals a good deal of evidence drawn from recent, and not so recent experimental work, which shows, he believes, that the use of digital technology is actually changing not just what we do, but how we think.

He refers us to the work of Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA development psychologist who studies the use of media and its effect on learning: “Every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others. Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been accompanied by new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes, including abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination.”

Or as Carr puts it: “We’re becoming, in a word, shallower.”

Experts Disagree On Carr’s Thesis

To be sure, there is experimental work that points in a different direction. In a rather unfriendly piece in the New York Times Book Review last month, Jonah Lehrer cited a different set of experts from UCLA who “found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the [brain], at least when compared with reading a book-like text.”

Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired, then went on to contradict Carr’s major thesis, saying: “Interestingly, this brain area underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet. Google, in other words, isn’t making us stupid — it’s exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.”

But does it?

Carr argues that our brains are “plastic,” that is they are modified by the tasks we undertake. “When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.”

Even the use of links that give readers access to useful information not in the text has a downside, Carr believes. Erping Zhu, a researcher at the University of Michigan, tested reading comprehension by having people read the same online article, but she varied the number of links included in the passage. She then tested the subjects, and found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased. Readers were forced to devote more and more of their attention and brain power to evaluating the links and deciding whether to click on them

As a nation, Americans are prone to believe that technology can fix almost anything, and that the downsides of technology can always be managed. And there’s no doubt, at least in my mind, that we’ve benefited tremendously from the use of digital technology. I’ll never want to drive to the library to look up the odd fact when I can find it on Google in seconds.

I’m certainly in no position to weigh the contradictory scientific evidence about the relationship of digital technology and cognitive development. But my own experience as a heavy (and often heavily distracted) user of Web-based technology tells me Carr is on the right track. At the very least, his book is worth reading with your iPhone turned off and your Tweets on hold.

San Francisco journalist Bill Snyder writes frequently about business and technology. He welcomes your comments and suggestions. Reach him at [email protected].

Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.

Related content

Windows 11 insider previews: what’s in the latest build, dropbox adds end-to-end encryption for team folders, android versions: a living history from 1.0 to 15, the unspoken obnoxiousness of google's gemini improvements, from our editors straight to your inbox.

San Francisco journalist Bill Snyder writes frequently about business and technology. His work appears regularly in CIO.com and the publications of Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. He welcomes your comments and suggestions.

More from this author

Firefox’s new anti-tracking features best chrome and edge, surprise best buy prices often on par with amazon, why you should be (very) wary of windows 10 if you own an older pc, wireless network tests prove competition boosts quality across u.s. carriers, show me more, google can’t seem to quit cookies, delays killing them again.

Apple reportedly cuts Vision Pro production due to low demand

Windows 11: A guide to the updates

After 10 years of progress, does mixed reality (XR) have a future? | Ep. 147

More tech layoffs as AI takes hold | Ep. 146

Why the world will be wearing more technology in the future

After 10 years of progress, does mixed reality (XR) have a future?

More tech layoffs as AI takes hold

The Internet’s Impact on Creativity: Your Thoughts

Is the internet helpful or hurtful to human creativity? I posed that question to the reader discussion group known as TAD , and the consensus seems to be: It’s both. It’s complicated. And naturally, it depends a lot on what form of creativity you’re talking about. Here’s how one reader sums it up:

Because of the Internet I write more and receive feedback from people I know (on Facebook) and online strangers (on TAD and other platforms that use Disqus). I use it as a jumping-off place and resource for planning lessons for my high-school students in science. However, I don’t practice music as often as I used to.

On a similar note, another reader confesses, “I draw less because I’m always on TAD”:

As a sketch artist, I appreciate my ability to Google things I want to draw for a reference point, but that doesn’t make me more creative. I already had the image in my head and the ability to draw. I honed my skills drawing people the old fashioned way, looking at pictures in books or live subjects and practicing till my fingers were going to fall off. In my opinion, the internet also encourages people to copy the work of others that goes “viral” rather than creating something truly original. The fact that you can monetize that viral quality also makes it more likely that people will try to copy rather than create.

That’s the same reason a third reader worries that “the internet has become stifling for creativity”:

Maybe I am not looking in the right place, but most platforms seem to be more about reblogging/retweeting/reposting other people’s creations. Then there is the issue of having work stolen and credits removed.

As another reader notes, “This is the central conflict of fan fiction”:

It’s obviously creative. On the other hand, it is all based on blatant copying of another writer’s work. How much is this a huge expansion of a creative outlet, and how much is this actually people choosing to limit their own creativity by colonizing somebody else’s world rather than creating a new one?

The fanfic debate is fascinating , and more readers expand on it here .

For my part, I tend to think the internet has encouraged and elevated some amazing new forms of creativity based on reaction and re-creation, collaboration and synthesis. Take this delightful example :

Those creative forms are a big part of my job too: When I go to work, I’m either distilling my colleagues’ articles for our Daily newsletter or piecing together reader emails for Notes, and those curatorial tasks have been exciting and challenging in ways that I never expected. But I’ve also missed writing fiction and poetry and literary criticism, and I worry sometimes that I’m letting those creative muscles atrophy. If you’re a fanfic reader or writer (or videographer, or meme-creator, or content-aggregator) and would like to share your experience, please let us know: [email protected] .

This next reader speaks up for creativity as “the product of synthesis”:

It’s not so much a quest for pure “originality,” as it is a quest for original perspectives or original articulations. I’d say that my creativity has been fueled by letting myself fall into occasional rabbit holes. Whether that’s plodding through artists I don’t know well on Spotify or following hyperlinks in a Wiki piece until I have forgotten about what it was that I initially wondered, that access to knowledge in a semi-random form triggers the old noggin like little else.

On the other hand: So much knowledge! So many rabbit holes! Jim is paralyzed:

I find many more ideas and inspirations, but the flow of information and ideas is so vast that I never find time to develop them. I need to get off the internet.

Diane is also exasperated:

The promise of digital technology was: spinning piles of straw into useful pieces of gold. My reality is: looking for golden needles in a giant haystack of unusable straw. I spend so much time looking for the few things actually useful to my project, my writing, my daily info needs, and by the end of the day I feel like I’ve wasted so much time and effort sorting through useless crap. And the pile of useless keeps getting bigger and bigger, like a bad dream.

This next reader provides some tips for productive discovery:

I am old enough to vaguely recall a time before I began to use the internet on a daily basis. What I would do, back then, when I got stuck and could not find a creative angle on a problem, was to go to some arbitrary corner of the library, take down the first book that caught my interest even though it had nothing to do with the problem at hand, and read a few pages—sometimes, the whole book. More often than not, it would trigger all sorts of analogies, and at least a few of them usually turned out to be fruitful. (Even if nothing turned out to be relevant, I usually still learned something interesting, so it was a win-win strategy.) It was a great way (to borrow Horace Walpole’s definition of serendipity ) to make discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things one were not in quest of. I try to use the internet in a somewhat similar fashion: When I’m stuck, I often spend a morning strolling around arbitrary corners of the internet, trying to discover stuff I did not know I was in quest of. Typically, I start in some academic resource like JSTOR. (I almost always start by limiting my search to articles at least 50 years old; it ensures that one does not end up reading fashionable stuff and thus thinking the same thoughts as all the other hamsters in the academic wheel. Also, older articles are usually far more well-written than the crap that results from the publish-or-perish system.) I am not above using e.g. Wikipedia, though, at least as a point of departure. I also like reading old stuff in online newspaper/magazine archives. Sometimes, a stray remark in one of those wonderful 19th-century magazines written by and for men of letters is all you need to get a fresh angle on a familiar problem.

Gotta love those 19th-century magazines . In some ways, their mission wasn’t so different from that of the Facebook groups and Reddit threads and Disqus forums of today: creating a space for discourse and exchange and reflection, where exciting new ideas could bump up against each other. As James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic ’s founding editor, wrote to a friend in 1857 , “The magazine is to be free without being fanatical, and we hope to unite in it all available talent of all modes of opinion.” And as Terri, one of the founding members of TAD, reflects today:

TAD itself has been a creative endeavor for me and the other mods. Envisioning the community we wanted. Coming up with ideas to bring it to life. We developed ideas around the mix of politics, open and fun threads that the community has taken on and grown. It really has been a creative experience in collaboration on the internet.

Check out TAD’s whole discussion on creativity here , as well as many more. As for the offline benefits of online collaboration, take it from this reader—a “furniture maker and Weimaraner enthusiast”:

I would like to share a story about a project I am working on in which the internet has certainly aided my creativity. Zeus, our 8-month-old Weimaraner, is a couch hog. When my girlfriend and I sit down on the couch to watch TV, he will sit directly in front of us and bark until we make room for him. There are three large dog beds in the house, but Zeus steadfastly refuses to lie on the dog beds. I am a member of a Weimaraner-owner Facebook group called Weim Crime. Several people in the group have had similar problems. We came up with a solution I tested out last week: build a dog bunk bed with one bed on the bottom and one bed about the same height as our couch. It has worked out very well. Zeus quietly relaxes on the top dog bunk while we sit on the couch. I am now collecting feedback from that same group before building the more attractive final version. I have received very useful feedback—for example, lowering the top bunk deck to 18 inches or lower to prevent joint injuries. My end goal is to design and build a simple, low-cost dog bunk bed that is more attractive than the prototype and post a YouTube video showing other owners how to build a similar one. This is just one silly project, but the feedback and interest I have receiving regarding the project has been really inspiring.

What questions about your day-to-day experience of the world have you been pondering? We welcome your feedback and inspirations. Check back Monday for the next discussion question in this series—and in the meantime, enjoy some Weimaraner art:

• Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Columbia university is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in gaza and the limits of free speech..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

[TRAIN SCREECHING]

Well, you can hear the helicopter circling. This is Asthaa Chaturvedi. I’m a producer with “The Daily.” Just walked out of the 116 Street Station. It’s the main station for Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. And it’s day seven of the Gaza solidarity encampment, where a hundred students were arrested last Thursday.

So on one side of Broadway, you see camera crews. You see NYPD officers all lined up. There’s barricades, steel barricades, caution tape. This is normally a completely open campus. And I’m able to — all members of the public, you’re able to walk through.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Looks like international media is here.

Have your IDs out. Have your IDs out.

Students lining up to swipe in to get access to the University. ID required for entry.

Swipe your ID, please.

Hi, how are you, officer? We’re journalists with “The New York Times.”

You’re not going to get in, all right? I’m sorry.

Hi. Can I help please?

Yeah, it’s total lockdown here at Columbia.

Please have your IDs out ready to swipe.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, the story of how Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators, and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. I spoke with my colleague, Nick Fandos.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

It’s Thursday, April 25.

Nick, if we rewind the clock a few months, we end up at a moment where students at several of the country’s best known universities are protesting Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks, its approach to a war in Gaza. At times, those protests are happening peacefully, at times with rhetoric that is inflammatory. And the result is that the leaders of those universities land before Congress. But the president of Columbia University, which is the subject we’re going to be talking about today, is not one of the leaders who shows up for that testimony.

That’s right. So the House Education Committee has been watching all these protests on campus. And the Republican Chairwoman decides, I’m going to open an investigation, look at how these administrations are handling it, because it doesn’t look good from where I sit. And the House last winter invites the leaders of several of these elite schools, Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, to come and testify in Washington on Capitol Hill before Congress.

Now, the President of Columbia has what turns out to be a very well-timed, pre-planned trip to go overseas and speak at an international climate conference. So Minouche Shafik isn’t going to be there. So instead, the presidents of Harvard, and Penn, and MIT show up. And it turned out to be a disaster for these universities.

They were asked very pointed questions about the kind of speech taking place on their campuses, and they gave really convoluted academic answers back that just baffled the committee. But there was one question that really embodied the kind of disconnect between the Committee — And it wasn’t just Republicans, Republicans and Democrats on the Committee — and these college presidents. And that’s when they were asked a hypothetical.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.

And two of the presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, they’re unwilling to say in this really kind of intense back and forth that this speech would constitute a violation of their rules.

It can be, depending on the context.

What’s the context?

Targeted at an individual. Is it pervasive?

It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?

And it sets off a firestorm.

It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.

Members of Congress start calling for their resignations. Alumni are really, really ticked off. Trustees of the University start to wonder, I don’t know that these leaders really have got this under control. And eventually, both of them lose their jobs in a really high profile way.

Right. And as you’ve hinted at, for somewhat peculiar scheduling reasons, Columbia’s President escapes this disaster of a hearing in what has to be regarded as the best timing in the history of the American Academy.

Yeah, exactly. And Columbia is watching all this play out. And I think their first response was relief that she was not in that chair, but also a recognition that, sooner or later, their turn was going to come back around and they were going to have to sit before Congress.

Why were they so certain that they would probably end up before Congress and that this wasn’t a case of completely dodging a bullet?

Well, they remain under investigation by the committee. But also, as the winter wears on, all the same intense protests just continue unabated. So in many ways, Columbia’s like these other campuses. But in some ways, it’s even more intense. This is a university that has both one of the largest Jewish student populations of any of its peers. But it also has a large Arab and Muslim student population, a big Middle Eastern studies program. It has a dual degree program in Tel Aviv.

And it’s a university on top of all that that has a real history of activism dating back to the 1960s. So when students are recruited or choose to come to Columbia, they’re actively opting into a campus that prides itself on being an activist community. It’s in the middle of New York City. It’s a global place. They consider the city and the world, really, like a classroom to Columbia.

In other words, if any campus was going to be a hotbed of protest and debate over this conflict, it was going to be Columbia University.

Exactly. And when this spring rolls around, the stars finally align. And the same congressional committee issues another invitation to Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s President, to come and testify. And this time, she has no excuse to say no.

But presumably, she is well aware of exactly what testifying before this committee entails and is highly prepared.

Columbia knew this moment was coming. They spent months preparing for this hearing. They brought in outside consultants, crisis communicators, experts on anti-Semitism. The weekend before the hearing, she actually travels down to Washington to hole up in a war room, where she starts preparing her testimony with mock questioners and testy exchanges to prep her for this. And she’s very clear on what she wants to try to do.

Where her counterparts had gone before the committee a few months before and looked aloof, she wanted to project humility and competence, to say, I know that there’s an issue on my campus right now with some of these protests veering off into anti-Semitic incidents. But I’m getting that under control. I’m taking steps in good faith to make sure that we restore order to this campus, while allowing people to express themselves freely as well.

So then the day of her actual testimony arrives. And just walk us through how it goes.

The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order. I note that —

So Wednesday morning rolls around. And President Shafik sits at the witness stand with two of her trustees and the head of Columbia’s new anti-Semitism task force.

Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people.

And right off the bat, they’re put through a pretty humbling litany of some of the worst hits of what’s been happening on campus.

For example, just four days after the harrowing October 7 attack, a former Columbia undergraduate beat an Israeli student with a stick.

The Republican Chairwoman of the Committee, Virginia Foxx, starts reminding her that there was a student who was actually hit with a stick on campus. There was another gathering more recently glorifying Hamas and other terrorist organizations, and the kind of chants that have become an everyday chorus on campus, which many Jewish students see as threatening. But when the questioning starts, President Shafik is ready. One of the first ones she gets is the one that tripped up her colleagues.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Mr. Greenwald?

And she answers unequivocally.

Dr. Shafik?

Yes, it does.

And, Professor —

That would be a violation of Columbia’s rules. They would be punished.

As President of Columbia, what is it like when you hear chants like, by any means necessary or Intifada Revolution?

I find those chants incredibly distressing. And I wish profoundly that people would not use them on our campus.

And in some of the most interesting exchanges of the hearing, President Shafik actually opens Columbia’s disciplinary books.

We have already suspended 15 students from Columbia. We have six on disciplinary probation. These are more disciplinary actions that have been taken probably in the last decade at Columbia. And —

She talks about the number of students that have been suspended, but also the number of faculty that she’s had removed from the classroom that are being investigated for comments that either violate some of Columbia’s rules or make students uncomfortable. One case in particular really underscores this.

And that’s of a Middle Eastern studies professor named Joseph Massad. He wrote an essay not long after Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government, where he described that attack with adjectives like awesome. Now, he said they’ve been misinterpreted, but a lot of people have taken offense to those comments.

Ms. Stefanik, you’re recognized for five minutes.

Thank you, Chairwoman. I want to follow up on my colleague, Rep Walberg’s question regarding Professor Joseph Massad. So let me be clear, President —

And so Representative Elise Stefanik, the same Republican who had tripped up Claudine Gay of Harvard and others in the last hearing, really starts digging in to President Shafik about these things at Columbia.

He is still Chair on the website. So has he been terminated as Chair?

Congresswoman, I —

And Shafik’s answers are maybe a little surprising.

— before getting back to you. I can confirm —

I know you confirmed that he was under investigation.

Yes, I can confirm that. But I —

Did you confirm he was still the Chair?

He says that Columbia is taking his case seriously. In fact, he’s under investigation right now.

Well, let me ask you this.

I need to check.

Will you make the commitment to remove him as Chair?

And when Stefanik presses her to commit to removing him from a campus leadership position —

I think that would be — I think — I would — yes. Let me come back with yes. But I think I — I just want to confirm his current status before I write —

We’ll take that as a yes, that you will confirm that he will no longer be chair.

Shafik seems to pause and think and then agree to it on the spot, almost like she is making administrative decisions with or in front of Congress.

Now, we did some reporting after the fact. And it turns out the Professor didn’t even realize he was under investigation. So he’s learning about this from the hearing too. So what this all adds up to, I think, is a performance so in line with what the lawmakers themselves wanted to hear, that at certain points, these Republicans didn’t quite know what to do with it. They were like the dog that caught the car.

Columbia beats Harvard and UPenn.

One of them, a Republican from Florida, I think at one point even marvelled, well, you beat Harvard and Penn.

Y’all all have done something that they weren’t able to do. You’ve been able to condemn anti-Semitism without using the phrase, it depends on the context. But the —

So Columbia’s president has passed this test before this committee.

Yeah, this big moment that tripped up her predecessors and cost them their jobs, it seems like she has cleared that hurdle and dispatched with the Congressional committee that could have been one of the biggest threats to her presidency.

Without objection, there being no further business, the committee stands adjourned. [BANGS GAVEL]

But back on campus, some of the students and faculty who had been watching the hearing came away with a very different set of conclusions. They saw a president who was so eager to please Republicans in Congress that she was willing to sell out some of the University’s students and faculty and trample on cherished ideas like academic freedom and freedom of expression that have been a bedrock of American higher education for a really long time.

And there was no clearer embodiment of that than what had happened that morning just as President Shafik was going to testify before Congress. A group of students before dawn set up tents in the middle of Columbia’s campus and declared themselves a pro-Palestinian encampment in open defiance of the very rules that Dr. Shafik had put in place to try and get these protests under control.

So these students in real-time are beginning to test some of the things that Columbia’s president has just said before Congress.

Exactly. And so instead of going to celebrate her successful appearance before Congress, Shafik walks out of the hearing room and gets in a black SUV to go right back to that war room, where she’s immediately confronted with a major dilemma. It basically boils down to this, she had just gone before Congress and told them, I’m going to get tough on these protests. And here they were. So either she gets tough and risks inflaming tension on campus or she holds back and does nothing and her words before Congress immediately look hollow.

And what does she decide?

So for the next 24 hours, she tries to negotiate off ramps. She consults with her Deans and the New York Police Department. And it all builds towards an incredibly consequential decision. And that is, for the first time in decades, to call the New York City Police Department onto campus in riot gear and break this thing up, suspend the students involved, and then arrest them.

To essentially eliminate this encampment.

Eliminate the encampment and send a message, this is not going to be tolerated. But in trying to quell the unrest, Shafik actually feeds it. She ends up leaving student protesters and the faculty who support them feeling betrayed and pushes a campus that was already on edge into a full blown crisis.

[SLOW TEMPO MUSIC]

After the break, what all of this has looked like to a student on Columbia’s campus. We’ll be right back.

[PHONE RINGS]

Is this Isabella?

Yes, this is she.

Hi, Isabella. It’s Michael Barbaro from “The Daily.”

Hi. Nice to meet you.

Earlier this week, we called Isabella Ramírez, the Editor in Chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, “The Columbia Daily Spectator,” which has been closely tracking both the protests and the University’s response to them since October 7.

So, I mean, in your mind, how do we get to this point? I wonder if you can just briefly describe the key moments that bring us to where we are right now.

Sure. Since October 7, there has certainly been constant escalation in terms of tension on campus. And there have been a variety of moves that I believe have distanced the student body, the faculty, from the University and its administration, specifically the suspension of Columbia’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And that became a huge moment in what was characterized as suppression of pro-Palestinian activism on campus, effectively rendering those groups, quote, unquote, unauthorized.

What was the college’s explanation for that?

They had cited in that suspension a policy which states that a demonstration must be approved within a certain window, and that there must be an advance notice, and that there’s a process for getting an authorized demonstration. But the primary point was this policy that they were referring to, which we later reported, was changed before the suspension.

So it felt a little ad hoc to people?

Yes, it certainly came as a surprise, especially at “Spectator.” We’re nerds of the University in the sense that we are familiar with faculty and University governance. But even to us, we had no idea where this policy was coming from. And this suspension was really the first time that it entered most students’ sphere.

Columbia’s campus is so known for its activism. And so in my time of being a reporter, of being an editor, I’ve overseen several protests. And I’ve never seen Columbia penalize a group for, quote, unquote, not authorizing a protest. So that was certainly, in our minds, unprecedented.

And I believe part of the justification there was, well, this is a different time. And I think that is a reasonable thing to say. But I think a lot of students, they felt it was particularly one-sided, that it was targeting a specific type of speech or a specific type of viewpoint. Although, the University, of course, in its explicit policies, did not outline, and was actually very explicit about not targeting specific viewpoints —

So just to be super clear, it felt to students — and it sounds like, journalistically, it felt to you — that the University was coming down in a uniquely one-sided way against students who were supporting Palestinian rights and may have expressed some frustrations with Israel in that moment.

Yes. Certainly —

Isabella says that this was just the beginning of a really tense period between student protesters and the University. After those two student groups were suspended, campus protests continued. Students made a variety of demands. They asked that the University divest from businesses that profit from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. But instead of making any progress, the protests are met with further crackdown by the University.

And so as Isabella and her colleagues at the college newspaper see it, there’s this overall chilling effect that occurs. Some students become fearful that if they participate in any demonstrations, they’re going to face disciplinary action. So fast forward now to April, when these student protesters learned that President Shafik is headed to Washington for her congressional testimony. It’s at this moment that they set out to build their encampment.

I think there was obviously a lot of intention in timing those two things. I think it’s inherently a critique on a political pressure and this congressional pressure that we saw build up against, of course, Claudine Gay at Harvard and Magill at UPenn. So I think a lot of students and faculty have been frustrated at this idea that there are not only powers at the University that are dictating what’s happening, but there are perhaps external powers that are also guiding the way here in terms of what the University feels like it must do or has to do.

And I think that timing was super crucial. Having the encampment happen on the Wednesday morning of the hearing was an incredible, in some senses, interesting strategy to direct eyes to different places.

All eyes were going to be on Shafik in DC. But now a lot of eyes are on New York. The encampment is set up in the middle of the night slash morning, prior to the hearing. And so what effectively happens is they caught Shafik when she wasn’t on campus, when a lot of senior administration had their resources dedicated to supporting Shafik in DC.

And you have all of those people not necessarily out of commission, but with their focus elsewhere. So the encampment is met with very little resistance at the beginning. There were public safety officers floating around and watching. But at the very beginning hours, I think there was a sense of, we did it.

[CHANTING]: Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest. Disclose! Divest! We will not stop!

It would be quite surprising to anybody and an administrator to now suddenly see dozens of tents on this lawn in a way that I think very purposely puts an imagery of, we’re here to stay. As the morning evolved and congressional hearings continued —

Minouche Shafik, open your eyes! Use of force, genocide!

Then we started seeing University delegates that were coming to the encampment saying, you may face disciplinary action for continuing to be here. I think that started around almost — like 9:00 or 10:00 AM, they started handing out these code of conduct violation notices.

Hell no! Hell no! Hell no!

Then there started to be more public safety action and presence. So they started barricading the entrances. The day progressed, there was more threat of discipline. The students became informed that if they continue to stay, they will face potential academic sanctions, potential suspension.

The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be! The more they —

I think a lot of people were like, OK, you’re threatening us with suspension. But so what?

This is about these systems that Minouche Shafik, that the Board of Trustees, that Columbia University is complicit in.

What are you going to do to try to get us out of here? And that was, obviously, promptly answered.

This is the New York State Police Department.

We will not stop!

You are attempting participate in an unauthorized encampment. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

My phone blew up, obviously, from the reporters, from the editors, of saying, oh my god, the NYPD is on our campus. And as soon as I saw that, I came out. And I saw a huge crowd of students and affiliates on campus watching the lawns. And as I circled around that crowd, I saw the last end of the New York Police Department pulling away protesters and clearing out the last of the encampment.

[CHANTING]: We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you!

It was something truly unimaginable, over 100 students slash other individuals are arrested from our campus, forcefully removed. And although they were suspended, there was a feeling of traumatic event that has just happened to these students, but also this sense of like, OK, the worst of the worst that could have happened to us just happened.

And for those students who maybe couldn’t go back to — into campus, now all of their peers, who were supporters or are in solidarity, are — in some sense, it’s further emboldened. They’re now not just sitting on the lawns for a pro-Palestinian cause, but also for the students, who have endured quite a lot.

So the crackdown, sought by the president and enforced by the NYPD, ends up, you’re saying, becoming a galvanizing force for a broader group of Columbia students than were originally drawn to the idea of ever showing up on the center of campus and protesting?

Yeah, I can certainly speak to the fact that I’ve seen my own peers, friends, or even acquaintances, who weren’t necessarily previously very involved in activism and organizing efforts, suddenly finding themselves involved.

Can I — I just have a question for you, which is all journalism, student journalism or not student journalism, is a first draft of history. And I wonder if we think of this as a historic moment for Columbia, how you imagine it’s going to be remembered.

Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that this will be a historic moment for Colombia.

I think that this will be remembered as a moment in which the fractures were laid bare. Really, we got to see some of the disunity of the community in ways that I have never really seen it before. And what we’ll be looking to is, where do we go from here? How does Colombia repair? How do we heal from all of this? so That is the big question in terms of what will happen.

Nick, Isabella Ramírez just walked us through what this has all looked like from the perspective of a Columbia student. And from what she could tell, the crackdown ordered by President Shafik did not quell much of anything. It seemed, instead, to really intensify everything on campus. I’m curious what this has looked like for Shafik.

It’s not just the students who are upset. You have faculty, including professors, who are not necessarily sympathetic to the protesters’ view of the war, who are really outraged about what Shafik has done here. They feel that she’s crossed a boundary that hasn’t been crossed on Columbia’s campus in a really long time.

And so you start to hear things by the end of last week like censure, no confidence votes, questions from her own professors about whether or not she can stay in power. So this creates a whole new front for her. And on top of it all, as this is going on, the encampment itself starts to reform tent-by-tent —

— almost in the same place that it was. And Shafik decides that the most important thing she could do is to try and take the temperature down, which means letting the encampment stand. Or in other words, leaning in the other direction. This time, we’re going to let the protesters have their say for a little while longer.

The problem with that is that, over the weekend, a series of images start to emerge from on campus and just off of it of some really troubling anti-Semitic episodes. In one case, a guy holds up a poster in the middle of campus and points it towards a group of Jewish students who are counter protesting. And it says, I’m paraphrasing here, Hamas’ next targets.

I saw an image of that. What it seemed to evoke was the message that Hamas should murder those Jewish students. That’s the way the Jewish students interpreted it.

It’s a pretty straightforward and jarring statement. At the same time, just outside of Columbia’s closed gates —

Stop killing children!

— protestors are showing up from across New York City. It’s hard to tell who’s affiliated with Columbia, who’s not.

Go back to Poland! Go back to Poland!

There’s a video that goes viral of one of them shouting at Jewish students, go back to Poland, go back to Europe.

In other words, a clear message, you’re not welcome here.

Right. In fact, go back to the places where the Holocaust was committed.

Exactly. And this is not representative of the vast majority of the protesters in the encampment, who mostly had been peaceful. They would later hold a Seder, actually, with some of the pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters in their ranks. But those videos are reaching members of Congress, the very same Republicans that Shafik had testified in front of just a few days before. And now they’re looking and saying, you have lost control of your campus, you’ve turned back on your word to us, and you need to resign.

They call for her outright resignation over this.

That’s right. Republicans in New York and across the country began to call for her to step down from her position as president of Columbia.

So Shafik’s dilemma here is pretty extraordinary. She has set up this dynamic where pleasing these members of Congress would probably mean calling in the NYPD all over again to sweep out this encampment, which would mean further alienating and inflaming students and faculty, who are still very upset over the first crackdown. And now both ends of this spectrum, lawmakers in Washington, folks on the Columbia campus, are saying she can’t lead the University over this situation before she’s even made any fateful decision about what to do with this second encampment. Not a good situation.

No. She’s besieged on all sides. For a while, the only thing that she can come up with to offer is for classes to go hybrid for the remainder of the semester.

So students who aren’t feeling safe in this protest environment don’t necessarily have to go to class.

Right. And I think if we zoom out for a second, it’s worth bearing in mind that she tried to choose a different path here than her counterparts at Harvard or Penn. And after all of this, she’s kind of ended up in the exact same thicket, with people calling for her job with the White House, the Mayor of New York City, and others. These are Democrats. Maybe not calling on her to resign quite yet, but saying, I don’t know what’s going on your campus. This does not look good.

That reality, that taking a different tack that was supposed to be full of learnings and lessons from the stumbles of her peers, the fact that didn’t really work suggests that there’s something really intractable going on here. And I wonder how you’re thinking about this intractable situation that’s now arrived on these college campuses.

Well, I don’t think it’s just limited to college campuses. We have seen intense feelings about this conflict play out in Hollywood. We’ve seen them in our politics in all kinds of interesting ways.

In our media.

We’ve seen it in the media. But college campuses, at least in their most idealized form, are something special. They’re a place where students get to go for four years to think in big ways about moral questions, and political questions, and ideas that help shape the world they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in.

And so when you have a question that feels as urgent as this war does for a lot of people, I think it reverberates in an incredibly intense way on those campuses. And there’s something like — I don’t know if it’s quite a contradiction of terms, but there’s a collision of different values at stake. So universities thrive on the ability of students to follow their minds and their voices where they go, to maybe even experiment a little bit and find those things.

But there are also communities that rely on people being able to trust each other and being able to carry out their classes and their academic endeavors as a collective so they can learn from one another. So in this case, that’s all getting scrambled. Students who feel strongly about the Palestinian cause feel like the point is disruption, that something so big, and immediate, and urgent is happening that they need to get in the faces of their professors, and their administrators, and their fellow students.

Right. And set up an encampment in the middle of campus, no matter what the rules say.

Right. And from the administration’s perspective, they say, well, yeah, you can say that and you can think that. And that’s an important process. But maybe there’s some bad apples in your ranks. Or though you may have good intentions, you’re saying things that you don’t realize the implications of. And they’re making this environment unsafe for others. Or they’re grinding our classes to a halt and we’re not able to function as a University.

So the only way we’re going to be able to move forward is if you will respect our rules and we’ll respect your point of view. The problem is that’s just not happening. Something is not connecting with those two points of view. And as if that’s not hard enough, you then have Congress and the political system with its own agenda coming in and putting its thumb on a scale of an already very difficult situation.

Right. And at this very moment, what we know is that the forces that you just outlined have created a dilemma, an uncertainty of how to proceed, not just for President Shafik and the students and faculty at Columbia, but for a growing number of colleges and universities across the country. And by that, I mean, this thing that seemed to start at Columbia is literally spreading.

Absolutely. We’re talking on a Wednesday afternoon. And these encampments have now started cropping up at universities from coast-to-coast, at Harvard and Yale, but also at University of California, at the University of Texas, at smaller campuses in between. And at each of these institutions, there’s presidents and deans, just like President Shafik at Columbia, who are facing a really difficult set of choices. Do they call in the police? The University of Texas in Austin this afternoon, we saw protesters physically clashing with police.

Do they hold back, like at Harvard, where there were dramatic videos of students literally running into Harvard yard with tents. They were popping up in real-time. And so Columbia, really, I think, at the end of the day, may have kicked off some of this. But they are now in league with a whole bunch of other universities that are struggling with the same set of questions. And it’s a set of questions that they’ve had since this war broke out.

And now these schools only have a week or two left of classes. But we don’t know when these standoffs are going to end. We don’t know if students are going to leave campus for the summer. We don’t know if they’re going to come back in the fall and start protesting right away, or if this year is going to turn out to have been an aberration that was a response to a really awful, bloody war, or if we’re at the beginning of a bigger shift on college campuses that will long outlast this war in the Middle East.

Well, Nick, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Michael.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The United Nations is calling for an independent investigation into two mass graves found after Israeli forces withdrew from hospitals in Gaza. Officials in Gaza said that some of the bodies found in the graves were Palestinians who had been handcuffed or shot in the head and accused Israel of killing and burying them. In response, Israel said that its soldiers had exhumed bodies in one of the graves as part of an effort to locate Israeli hostages.

And on Wednesday, Hamas released a video of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American dual citizen, whom Hamas has held hostage since October 7. It was the first time that he has been shown alive since his captivity began. His kidnapping was the subject of a “Daily” episode in October that featured his mother, Rachel. In response to Hamas’s video, Rachel issued a video of her own, in which she spoke directly to her son.

And, Hersh, if you can hear this, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days. And if you can hear us, I am telling you, we are telling you, we love you. Stay strong. Survive.

Today’s episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Olivia Natt, Nina Feldman, and Summer Thomad, with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow, contains research help by Susan Lee, original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

• April 26, 2024   •   21:50 Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out
• April 25, 2024   •   40:33 The Crackdown on Student Protesters
• April 24, 2024   •   32:18 Is $60 Billion Enough to Save Ukraine?
• April 23, 2024   •   30:30 A Salacious Conspiracy or Just 34 Pieces of Paper?
• April 22, 2024   •   24:30 The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
• April 19, 2024   •   30:42 The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
• April 18, 2024   •   30:07 The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial
• April 17, 2024   •   24:52 Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
• April 16, 2024   •   29:29 A.I.’s Original Sin
• April 15, 2024   •   24:07 Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
• April 14, 2024   •   46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
• April 12, 2024   •   34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Nicholas Fandos

Produced by Sydney Harper ,  Asthaa Chaturvedi ,  Olivia Natt ,  Nina Feldman and Summer Thomad

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow

Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.

Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The Times, walks us through the intense week at the university. And Isabella Ramírez, the editor in chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, explains what it has all looked like to a student on campus.

On today’s episode

Nicholas Fandos , who covers New York politics and government for The New York Times

Isabella Ramírez , editor in chief of The Columbia Daily Spectator

Background reading

Inside the week that shook Columbia University .

The protests at the university continued after more than 100 arrests.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Research help by Susan Lee .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government. More about Nicholas Fandos

Advertisement