Carr

In Nicholas Carr's essay "Is google making us stupid" He proposes that reading online texts can inhabit the way you think after long terms of surfing the web and reading articles for long periods of time. Carr seems to think that the web effects the cognitive parts of the brain, making people less aware that they are skimming paragraphs. In Carr's essay he says "The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” (par.13) Carr seems to be saying that, once a brain breaks a connection, it forms a new one. When on the computer for hours and hours at a time it seems that people presented in Carr's examples have experienced headaches, and problems seeing after being on a computer for hours at a time. "Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating 'like computers.' But the changes, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level." (par. 16) Carr seems to be saying that in today's age we seems to refer to our brains as computers, the more information the hold and the longer it stays there, the easier we can access it after long periods of time. In ten years if we come across something we haven't studied in over ten years we can sometimes easily remember how to do it or recover information we read over ages ago. Today computers have made accessing information a whole lot easier in seconds. Students today can access a book in seconds and read the whole book in a matter of five pages making studying a whole lot easier but missing the key points in the book. "It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. " (par. 17) subsequently enough, our brains are our computers and can hold information for as long as we can remember.