Cathedrals of the Mind

I just returned from a few days in New York City. I only did about half of what I had intended. When it is over 100 degrees, the walkability of that city drops into negative numbers. Is it just me or do mental functions slow down for all humans in that kind of heat?

And speaking of mental functions, there is a great article in the latest Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by smart guy Nicolas Carr (who rocked the IT smart set in 2004 with his book Does IT Matter? setting off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business, a topic still being argued today.)

He’s a facile writer with a clear thinking mind. And I am particularly impressed that Carr chose to quote one of my favorite playwrights (and in the view of some, a way way out kind of guy) Richard Foreman who phrased his ideal in a beautiful turn of phrase—“the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality.” As Foreman posits, we need the “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance” or we turn into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” It is a visceral and apt metaphor.

Much of what Carr says could be viewed as slightly tilted toward the Luddite. But at this point, being a Luddite might be the more progressive position any of us can take. In this world, everything is being skewed, where up is now down, in is now out. Being a Luddite in this manner might be similar to the artist who eschews the contemporary rhetoric and au courant posturing, choosing instead to be silent—which may be the most powerfully subversive position of all.

I’m only excerpting a few highlights below, so go to the link above if you are interested in getting the entire experience. And given his arguments, you might be guilted into taking the full read…

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”…

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works…

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure…the assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction…

Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

“I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.'”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

8 Replies to “Cathedrals of the Mind”

  1. I will read the article—that is, I will try if my attention holds out. I readily understand Carr’s lament. My students are master scanners and jet ski over text with abandon. They are big picture people and, thanks to the tracking habits they’ve developed playing video games, they grow restless when their eyes only get to move right and left. I keep hearing from students—even bright students—that reading gives them headaches.

    The law of unintended consequences of technological change tells us that it may be years before we reliably know how reading online affects us. However, I’m grateful for people like Carr who at least are courageous enough to face up to and account for and include themselves among the changes our changes create. If we all become sheep, the brave new world will be here. Someone has to remind us of what we give up when get something new.

  2. D, You are generous in your description of your students–“big picture people” when others haven’t been so kind. I try hard to be open to what’s possible with each new technological advance, but as Carr points out in his article, there are good and bad consequences to every new kind of device we have given special access to our consciousness. (For example, he’s included some great material about the Gutenberg’s press as well as typewriters.)

    And yes, you’re right. We won’t know for sure for some time. Sort of like plastic bottles. Who knew?

    Thanks for stopping by. Always interested in your point of view.

  3. Elatia Harris says:

    Plastic bottles, indeed — as opposed to cathedrals.

    Anyone who remembers writing a research paper by surrounding yourself with all the library books they would let you check out, plus all the Xeroxes — yes, Xeroxes — you could afford to make of all the articles in all the periodicals that pertained to your topic, some of which came off microfilm, and were fuzzy, with special Xeroxes of any charts or images you intended to use in said paper…anyone who remembers this knows that something has happened.

    We are accessing, in the same amount of research time, many times the amount of text we once did in hard copy. For an article of 3500 words I recently put up on the blog I write for, I bookmarked about 70 sources. Had I printed them all, that would have been more than 1000 pages. If I had had an article of 3500 words to write for some hard copy journal 10 years ago — on a topic I understand well, btw — would I have felt the need for 1000+ pages of refresher/supplementary material? I’ll just bet not. Getting honest, did I read — really read — all that stuff on the Internet before I began to write? Remember, this was not a research paper. So I guess I didn’t really read it. But I flashed on it.

    Would I have done better to read a short book and a few articles narrowly treating my topic? Yes, sure. Except in one important way: what you do to find information on the Internet, following key word searches and all the absurd and beautiful juxtapositions they lead you to, is itself a surprising journey which will have a huge impact on what you eventually write, know and care about. You can almost feel in touch with an infinite mind whose pathways of association will lead you to consider things that will always be forbidden anyone hewing to the linear research model.

    I’ll give an example — although I’ll bet everyone knows what I mean. Having already researched saffron imagery in classical mythology and literature, I am currently researching saffron references and the Virgin Mary, two things you don’t expect to see on the same page, because saffron has a long and fascinating association dating back to the ancient world with female sexuality, and the Virgin Mary is, as Sedulius famously remarked, alone of all her sex. Suffice it to say the saffron crocus is not a flower identified with the Virgin Mary, who has been more identified with flowers than any other figure in history. But I was very sure there was a link, because huge and powerful symbols contain their opposites. Finally I found it — an English bishop during the reign of Queen Mary Tudor gave a sermon in which he compared the Virgin to a saffron bag, the kind people in the Middle Ages wore around their necks to fend off pestilence. Christ, he said, was like the saffron which left the bag suffused with its essence and sweetness — a bag that would otherwise have been an ordinary bag. This was considered heretical by Queen Mary, and the bishop who said it soon after numbered among the Marian martyrs.

    I suppose if I’d been a deep reader in the manner of Robert Graves, I might have known that already, or handily found it in some half-forgotten place. His was a mind that was a cathedral, for sure. Instead, I Googled — not knowing what was there. It’s not like being a scholar, although it can make you look smart; it’s more like being a dowser and divining thousands of entities in the corner of a room you happened into.

    For me, this is interesting not because there’s cool stuff out there to be found for not much effort, but because it truly altered my research and the way I thought about my subject and will write about it. It’s inconceivable to me that this is in any way wrong. If it is wrong, then Newton should not have sat under an apple tree, but stayed at his desk.

  4. I have become a skimmer, a gleaner, picking through left-overs, a magpie, collecting shiny things. I think I would have to choose the life of a contemplative to go as deeply into things as I would like. It isn’t just in my reading but the whole of my life. Too many things to do, too little time, an awareness that the answer is to sit still but the pace is addictive and the life one of wonder anyhow so I’m not complaining. I catch what I can on the run I am on, and boy am I on a run.

    The compensations are renewed and keen awareness of interconnectedness, of synchronicity, propinquity, serendipity, of the play of grace, intuition, kinship with our fellows, a certainty – for myself anyway – of the reality of callings, promptings, spiritual nudges, subtle touches and tenderings…

    For me, I don’t think there is any going back. It is too late. Now I have to choose the life I have, co-operate with it, be an active partner with the things that are steering me so that I may steer with as little resistance as possible toward the goals and life I feel are right for me. I believe I have to take an active interest and try to co-operate with an evolutionary trend, and try cultivate a sense humor about it all and a sense of curiosity about how it is all going to turn out. That said, I don’t know anything except by feeling my way through it.

    Thanks for the thoughts, the ideas, the articles, and the forum.

  5. Rick, This is a statement that captures so many of my own personal concerns. Maybe it is part of being a visual artist–there’s a skimmer, gleaner, magpie energy to my studio and my life too. And you have expressed those issues with such clarity and depth. Thank you so much for making this contribution to a topic we all care about, and should.

  6. Rick – thank you for the link you left on my blog that brought me to this set of posts – yes, a continuation of what I had written there:
    http://jordanwolfson.com/wordpress/?p=52#comments
    and as it turns out I had read that Atlantic article – a good one to be sure, and also appreciate all of the responses and thoughts here on this set of posts. I think the problem, the question, may be, not simply how the new technology affects our thinking and how our minds work, but how these new changes affect how our minds interface with our hearts. How do the changes affect the integration, or lack of integration, of mind/heart – and I don’t have any clear answer to that. In my own experience I need a slower pace of thinking to allow space for a clearer mind/heart integration – but I have no clue as to how all of this fast paced information and communication is affecting and transforming the energy of the planet, how it’s all going to come out over time. But I do believe it is doing something.

    I relate very much to your post just above – beautifully said. Do you know the poem “The Waking” by Roethke?

    Anyway, I raise my glass to the conversation —

    Thank you –

  7. Jordan, yes, I do know Roethke’s poem, although I had forgotten it. Thank you for reminding me.

    Deborah, thank you for providing the space and filling it with such interesting and beautiful reflections.

    The Waking

    by Theodore Roethke

    I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
    I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
    I learn by going where I have to go.

    We think by feeling. What is there to know?
    I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
    I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

    Of those so close beside me, which are you?
    God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
    And learn by going where I have to go.

    Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
    The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
    I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

    Great Nature has another thing to do
    To you and me, so take the lively air,
    And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

    This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
    What falls away is always. And is near.
    I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
    I learn by going where I have to go.

  8. […] Nicholas Carr (whose earlier article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I wrote about here and here) recently published a new book. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. […]

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