6/10/2023 0 Comments The Shallows by Nicholas Carr![]() It may not be what the author intended, but you might learn more, and make some stimulating connections along the way – just like you do on the internet. Or buy it, knife out all the pages, bin a few, shuffle the rest and begin to digest. And if you finish it, you'll have a satisfying sense of having, at an individual level, disproved its thesis. Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.Michael Agger, Slate. Read this book: you'll learn lots of interesting stuff, lots of thought-provoking theories about the brain, about Google. One begins to wonder whether Carr is mourning the death of the author, the end of narratives and all that, and using neuroscience to vindicate his grieving. While he points out that he was an early adopter who spent all his savings on a Macintosh SE, he seems more comfortable with digital devices that help him with analogue tasks (such as word processing) than entirely new digital forms, such as Facebook. The internet has too many distracting flashing lights it's a bit noisy. Unsurprisingly, Carr comes across as someone who is uncomfortable with change. ![]() And as the internet remoulds and rewires the brain in its image, the old book-reading circuits fall out of use and wither. The latest neuroscience says that our grey matter is malleable and plastic. ![]() We stop reading novels, and before we know it, "the linear, literary mind" becomes "yesterday's mind".Ĭarr puts together an informative history of brain science to back up his argument. Soon all our brains want to do is click and flick. The web encourages us to click and flick. ![]() But, he says, it has altered the way our minds work. ![]()
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