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Jul 11 2008 11:18AM EDT

This Is Your Brain on Google

Kevin Maney thinks -- or thinks he thinks: Thought-provoking essay by tech provocateur Nicholas Carr in the new Atlantic, titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," Carr writes. The Web is to blame in general, but really he points specifically at the world that Google has wrought.

The most alarming -- well, for moi -- point that he makes is that reading long texts is not a native human capability. Spoken language is, but placing symbols on a page that have to be decoded into words is an invention. So, Carr argues, there is no reason to believe reading as we know it is forever. Google and the Web seem to be teaching our brains to skim and alight from one idea to another, not deep dive on a topic. (It's worth noting that Carr makes these observations in a very long essay, and he also writes books.)

Carr doesn't write much about a different Google-y phenomenon that seems to affect me more than this reading thing. I increasingly feel like I don't need to remember things, so I don't bother. Phone numbers and birthdays are stored in my cell phone. Random facts like the year of the Battle of Gettysburg or the ingredients in a margarita -- why stuff them in your brain when you can instantly find it through Google? What is THAT doing to the way we think?

It makes me wonder, as I watch my teenagers go through high school, why on earth we still make students memorize so many things. Much of school is based on memorization -- history, biology, chemistry. Is memorization obsolete?

I'd think more about this but I'd rather go play with my iPhone...

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