The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (5 page)

In Plato’s
Phaedrus,
we hear Socrates describing how a king from Egypt called Thamus informed the god Theuth that the phonetic alphabet was not so great a gift. The god was particularly chuffed about this new technology, which he delivered to poor, illiterate humans, bragging that writing would make the memories of Egyptians more powerful and that it would supercharge their wit. King Thamus shrewdly replies:

O most ingenious Theuth
 . . . this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing. 

Was there ever a finer description of Google? “An aid not to memory, but to reminiscence.” Real memory and the magic trick of reminiscence, of course, are not the same thing at all. We reminisce when something external recalls the memory for us. Unlike our hard-won memories, a reminiscence is easy, passive, and provided by some reminder. But the user of a technology that recollects on his or her behalf (a scroll, say, stuffed with important dates and names) is not likely to care about that subtle distinction. Kids these days, for Socrates, were rotting their brains by abandoning the oral tradition.

Several millennia later, in the fifteenth century, the fantastically named Venetian editor Hieronimo Squarciafico looked around at “kids these days” and groaned that the advent of book publishing would lead to intellectual laziness. Men would become less studious when material became so cheap to produce and so whorishly available. The mind would turn to mush.
The Florentine book merchant
Vespasiano da Bisticci backed Squarciafico up, saying that a printed book should be “ashamed” in the company of a handmade manuscript (one wonders whether his disdain was motivated more by business concerns than aesthetics).

Our modern, studious commitment to the technologies of writing and printing, then, is a startling departure from the experience of our ancestors. Those men weren’t wrong to be suspicious; something fundamental
had
been changed. Here’s Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik, describing how the act of reading reshaped our brains long before the Internet got its hands on them:

Cortical areas that once
were devoted to vision and speech have been hijacked by print. Instead of learning through practice and apprenticeship, I’ve become dependent on lectures and textbooks. And look at the toll of dyslexia and attention disorders and learning disabilities—all signs that our brains were not designed to deal with such a profoundly unnatural technology.

Our devotion to reading feels wholesome, natural, but is in fact a wonderful kind of brainwashing. Marshall McLuhan, having fewer brain scans in his arsenal than Gopnik, speaks in more obscure terms when analyzing the fallout of the printing press. For him, printed words became a gravitational force, something our minds reorganized around. “
For the most obvious character of print
,” he notes, “is repetition, just as the obvious effect of repetition is hypnosis or obsession.” For McLuhan, Stephen King novels and ingredients lists on cereal boxes and the words you’re reading right now are all conspiring to make you think this strange attention you’re paying to tiny lines of printed symbols is a natural act. But it’s not. The intensely myopic attention that the act of poring over a book requires of us is anything but natural, and it reshaped our attitude toward the world at large, bringing about—according to McLuhan—the dawn of capitalism, the regulation of language, and the dominance of the visual at the expense of our multisensory lives: “
The eye speeded up
and the voice quieted down.” He attributes the bulk of our “
shrill and expansive individualism
” to Gutenberg’s invention.

After the arrival of mass-produced books, we became “typographical man,” and our voices lost some power. We were encouraged by the technologies of writing and printing to take on some kinds of input and discouraged from taking on others. Today we privilege the information we take in through our eyes while reading and pay less heed to information that arrives via our other senses. In plainest terms, McLuhan delivers his famous line: “The medium is the message.” What you use to interact with the world changes the way you see the world. Every lens is a tinted lens.

• • • • •

A latter-day King Thamus or Squarciafico would grumble at me for using my phone to call up my partner’s number. In fact, I’ve never known Kenny’s number by heart. But it’s not something I worry about or seek to fix. Likewise, if adults in 2064 manage to entirely outsource their memories to digital aids, they won’t begrudge their situation at all, but will rejoice in their mental freedom. How many of us long for more things to store in our brains? Indeed, the value of doing things the hard way becomes a question of “things you never knew you never knew,” to steal a line from Disney’s
Pocahontas
. I don’t know what satisfaction I might gain from carrying that information in my brain instead, just as my child will never know the value of learning to read a map without GPS. And neither of us will think to care. This is the problem with losing lack: It’s nearly impossible to recall its value once it’s gone.

Which is why the ancients all cry out in their turn: “Kids these days!” Youths, and the technologies that inform their sensibilities, will always be at odds with the dying techno-sensibility that informed the character of their elders. Yet the scale of discordance in contemporary culture is perhaps an unprecedented thing. Digital natives are subject to a violent removal from the habits of their parents, a shift that will leave them quite alien to those only one generation older, and vice versa.

When I pause to consider that last remark, I see I’m being way too conservative. There’s actually a chasm between me and folk
five
years younger. The other day, I was speaking with a young friend of mine—a journalist in his late twenties—and he thought nothing of carrying on a text conversation with someone else while speaking with me. (I am, trust me, painfully aware of being transformed into the kind of man people call “crotchety” here.) It’s a common annoyance, barely worth noting, except that I’d been thinking about what it meant to be constantly put on hold by a person I’m sharing a beer with. It seemed to me that 80 percent of his attention procured 20 percent of my interest. It’s a case of compound distraction. But the really gruesome thing was that he didn’t notice or care that we were both so disengaged. The “natural” attention of someone just a few years younger than me is vastly more kinetic and fractured—attention span has evolved.

Just how insidious is our difference in attitude? How violent is the change between one mental state and the next?

• • • • •

The brains our children are born with are not substantively different from the brains our ancestors were born with forty thousand years ago. For all the wild variety of our cultures, personalities, and thought patterns, we’re all still operating with roughly the same three-pound lump of gray jelly. But almost from day one, the allotment of those brains (and therefore the way they function) is different today from the way it was even one generation ago. Every second of your lived experience represents new connections among the roughly eighty-six billion neurons packed inside your brain. Every minute you spend in the particular world that you were born into makes you massively, and functionally, different from those who came before. Children, then, can become literally incapable of thinking and feeling the way their grandparents did. A slower, less harried way of thinking may be on the verge of extinction.

To understand the severity of this predicament, though, we first need to understand just how very vulnerable, how plastic, our minds really are.

The plasticity of our minds is a marvelous thing to behold. In your brain alone, your billions of neurons are tied to each other by trillions of synapses, a portion of which are firing right now, forging (by still mysterious means) your memory of this sentence, your critique of this very notion, and your emotions as you reflect on this information. And these transmissions play out, we’re finding, in a highly organic and malleable fashion. Our brains are so plastic, so open-minded, that they will reengineer themselves to function optimally in whatever environment we give them. Repetition of stimuli produces a strengthening of responding neural circuits. Neglect of other stimuli will cause corresponding neural circuits to weaken. (Grannies who maintain their crossword puzzle regime knew that already.)

And as crossword-puzzling grandmothers know, it is not only the brains of the young that are vulnerable to environmental influence. While many still think that our personalities—and our brains—effectively crystallize when we graduate high school, we now know that our brains in fact remain plastic, changeable, throughout our lives. No matter your age, your brain’s ability to think, to feel, to learn, is minutely different from the way it was yesterday. What you think and how you think are up for grabs.

This plasticity is the ultimate consolation for the perennial “nature vs. nurture” argument, by the way. Evolution (nature) endowed us with minds capable of fast and furious transformation, minds able to adapt to strange new environments (nurture) within a single lifetime—even within a few weeks. Therefore, we’re always products of both inherited hardware and recently downloaded software. We are each a brilliant symbiosis of nature
and
nurture.

UCLA’s Gary Small is a pioneer of neuroplasticity research, and in 2008 he produced the first solid evidence showing that our brains are reorganized by our use of the Internet. He placed a set of “Internet naïve” people in MRI machines and made recordings of their brain activity while they took a stab at going online. Small then had each of them practice browsing the Internet for an hour a day for a mere week.
On returning to the MRI machine
, those “naïve” folk now toted brains that lit up significantly in the frontal lobe, where there had been minimal neural activity beforehand. Neural pathways quickly develop when we give our brains new tasks, and Small had shown that this held true—over the course of just a few hours, in fact—following Internet use.

“We know that technology is changing our lives. It’s also changing our brains,” he announced. On the one hand, neuroplasticity gives him great hope for the elderly. “It’s not just some linear trajectory with older brains getting weaker,” he told me.
Your brain’s ability to empathize
, for example, will increase as you age. The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains, immersed in a dozen hours of screen time a day, may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy
reality
reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, often quiet, material world.

In
The Shallows,
Nicholas Carr describes how the Internet fundamentally works on our plastic minds to make them more capable of “shallow” thinking and less capable of “deep” thinking. After enough time in front of our screens, we learn to absorb more information less effectively, skip the bottom half of paragraphs, shift focus constantly; “
the brighter the software
, the dimmer the user,” he suggests at one point.

The most startling example
of our brain’s malleability, though, comes from new research by neural engineers who now suggest that our children will be able to “incept” a person “to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized.” I am quoting here from a report issued from a Boston University team led by Takeo Watanabe. His team was able to use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to modify in highly specific ways the brain activity in the visual cortex of their human subjects. “
Think of a person watching a computer screen
,” suggested the National Science Foundation when it announced the research, “and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete.” The possibilities of such injections of “unearned” learning are as marvelous as they are quagmires for bioethical debate. Your grandchild’s brain could be trained in a certain direction while watching ads through digital contact lenses without his or her awareness (or, for that matter, acquiescence). In other words, decoded neurofeedback promises truly passive learning, learning without intention from the person who is to be “informed.”

For now, it’s easier to tell that something has changed in our minds, but we still feel helpless against it, and we even feel addicted to the technologies that are that change’s agents.

But will our children feel the static? Will
X Factor
audition videos replace basement jam sessions? Will “deep” conversation and solitary walks be replaced by an impoverished experience of text clouds? Will the soft certainty of earlier childhood be replaced by the restless idleness that now encroaches? Our children will always have their moments of absence, of course—their lives will not be wholly zombielike but will be a mixture of connection and disconnection. They will get lost in the woods, they will run naked on beaches, they will sometimes shut off their devices. The important question is whether the bias is shifting—whether they’ll find it as easy to access absence and solitude. What’s important is that we become responsible for the media diets of our children in a way that past generations never were. Since our children are privy to a superabundance of media, we now need to proactively engineer moments of absence for them. We cannot afford to count on accidental absence any more than we can count on accidental veggies at dinner.