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The Shallows What Is The Internet Doing To Our Brain

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The Shallows What Is The Internet Doing To Our Brain
I’m sitting in rapt attention in front of the television watching Game of Thrones. A new scene begins and I see an actress that I recognize, but, for some reason, her name has slipped my mind. As I continue to watch the fact that I cannot seem to remember this popular face begins to bug me. I pull out my phone and search for the familiar actress using a couple of keywords. Ah yes, Maisie W. Putting my phone away I turn my gaze back to the drama before me. What is so strange about this picture? Ask anyone from “Generation Y” and they might shrug. The miracle of instant information at our fingertips that our parents and grandparents only fantasized about is now common place. From Instagram, to selfies, to live streaming The Walking Dead, 21st …show more content…
Carr quotes Eric Kandel, accomplished biologist, in the complexity of forming new memories (Carr). “For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory” (Carr 193). When information is readily available through a few clicks of the mouse, we simply do not take the time to think deeply about a subject and commit it to memory. When this becomes an issue, it is clear that we are losing a vital part of what makes our lives rich and …show more content…
Results showed that “Most Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone (cite)”. If the statistics were this high in 2006, image how this number has grown in recent years. Americans have come to rely more and more on technology to solve their problems — from which shoes Target has on sale this week, to the Pintrest-perfect wedding dress, to which candidate to vote for in the next election. It can become easy to create a utopian world of ease, but the question soon becomes, what would we do without the internet? And maybe more importantly, what is the prolonged internet use doing to
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