Is the network reshaping the brain really bad for us?

Do you have a feeling? It seems that something is playing with your brain, and that your way of thinking is completely different from what it used to be. When reading the most obvious, often read two or three pages after the attention began to drift, become anxious, began to look for other things to do.

If you have this kind of situation, it is possible that the network is slowly changing your brain circuitry to prevent deep or creative thinking.

Does the network reshape the brain really make us more stupid than before?

You can do it now, in one afternoon, to find out all the information stored in the Bialexian library, the Library of Alexandria is said to be a treasure trove of knowledge in the ancient world, thanks to the computer in front of you.

Except for a fence of intellectual property, all human knowledge seems to be here, and the noise of the data is boiling all the time. The internet represents a revolution in knowledge that has never been invented since the invention of printing or even human learning, and it has brought a bright future to the final realization of the popularization of knowledge.

The internet makes people "split the Heart"

In most cases, the advent of the internet is seen as a good thing, but not everyone thinks so. A few years ago, Carr, an American technology expert, wrote a provocative article on the topic: Will the Web make us stupid?

Carl's paper has now expanded into a similarly provocative book called "The Internet also has a dark side." The book said that there is not only pornography on the Internet, there are more sinister things, that is, the Internet is making us stop thinking.

Carl wrote: "Over the past few years, I have been feeling uncomfortable that someone or something is fiddling with my brain, reshaping the central nervous system, resetting memories." My brain is changing, and my current way of thinking is quite different from what it used to be, and I can feel it most strongly when I read it. Absorbed in a book or a long article, once was a breeze, my brain can grasp the narrative of the evolution or the point of the transition, I spent hours wandering in long lines. But this is no longer the case, and my attention began to drift after reading two or three pages. I became agitated and began to look for other things to do. I feel like I've been trying to drag my wayward brain back into the book, and it's been a battle to read razzing in the past. ”

Carl asked some friends and found that they all felt the same way, and some people even stopped reading altogether. One of his doctor friends said: "I am now almost lost the ability to read and understand long articles in the Web and in print." Carl's other friend talked about the "fragment" of thinking. "I can't read War and peace any more, I don't have that kind of power anymore," he said. Even a post that is longer than three to four is too unbearable for me, I can only browse a little. ”

Carl had a hunch that something nasty was happening in his head, and he doubted that the Internet was the culprit for that change.

Carl realizes that he needs some evidence to support his hunch. So he talked to linguists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists and psychologists and came to the disturbing conclusion that, yes, the Internet (and all the electronic branches-Twitter, text messages, etc.) are rewiring our brains.

Marianna Wolf, a psychologist at Tufts University in the United States, is an authoritative expert on reading, saying: "We are not only influenced by what we read, but also by the way we read it." ”

Wolff worries that the web's new reading, which puts "richness" and "timeliness" first, may have weakened our ability to read deeply. The typography of hundreds of years ago has made reading a long and esoteric work commonplace, and it has allowed people to sit down and read, and when we read online, it's just an "information decoder". Our interpretation of the text, the mind without distractions, the rich spiritual associations formed in the depth of reading have largely abandoned us.

Network Changes Brain circuitry

With books and libraries, you have to make a leap of knowledge to get to the next stop in research, and now maybe no longer, the machine will help you complete this step. When we "outsource" our memories to a machine, we also "outsource" our intelligence and even identity.

The internet is a bit of a drug, Carl says, and it gives you instant gratification, and it's easy to get and cheap. Like the chemical narcotics, the network's "sharp stimulus" creates a short circuit of conscious and unconscious thinking that hinders our brain from deep or creative thinking.

All this may be true, but it does not mean that the network is rewiring our brains. So how do we know if this is just a simple distraction? Because, whether it is listening to music or watching movies, as long as the power is off, we will soon be back to God.

The answer lies in the fact that the adult brain is not static.

It is commonly thought that our mental networks, the dense connections that form about 100 billion neurons in our skulls, are roughly fixed at some point in adulthood. However, brain researchers have found that this is not the case – in fact, both teens and adults have a brain that is malleable. This plasticity provides indirect but powerful evidence for the correctness of Carl's thesis.

James Orze, a neurologist at George Mason University, says the fruit flies have the ability to reprogram their brains, altering how the brain works. Even adult thinking is "very resilient". Nerve cells periodically disconnect old connections and generate new ones. The brain does shrink when we get older, but even a centenarians can continue to reshape their brains to some degree.

So, is there any evidence at all? Back to the 70 's, the brain scientist, Michael Mor, has carried out quite an astonishing experiment on macaques. It's amazing because these macaques are intelligent, emotional creatures.

If the brain is a constant entity, once you cut off the peripheral nerves of the macaque's hand, allowing it to grow back in random ways (and the rest of the nearby nerves), the brain is confused.

Mozani cut the sensory nerves of one of the monkeys ' hands and then took them back after a while. It turns out that when you first touch the monkey's thumb, the area of the brain associated with the index finger is "stimulated". However, a few months later, Mozani was surprised to find that the brain somehow realized the reclassification and recovered the nerve to respond to the corresponding part of the body. The brain circuitry has actually made up for damage through rewiring.

But surfing the internet is certainly not the same as cutting nerves. Guery Sch, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008, suggests that the use of the Internet seems to be really changing the neural circuitry in our minds. He asked the volunteers to do a lot of searching on the internet, then scanned his brain, and found that the brains of the "novice" users of the network, after a few days of use, were just like the brains of "veteran" users, and that the change was eternal.

Network makes human thought degenerate?

So, does the internet really make us stupid? Carl made a clear answer with persuasive arguments. That is, the web is changing the way we think, but it's not the same as saying that makes us stupid. Moreover, it is not the first time that electronic technology has been blamed for the degradation of human thought.

Socrates, who had expressed concern about the oldest information technology in writing, thought that replacing memory with reading might eventually make us less intelligent. Similar views have been raised after the invention of print media and typewriters. In fact, every technology that makes written text easier to produce and spread faster is accompanied by the fear that these technologies will somehow degrade our minds.

There is no doubt, however, that we are experiencing a great shift in the way the human mind works. Flynn, a New Zealand psychologist, has documented one aspect of which, over the past 50 years, the IQ of most people has been inexplicably improved, and people seem to be smarter, far from being stupid. It is puzzling because the human intellect is not a step in the way of genetic change or increased dietary and educational levels.

What's happening in our brains, Flynn argues, is not that we're smarter than our great-grandparents, but that we're just different from them.

In other words, to live in the present age, you need to think "science" (even if you are not a scientist), to be able to classify things, operate machines, think in a linear way, and use modern technology. This mindset tends to score high in IQ tests, so people call this improvement the "Flynn effect".

Is the network reshaping the brain equal to becoming stupid?

The internet may be a sign and a reason. Socrates is right, when the learning tradition of word of mouth is replaced by written words, we do lose some important things, but the written words bring us into a richer and deeper world, we have more than we have lost.

Carr worried that the difference between the network is that computers become more "human", we will also become a simple automatic device, through e-mail, push the principal means of communication, we can conduct 36 simultaneous sessions, but do not really pay attention to any one of them.

What Carl has noticed may be the worst result of this information waterfall, and it will be hard to concentrate, and we are becoming a group of intellectual mayfly or restless little ones.

Will we become more stupid or more superficial? Carl thinks the answer to this question is open. We may end the writing, but we should get more than we lost.