1. How has the internet changed the way we think?
2.If our brains are trained to read quick blurbs and we can't read deeply, can't we then retrain our brains back?
3.Will we continue on this path and forget books altogether therefore abandoning deep thought?
Nicholas Carr, in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid, questions if people now are changing the way they think and if they are not able to stay focused while reading a long literary work. He has noticed that he himself cannot stay focused long enough to read a book. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages" Carr states (1). Carr believes that the internet has been the reason for this say "deterioration" of his brain. Supposedly the internet is doing this by training our brains to take in information quickly and in short little blurbs. This is a problem because, "Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking" (Carr, 10). If we lose the ability to read deeply we also lose deep thought.
Carr brings up the point that our brains are always changing. That "nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones" (Carr, 5). If the brain can change itself and how it functions, then it obviously changed to accommodate the internet's fast pace. Along the same thinking, if this is becoming a problem, like Carr believes, couldn't we then train it back to before, before being where we can actually read long works?
This question is important to ask because our changing minds wouldn't be a problem. We could always just retrain it the way we want, maybe even train it to function both ways. There are so many programs out there, even games, that have the function to train people's brains. One example is Luminosity. One look at the site and one can see that people can train their brains to function the way they want. Based off this fact that the brain changes, Carr need not worry at all. All anyone needs to do is pick up a few books and put the internet to rest for a while.
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