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Is Google Making Us Stupid Essay 4

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Is Google Making Us Stupid Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Online article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” discusses how the use of the computer affects our thought process. Carr starts out talking about his own experience as a writer and how he felt like “something had been tinkering with his brain, remapping his neural circuitry and reprogramming his memory”. Since starting to use the Internet his research techniques have changed. Carr said before he would immerse himself in books, lengthy articles and long stretches of prose allowing his “mind to get caught up in the narrative or the arguments”(July/August 2008, Atlantic Monthly). Today Carr has found that “his concentration drifts away from the text after several pages and he struggles to get …show more content…

Indeed, he states in his article: “Anecdotes don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how the Internet effects cognition.” I could not agree more. That said, experts like Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Harvard professor and world-renown expert on Attention Deficit Disorder describes in his book “Driven to Distraction” the phenomenon of “culturally-induced ADD.” Different from the genetically based disorder, Dr. Hallowell describes this phenomenon as “simply an artifact of being too busy. When you get too busy you become distractible, you become impulsive, you become restless, you become irritable, you become easily frustrated.” Dr. Hallowell describes how culturally induced ADD, caused by the frantic pace of modern life, creates a situation where a person can not read long passages or focus, and, as Carr describes, does not or can not take the time to deliberate or contemplate. They seem to be negative changes. However the Internet enables individuals to spend more valuable time in the creative process than in performing the mechanical aspects of research. Only four decades ago, scientists would spend a majority of their time performing the laborious task of cranking out answers to mathematical calculation. The calculator and the computer have relieved them of this task and freed their minds to more deeply contemplate the

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