The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains is a very accessible theshallowscoverpopular culture meets popular science book about just how exactly our intense immersion with technology and internet usage has changed the chemical structure of our brain, and in effect, our cognitive habits, as well.

As I read The Shallows, I went through various different stages that I would later realize were the stages of me mourning the loss of what my brain once was. I felt excitement at the prospect that our brains are so malleable, even in adulthood, that they would be able to adapt to fit our newest habits. I felt sadness, because as a literature student, I knew my ability to sit and read a book for an extended period of time had diminished due to all the time I spent reading shorter articles on the internet. I even tried to barter with my brain: okay, I said, I’ll read less Cracked articles and more Dostoevsky, if that’s what you want.

Ultimately, what I landed on was a return to excitement. And for the most part, this is not the tone of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. In the prologue, Carr admits that technology is not neutral: “…if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.” And this is just what The Shallows is about: how our brains have been changed for the worse by the complete immersion of the internet and technology into our daily lives. Our memories are lagging, our ability to read and comprehend subtley is slipping. We are becoming shadows of our cognitive selves, Carr warns, because we are no longer engaging with nuanced material. We want content now, we want it easy to digest, and we want to be able to move on to the next topic in the same breath. For Carr, this is a negative aspect of the internet and our ever-increasing reliance on technology:

“The tumultuous advance of technology could….drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arrive only through contemplation and reflection. The ‘frenziedness of technology,’ Heidegger wrote, threatens to ‘entrench itself everywhere.’ “

To elucidate his idea more clearly, he discusses how our reading habits have changed. When reading, our brains no longer operate the way they used to. The more we expose ourselves to reading short snippets of writing (like articles we find online and consume voraciously) the less we are able to read longer works for extended periods of time. Can’t finish that Charles Dickens novel you started a month ago? Of course not, neither can we. Not any more. Our brains are no longer chemically constructed to be able to digest this amount of information in drawn-out sessions because our brains have changed from repeated exposure to the same habits and cognitive processes. In his popular culture style, Carr explains this process of neurotransmitters “firing and wiring together” very eloquently and in a very down to earth manner.

Carr fears that we are losing too much in our increasing dependence on technology in our lives, from our phones to our computers, and that that price is too high to pay for the trade-off. We don’t need to remember information any more, if it is always available at our fingertips via Google. The Shallows reads as both his compiling evidence for this fact, and rallying others to engage with their brains in older, more complicated ways, to stave off this dissolution of our brain power.

Whether or not you experience the same fear of what we are losing the more dependent we become on technology, The Shallows does offer a fascinating read about the capabilities of our brains and how we are so intimately changed by the mediums and technologies we interact with every day. Carr raises concerns we should be aware of to be able to control the extent of its effect over us. The first part of the battle is always knowing.

The moving point of The Shallows, whether you agree with Carr’s assertion that this change is a negative one or not, is that this is happening to our brains whether we like it or not. We can control it as best as we can, but technology is only becoming further entrenched in our lives, and the issue of how it changes us, as both individuals and as a society, is one we must all be aware of. And The Shallows provides an extremely engaging manner in which to grapple with these thoughts and problems we are facing en masse.

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