Activity 5.4

In the book, The Shallows, Carr describes the struggles that he and many friends experience when reading and focusing on a book. He attributes these struggles to the technology overload, which has changed the way that humans attend, receive information and stores memories. Carr explains, “the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” (p. 6) As a result, people aren’t able to “process” information the way they did prior to the influx of technology, and this has negatively impacted learning.

In addition, learning, storing and retrieving information has gone from focused and linear to disjointed and overlapping, changing the make-up of our brains. In fact, Carr explains, “the influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on anyone thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted-to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. (p. 194) Similarly James describes, “the total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties.” (p. 57) Therefore, if one part of our “faculties” isn’t working, such as our ability to mentally attend, receive or retrieve information, then the man isn’t mentally efficient.