Nicholas Carr

It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire our brains. Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry.

Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.

The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

We become, neurologically, what we think.

Between the intellectual and behavioral guardrails set by our genetic code, the road is wide, and we hold the steering wheel. Through what we do and how we do it—moment to moment, day by day, consciously or unconsciously—we alter the chemical flows in our synapses and change our brains.

The constant distractedness that the Net encourages—the state of being, to borrow another phrase from Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’—is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking when we’re weighing a decision

‘We shape our tools,’ observed Jesuit priest and media scholar John Cilkin in 1967, ‘and after they shape us.’

We like to feel connected—and we hate to feel disconnected. The Internet doesn’t change our intellectual habits against our will. But change them it does.

Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.