The Different Engine: Rewiring the Brain

    A. It's a question that's bothered cultural critics for decades: while we know more than ever, are we getting dumber as a result of the increasing amount of technology at our disposal? Reading historical debates, and hearing of the attention paid to them by a thoughtful person, certainly makes one wonder. Speaking in the 1820s of the mechanical Difference Engine he had devised for computing polynomial functions, Charles Babbage, the father of the programmable computer, told the House of Commons:
    B. 'On two occasions I have been asked by Members of Parliament, Tray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.'
    C. Sharp-tongued eloquence—in Latin and Greek as well as their mother tongue—was common fare among Georgians and Victorians lucky enough to have had at least a dozen years of schooling. One wonders how the founders of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube might respond to similarly stale queries tossed at them during congressional testimony.
    D. The current debate about intelligence, sparked by Nicholas Carr's recent and eminently readable 'The Shallows,' asks what is the Internet doing to our brains? Like Susan Jacoby's 'The Age of American Unreason' and Adam Winer's 'How Dumb Are You?' earlier in the decade, Mr. Carr taps into the sense of despair among American intellectuals about the country's poor educational showing when compared with other countries.
    E. In reading, mathematics and science, American 15-year-olds suffer in the lower half of the OECD rankings for the 30 wealthiest countries. Other English-speaking nations such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and even Britain are all in the upper quartile (四分之一). South Korea and Japan are in the top decile (十分之一).
    F. Such indisputable facts are rightly a concern for policy-makers and parents throughout the United States. But the reasons for the crushing failure of American education—especially at middle- and high-school levels—are well understood, and the corrective measures widely accepted. Implementing them, however, remains as politically tricky as ever.
    G. But it is not just the disappointment of seeing a nation's youth so poorly served. Even more so, an unspoken nostalgic mood for an age when book-learning was the noblest of pursuits has animated the debate about the dumbing down of America. Tellingly, the sharpest critics are always middle-aged or older.
    H. Among other things, Ms. Jacoby blames a rising tide of anti-intellectualism. She notes that the reading of books, newspapers and magazines has declined across the board. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing whatsoever (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004—a period that oversaw the rise of personal computers, the Internet and video games. She sighs that the way electronic media, with their demand for spectacle and conciseness, have shortened our attention spans. Sound bites by presidential candidates, she points out, dropped from 42 seconds in 1968 to less than eight seconds by 2000.
    I. But things are rarely as they seem. For one thing, e-books barely existed a decade ago, but have exploded in popularity since Amazon introduced its Kindle a few short years back, and a host of rivals rushed in with copycat versions. For many readers, the ability to interact with e-books digitally—searching them automatically, inserting digital bookmarks, zooming in on the small type—has rendered hardcovers and paperbacks outdated. So much so, e-books are now outselling hardcovers. Perhaps we are witnessing not a decline in book reading but a renaissance. The irony is that had computers been invented before books, we would now be wringing our hands over the loss of multi-media, multi-tasking, computer-gaming skills as our children wasted their time by burying their noses in single-topic paper books.
    J. To the specific question that Mr. Carr asks about what the Internet is doing to our brains, the simple answer is that it is making us think and behave differently. Of that, there is no doubt. But that does not mean we are getting dumber in the process. What makes people intelligent is their ability to learn and reason--in short, to adapt and thrive within their environment. That fundamental capacity has not changed in thousands of years, and is unlikely to do so because some new technology comes along, whether television, mobile phones or the Internet.
    K. Adaptation to one's changing surroundings is a different matter. Every new medium introduced since the invention of the printing press has molded our minds in different ways. It would be alarming if it didn't. Today, confronted with the popularity of the Internet, we need a whole new set of skills to navigate the information-loaded environment we inhabit. In other words, each new set of skills we learn and memories we create builds on our existing mental capacities without changing them in any fundamental way.
    L. Still, the Jeremiahs have a point. Their concern is that prolonged use of the Internet—with its buffet of mouthwatering delicacies of information—is producing a generation of magpie minds, as users hop from one small bright ornament to another, rarely focusing long enough on any one topic to comprehend it thoroughly. According to this view of the brain, the lack of 'deep thinking' lies at the heart of the present generation's inability to sweat the hard stuff.
    M. The problem, says Mr. Carr, is that most of us with access to the web spend at least a couple of hours a day online—and sometimes much more. During that time, we tend to repeat the same or similar actions over and over again. As we go through these motions, the net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory (体觉的) and auditory cortices (皮层). There is evidence, the author affirms, that the Internet is damaging people's long-term memory consolidation that he singles out as the true basis of intelligence.
    N. As reasonable as it may sound, such an explanation is markedly different from anything your correspondent has experienced. Perhaps that's because he, like so many other computer users, spends far less time online than social critics imagine. According to Nielsen, a media research company, Americans with access to the Internet devote around 26 hours a month to online activity—in other words, just 5% of their waking hours. Even then, half that time is taken up with proactive, even creative, activities—social networking, playing games, e-mailing, and instant messaging. Pecking at the despised low-hanging fruit found on Google and other search engines accounts for a tiny 3.5% of the average user's online time.  

    Ms. Jacoby is disappointed that the way electronic media demanding for resourceful and neatness have shortened people's attention spans.

    Every new medium has shaped people's minds somehow since the invention of the printing press.

    American 15-year-olds do worse in reading, mathematics and science than students from other wealthy countries.

    Mr. Carr thinks that the true basis of intelligence is people's long-term memory consolidation.

    E-books have exploded in popularity since Amazon launched its Kindle a few years ago.

    It is unclear if people are getting more stupid because they master more and more technology.

    The ability to adapt and thrive within their environment makes people intelligent.

    Conducting corrective measures to American education is as politically difficult as ever.

    According to Nielsen, Americans who surf the Internet spend just 5% of their waking hours a month on online activities.

    People worry that, the present generation has no ability to do hard work because they are deficient in deep thinking.