This book was on Obama's summer reading list last year, and I am just now getting around to finishing it. I am a bit lean in the area of reading nonfiction, and this did not immediately appeal to me. The premise of the book is that the Internet has changed the way our neural networks function, and the subtext is that we are dumber for it.
The web encourages us to click through lots of data in a short period of time, and things that are longer than 10 minutes don't hold our attention. We stop reading novels before we know it. He references the change from oral to written work, which happened centuries ago as an example of how technology has been changing man forever.
Carr puts together an informative history of brain science to back up his argument. The latest neuroscience says that our grey matter is malleable and plastic. And as the internet remoulds and rewires the brain in its image, the old book-reading circuits fall out of use and wither. Read this book: you'll learn lots of interesting stuff, lots of thought-provoking theories about the brain. And if you finish it, you'll have a satisfying sense of having, at an individual level, disproved its thesis.
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