Friedman wonders, is the Internet changing his brain? (Carr).
One thing is for sure: the Internet has changed the way we use our brain. As both Carr and Friedman note, reading alone has changed drastically. In Carr's article, he cites a study by researchers at University College London, that surveyed reading habits online over a five-year period. Researchers found that "there are signs that new forms of 'reading' are emerging as users 'power browse' horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts for quick wins" (Carr). .
But does this new style of reading affect our ability to use our brains effectively? According to Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University developmental psychologist, the answer is yes. Wolf is concerned that the kind of reading that sources from the Internet, reading that focuses on getting what you want right now, "may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace." Wolf worries that we are only decoding information versus synthesizing it. .
If our use patterns of acquiring information are indeed changing, there may actually be a physiological change as well. Indeed, our brains are quite likely being rewired by Google and the Web. "Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet," explains Carr, meaning that the more we use the Web, the more our brain changes to adapt to it. While it was once thought that our brains, especially those of adults, were finished and formed, this is now known to be untrue. "The human brain is almost infinitely malleable," explains Carr. According to James Olds, director or the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, "even the adult mind is very plastic" (Carr).
