This is Your Brain Online

“Don’t let me get too deep” (Brickell & Withrow, 1988).

Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows is a fascinating read. In Chapter Seven “The Juggler’s Brain”, he clearly, succinctly, and frighteningly (at least, for an educator planning to develop and deliver a course in an online environment), answers the question “What can science tell us about the actual effects that internet use is having on the way our minds work?” (Carr, 2010).

The bad news: Carr’s answer is that one’s brain buzzing through an online environment doesn’t work in a manner conducive to long-term learning and retention. Working within an online environment promotes “cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning” (Carr, 2010). Although visual, auditory, and sensory-somatic pathways are engaged both simultaneously and continuously, this engagement is occurring at a superficial level. Users quickly are drawn into the online environment, and, once there, often become largely oblivious to the outside world. However, although attentive to what they’re seeing in cyberspace, few users are doing anything resembling thinking. Instead, their time is spent flitting from link to link, grazing bits of data as they follow the trail of whatever happens to be of interest to them at the time.

Online, most users are easily and continually distracted. Their attention might be attracted to a kernel of information on one website, only to be sent skittering off in another direction as they follow whatever link appeared most interesting to them at the time. The presence of hyperlinks makes reading in the online world a very different experience from that of reading a book. Readers no longer have to follow a single track of words along a linear narrative, reading to understand the author’s thoughts: they can hop, skip, and jump along whichever path they choose, and never follow the same data trail twice.

It turns out that linking ideas to one another through hypertext neither promotes learning nor increases understanding. Research shows that online readers will click provided hyperlinks as they meander through the online environment. It was originally thought that the ability to interconnect data through hypertext would be a good thing, providing users with a richer, more nuanced understanding of the relationships and points of contact between related concepts. Instead, researchers have found that learners reading hyperlinked text leave the experience disoriented, confused, and with a muddled understanding of the interrelated concepts. Looking more closely at these findings, it appears that hypertext increases the cognitive load on the brain to a point at which the capacity of working memory is exceeded, resulting in decreased comprehension and understanding. This is not the way I want my learners leaving a learning interaction.

Research into memory has shown that long-term memory is not just a large storehouse of details and facts, but that information is organized into interconnected patterns of understanding called schemas. Short-term memory has a very limited capacity: it likely is not even as much as the famous 7 plus or minus 2 items proposed by George Miller in 1956. This means that very little information gets transferred from short-term memory into working memory, and without this crucial step, nothing makes it into long-term memory. When working online, information is rushing into a user’s brain at an incredible rate. The cognitive load is tremendous, which means that very little of this steady stream of information flow can be diverted from the massive data influx and transferred into long-term memory. If information doesn’t get transferred into long-term memory, schemas cannot be constructed. As a result, learning is impaired. Understanding becomes superficial, at best. Again, not how I want my learners to leave a learning interaction.

This effect appears to stem from the mechanism by which online readers process text. When asked how users read when online, noted usability expert Jakob Nielsen is quoted by Carr as saying “They don’t”. Other research supports Nielsen’s position: many studies reviewed by Carr revealed that online readers tend to skim for information, spending, on average, less than thirty seconds on each web page viewed. Analysis of post-secondary learners conducting academic research online showed a similar superficiality to their reading: even these learners tended to browse titles, tables of contents, and abstracts rather than reading and carefully analyzing entire articles. This frightens me considerably. As an instructor, I don’t want to be teaching a course full of indiscriminate hunter-gatherers: I want to teach learners who roll up their sleeves and dig into a passage of text, and who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty wrestling with the content of ideas the ideas they find there!

Carr follows this up with a description of what seems to be a fundamental change in the way users who spend a lot of time online use their brains. Quoting from a 2008 blog entry by Michael Merzenich, Carr says “When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates DIFFERENT brains...HEAVY USE [of the internet] HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES” (italics in original). This concerns me a great deal. Carr tells me that I cannot assume online learners will read and analyze a carefully-crafted argument or description of content. In fact, according to Nielsen, I cannot assume they will read AT ALL. As Merzenich says, their brains have been changed through long-term interaction with the internet: they expect to work quickly and superficially, and have re-wired their brains so they do just that. Obviously, this is going to pose a tremendous challenge to anyone trying to facilitate deep, retentive learning in an online environment!

References:

Carr, N. (2010). The shallows. NY, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Brickell, E. & Withrow, K. (1988). What I Am [Recorded by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians]. On Shooting rubberbands at the stars [CD]. New York, NY: Geffen.