Media Choices Rewire Our Brains

Nicholas Carr gives us some insights into how our media choices are rewiring our brains. See his article "The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains." The easy availability of information via the Internet is having an unintended consequence that we become more distracted and shallower thinkers.

Here is how Carr ends the article:

"There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

"What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting."

As leaders, I recommend that we give this serious thought. We need to create learning opportunities that develop different kinds of cognitive skill, so that we and our children and their children will have both breadth and depth of thinking.