The second in a series of two stories

Many people are so addicted to their 24/7 access to information that the “first thing they do when they get up in the morning is to check their smartphone or computer,” author-thinker Nicholas Carr observed during a talk in Asheville recently.

“If we accept the fact that our brains do change,” as the result of using technology, “then it will have a profound effect” in how human beings choose to adapt, he said.

Carr discussed the findings in his New York Times best-seller, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” during an address Sept. 28 at A-B Tech’s Ferguson Auditorium.

About 100 people attended the program hosted by Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Center for Graduate Studies of Asheville.

With laptop computers and smartphones, “it places us in an information-rich environment ... We, as human beings, like to know what’s going on around us.”

However, he also said people today are in “an interruption-rich environment,” too.

With the Internet, he said human beings have 24/7 access to information. “Just think of our conception of time ... Never before have we trained ourselves to instantaneous responses” to information. From what was once a matter of hours, people now measure sending and receiving information in micro-seconds, he said.

“One of the big things (now) is interactivity  — interacting with the technology,” Carr said. “In many respects, these are good things.”

Yet, he said, “The dark side of the Internet is, all these things we like so much is ... It’s in an interruption-rich environment.”

As a result, the technology is resulting a quick shift in focus, such as is experienced in video games, he said.

“This is really the environment we find ourselves in any time we go on-line — and it rewards that.

“But what about all the types of thinking that requires attentiveness? The Internet is designed to discourage attentive thinking... It discourages sustained attention,” which, Carr said “used to be considered the highest form of thinking.” As an example, he cited Rodin’s  “The Thinker,” wherein the artists’s sculpture portrays a man apparently lost in deep thought.

With a smile, Carr said, “I don’t know what the guy is thinking as he’s sitting there, but I’m pretty sure he’s not thinking about composing a tweet.” The crowd laughed at his joke.

The author then turned to what he termed “compusive consumption.” Carr said the average page view time on the Internet is 21 seconds, with most pages viewed in less than 10 seconds.

In the meantime, he said that in-box glances average 30 to 40 times per hour, which is 10 times what those in a study thought they were doing and “each glance is a little break in your train of thought.”

He said teens average sending 3,300 text messages per month — and more than 400 text messages for teenage girls. Carr also said there is a disturbing trend from “page to stream....

“We’ve adopted this technology that’s basically interrupting us all of the time,” he said. “It’s e-mail, texting, Facebook.... When you look at that, you see people in a perpetual state of distraction.

“You see more evidence of this if you see how people look at text on-line.”

To that end, Carr said people traditionally read text in an “F” pattern. “On the one hand, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. What’s different though, is this is the normal default way we read on the Internet.

“We just want to get the gist of things, versus paying attention to the meaning of individual words and sentences.”

In speaking of what he called “the brain’s bottleneck,” Carr said, “Maybe what’s important is exchanging as much information as possible ... What it ignores is how we create memory.”

He said there are two kinds of memory — working and long-term. “Working memory is what you’re aware of moment to moment through the day... You can hold only two to four elements in your bain... Long-term memory is whatever you can remember through your life.”

After a pause, Carr asserted, “What’s really important in your intellectual life is what you put in long-term memory.

“If you don’t move information from working memory to long-term memory, your knowledge is superficial. The way you moe information from working memory is by paying attention.”

Instead of building long-term memory, he said high-tech users are experiencing cognitive overload wherein “we’re taking things in and out of working memory that we’re unable so fast that we’re unable to store it in long-term memory.”

He added, “It’s a state we live in all of the time. It cuts us off from the ability to pay attention. It cuts us off from creative and intellectual thought... So, we process information more quickly, but also more superficially.

“Multi-tasking erodes cognitive skills. On all six of the cognitive tests, the multi-taskers did worse” than others.

Carr also pointed out that those who frequently use high-tech devices lose their ability “to distinguish trivial information from important information.

“Heavy on-line users are ‘suckers for irrelevancy,’” Carr said, citing research by Clifford Nass.

“What this shows is, the more time we spend on-line, the newest of the information becomes the most important,” he noted. “The more you multi-task, the worse you get at it.”

He said multi-taskers are “not doing anything particularly well. They’re expending their energy focus, shifting from task to task.”

He quoted researcher Patricia Greenfield in a 2009 Science magazine article,who said, “We’re making a fundamental congitive trade-off,” as screen media strengthens visual-spatial intelligence (the ability to spot patterns) at the expense of mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination and reflection.”

In his own estimation, Carr said, “These things” that Greenfield cites seem to be “the most important to to have a vibrant, progressive culture” — and while the Internet’s benefits are enormous, it also has a down side.