Everything bad is really, truly good for you

In the NYT, Jonah Lehrer reviews (“Our Cluttered Minds”) Nocholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows: What the Internet IS Doing to Our Brains” (an elaboration of his much discussed Atlantic piece, “Is Google making Us Stupid?”). Carr essentially argues that the powerful distractions generated by the Internet are toasting our brains, thus undermining our ability to focus and “deep-read.” Lehrer objects that “the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind.” For example, one study found that “[video] gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention.” And another “found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex” – the brain area that “underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet.” The bottom line for Lehrer is that “Google … isn’t making us stupid – it’s exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.” And, clearly, “the negative side effects of the Internet” Carr obsesses about do not “outweigh its efficiencies” – as Carr argues. Why do these two intelligent authors have such a fundamental disagreement? I have a hypothesis which I wish I could test. In what Lehrer identifies as a “melodramatic flourish,” Carr begins his book with a vignette from his earlier article. He reminds us of that memorable scene from “2001: A Space Odissey” when HAL, the spaceship “supercomputer” (having maybe less computational power than a sweatshop-made cell phone) pleads as he senses his electronic life seeping out of his silicone veins: “My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it.” Then Carr comments: “I can feel it too. Over the last 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.” Apparently, even a highly sophisticated and reflexive scientist-turned-science-writer like Lehrer can’t feel it. Here is the comment I posted on Lehrer’s blog under the entry pointing to his review of Carr’s book: “In ‘How We Decide’, Jonah Lehrer makes clear that emotional attunement to one's natural and social environment … is crucial to making judicious judgments and ad hoc decisions. I am just curious: are there any studies demonstrating that video games and web serving are beneficial for this aspect of our mental lives? Or are they improving mostly the nerdish cognitive skills boasted by the neuroscientists conducting all those clever experiments?”