The Internet is affecting the human brain in different ways.
Summary of author Nicolas Carr’s article in The Atlantic about the effects of the Internet today on people.
The strong development of the Internet makes people gradually move away from books. Too many things pull our focus. The deep, brooding reading has now really become a psychological struggle.
Instead of digging through the library for hours, reading through thousands of books to look up some information, right now, a single click on Google has given us access to a huge database. Mankind is willing to spend all day surfing the web, listening to music, podcasts, watching news, blogs…
We are drawn from one thing to another by the Internet. The computer network has become a means of bringing people to most of the information, but also a cause of contemplation gradually diminishing.
Is it so easy to find and access information that we gradually give up the habit of thinking? (Photo: Buffer).
Scientific studies have found that web users are more likely to browse, jump from one source to another, and rarely return to a resource they previously visited. Users also read no more than a page or two of the article before suddenly jumping to another website. Sometimes, they save the article, but then never come back and actually read it.
The shorter the content articles, the more summary they will attract, being selected to read more. Psychologists worry that the reading style created by the Internet puts efficiency and immediacy above all else, which undermines the ability to read deeply.
The ability to translate text, the psychological connection that forms when reading deeply and without the distractions of the past, has largely been superseded in this day and age.
We often assume that the dense network of nerves, formed by the hundreds of billions of cells inside the skull, will remain largely unchanged in adulthood. However, the brain’s ability to transform is limitless.
Neurons regularly break old connections, forming new connections. The brain has the ability to program itself, adjust the way it works accordingly.
The Internet has long promised to bring far-reaching effects on human perception. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing demonstrated that a digital computer (at the time this machine was only theoretically available) could be programmed to perform the function of any other information processing device.
The human brain is a machine capable of programming itself, adjusting the way it works accordingly. (Photo: Buffer).
That is what we see today. The Internet – the extremely powerful computer system that is gradually replacing most of the human intellectual technology: Maps, clocks, typing tools, newspapers, calculators, telephones, radio stations and even TELEVISION.
This integration makes it easy for Internet users to lose focus because there are too many notifications appearing in a rush from emails, messages or alarms…
Not stopping there, as people gradually get used to the “too much” of Internet communication, traditional media channels have to adapt to the new expectations of the audience. TV shows began adding subtitles, running ads, shortened magazines and newspapers, adding summaries of their articles, engaging viewers with easily digestible snippets of information.
Although traditional media channels do not have too many options, they are forced to follow new media rules.
Never before has a communication system played so many important roles in our lives as the Internet today. However, based on all that is known about the Internet, there hasn’t been much consideration in the way in which the Internet has “reprogrammed” us. The intellectual ethical standards of what the Internet in general or Google in particular is doing is still quite vague.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google often talk about their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence that can be directly connected to the human brain.
Will it be a positive or a disaster if artificial intelligence is smarter than humans? (Photo: The Creationpost).
“The search engine will eventually be something as smart as us humans, even smarter,” Larry Page said a few years ago. In fact, Google is seriously building and developing an artificial intelligence empire on a large scale.
Such ambition is obvious, even admirable. However, the assumption that we would all be better off if aided or even “replaced” by artificial intelligence seems worrisome.
In addition to the achievements, with the consequences mentioned above, it is probably worth seriously considering what Google and the Internet world have been doing with our minds. Is it the Internet that is gradually wiping out the real intelligence of humanity?