The Shallows (29 page)

a digression
ON WHAT THE BRAIN THINKS ABOUT WHEN IT THINKS ABOUT ITSELF

1.
Quotations from Aristotle’s
The Parts of Animals
are from William Ogle’s much-reproduced translation.

2.
Robert L. Martensen,
The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 50.

3.
René Descartes,
The World and Other Writings
, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–40.

4.
Martensen,
Brain Takes Shape
, 66.

Three
TOOLS OF THE MIND

1.
Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress,
Cartographia
(New York: Little, Brown, 2007), 5.

2.
Ibid.

3.
Arthur H. Robinson,
Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1.

4.
Jacques Le Goff,
Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44.

5.
David S. Landes,
Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 76.

6.
Lynn White Jr.,
Medieval Technology and Social Change
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 124.

7.
Landes,
Revolution in Time
, 92–93.

8.
Lewis Mumford,
Technics and Civilization
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 15. The distinguished computer scientist Danny Hillis notes that “the computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.” W. Daniel Hillis, “The Clock,” in
The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years
, ed. John Brockman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 141.

9.
Karl Marx,
The Poverty of Philosophy
(New York: Cosimo, 2008), 119.

10.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” in
Collected Poems and Translations
(New York: Library of America, 1994), 63.

11.
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
, critical ed., ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 2003), 68. For a more recent expression of this view, see Kevin Kelly, “Humans Are the Sex Organs of Technology,”
The Technium
blog, February 16, 2007, www.kk.org/thetechnium/ archives/2007/02/ humans_are_the.php.

12.
James W. Carey,
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society
(New York: Routledge, 2008), 107.

13.
Langdon Winner, “Technologies as Forms of Life,” in
Readings in the Philosophy of Technology
, ed. David M. Kaplan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 105.

14.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Intellect,” in
Emerson: Essays and Lectures
(New York: Library of America, 1983), 417.

15.
See Maryanne Wolf,
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
(New York: Harper, 2007), 217.

16.
H. G. Wells,
World Brain
(New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), vii.

17.
René Descartes,
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes
, vol. 3,
The Correspondence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 304.

18.
Walter J. Ong,
Orality and Literacy
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 82.

19.
F. Ostrosky-Solís, Miguel Arellano García, and Martha Pérez, “Can Learning to Read and Write Change the Brain Organization? An Electrophysio-logical Study,”
International Journal of Psychology
, 39, no. 1 (2004): 27–35.

20.
Wolf,
Proust and the Squid
, 36.

21.
E. Paulesu, J.-F. Démonet, F. Fazio, et al., “Dyslexia: Cultural Diversity and Biological Unity,”
Science
, 291 (March 16, 2001): 2165–67. See also Maggie Jackson,
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008), 168–69.

22.
Wolf,
Proust and the Squid
, 29.

23.
Ibid., 34.

24.
Ibid., 60–65.

25.
Quotations from
Phaedrus
are taken from the popular translations by Reginald Hackforth and Benjamin Jowett.

26.
Eric A. Havelock,
Preface to Plato
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 41.

27.
Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, 80.

28.
See Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, 33.

29.
Ibid., 34.

30.
Eric A. Havelock,
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 74.

31.
McLuhan,
Understanding Media
, 112–13.

32.
Ibid., 120.

33.
Ong,
Orality and Literacy
, 14–15.

34.
Ibid., 82.

Four
THE DEEPENING PAGE

1.
Saint Augustine,
Confessions
, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 114.

2.
Paul Saenger,
Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 14.

3.
Ibid., 7.

4.
Ibid., 11.

5.
Ibid., 15.

6.
Maryanne Wolf,
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
(New York: Harper, 2007), 142–46.

7.
Saenger,
Space between Words
, 13.

8.
Charles E. Connor, Howard E. Egeth, and Steven Yantis, “Visual Attention: Bottom-Up versus Top-Down,”
Cognitive Biology
, 14 (October 5, 2004): 850–52.

9.
Maya Pines, “Sensing Change in the Environment,” in
Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling in the World: A Report from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
, February 1995, www.hhmi.org/senses/a120.html.

10.
The brain’s maintenance of top-down control over attention seems to require the synchronized firing of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. “It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong [distracting] input,” says MIT neuroscientist Robert Desimone. See John Tierney, “Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration,”
New York Times
, May 5, 2009.

11.
Vaughan Bell, “The Myth of the Concentration Oasis,”
Mind Hacks
blog, February 11, 2009, www.mindhacks.com/blog/ 2009/02/the_myth_ of_the_conc.html.

12.
Quoted in Alberto Manguel,
A History of Reading
(New York: Viking, 1996), 49. Early Christians practiced a religious form of Bible reading called
lectio divina
, or holy reading. Deeply meditative reading was seen as a way to approach the divine.

13.
See Saenger,
Space between Words
, 249–50.

14.
Ibid., 258. Walter J. Ong notes that editorial intensity increased further as the publishing business grew more sophisticated: “Print involves many persons besides the author in the production of a work—publishers, literary agents, publishers’ readers, copy editors and others. Before as well as after scrutiny by such persons, writing for print often calls for painstaking revisions by the author of an order of magnitude virtually unknown in a manuscript culture.” Ong,
Orality and Literacy
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 122.

15.
Saenger,
Space between Words
, 259–60.

16.
See Christopher de Hamel, “Putting a Price on It,” introduction to Michael Olmert,
The Smithsonian Book of Books
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1992), 10.

17.
James Carroll, “Silent Reading in Public Life,”
Boston Globe
, February 12, 2007.

18.
Gutenberg was not the first to invent movable type. Around 1050, a Chinese craftsman named Pi Sheng began molding Chinese logographs out of small bits of clay. The clay type was used to print pages through hand-rubbing, the same method used to make prints from woodblocks. Because the Chinese didn’t invent a printing press (perhaps because the large number of logographic symbols made the machine impractical), they were unable to mass-produce the prints, and Pi Sheng’s movable type remained of limited use. See Olmert,
Smithsonian Book of Books
, 65.

19.
See Frederick G. Kilgour,
The Evolution of the Book
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 84–93.

20.
Francis Bacon,
The New Organon
, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 100.

21.
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
, one-volume paperback ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 46.

22.
Michael Clapham, “Printing,” in
A History of Technology
, vol. 3,
From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, c. 1500–c. 1750
, ed. Charles Singer et al. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 37.

23.
Eisenstein,
Printing Press as an Agent of Change
, 50.

24.
Ibid., 49.

25.
François Rabelais,
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 161.

26.
Eisenstein,
Printing Press as an Agent of Change
, 72.

27.
Quoted in Joad Raymond,
The Invention of the Newspaper: English News-books, 1641–1649
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 187.

28.
See Olmert,
Smithsonian Book of Books
, 301.

29.
Eisenstein,
Printing Press as an Agent of Change
, 130.

30.
Notes Eisenstein, “Reading out loud to hearing publics not only persisted after printing but was, indeed, facilitated by the new abundance of texts.” Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 328.