The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | Hacker News Reader

The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

wired.com

67 pointsrazorburn30 comments

>In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people to read “The Demon Lover,” a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read it in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing.

In other words, if you mangle a short-story and push it into a different format from the one it was written in, it's harder to read. That has nothing to do with hypertext.

>She found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all, whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which is itself distracting.

That's more a question of wordiness than of hypertext. Whether and where to link is a very important decision in modern composition, probably more important than word choice.

Basically, these studies are assuming that all content is created equal, and that's far from the case. I would say it's more a question of poor web design shattering focus - that said, much of the web is designed with the intent of shattering focus.

It might be interesting to try that with "David's Sling" since Stiegler originally wrote it to use an early hypertext, then rewrote it as a novel. (Note, I have not seen the hypertext version, I don't even know if he ever ported it to html).

When movable type made cheap, mass printing of books possible, learned people of the time worried that the widespread availability of books would destroy the oral tradition of passing knowledge down through communities (and the Scribes worried that they would be put out of a job).

While the oral tradition is not yet destroyed (and in fact I attended a fantastic storytelling session earlier this year that was geared to adults), it has certainly been supplanted as the principal means through which people learn about the world - and thank heavens for it!

http://raisethehammer.org/blog/1486/

Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.

So then, it's like TV, only even more powerful because it's more interactive. Web Surfing is the new channel surfing?

This makes me wonder if this is an expression of typical fears about new media.

If it's true, then of course the Internet will be supported by governments around the world. It appears to be a better opiate of the masses than TV. A public which spends a lot of time being "informed" but is only informed on a cursory, distracted, and superficial level is a public which is easier to control. (Even easier to control than an uninformed public.) TV news and programming in the US already seems to be geared toward producing such a public.

A public which spends a lot of time being "informed" but is only informed on a cursory, distracted, and superficial level is a public which is easier to control. (Even easier to control than an uninformed public.)

What makes that true?

Such a public is particularly receptive to spin. Such a public is also ill suited to examination and oversight of it's own institutions. Such people can think they've performed such oversight, even though they've been fooled. As such, they are more easily innoculated against the truth with disinformation and propaganda.

A public which is not informed resents the withholding of information. They will seek the truth if they can and resent those who withhold the information.

Wow, this is weird. Yesterday, on my work - home commute, I was thinking exactly this. I realized that the massive usage of Internet has led me to have more difficulties in concentrating and studying, and in general keeping focus on a given task, while at the same time has given me an edge over less intensive web users I know when it comes to extrapolate a more or less superficial meaning from a resource like an article such as this, or a discussion, or even a picture. I wonder if these two aspects could somehow 'live together', that is, have the brain 'switch' to a certain mode when doing a certain task.

edit: and I'm kinda worried about this.

A large part of meditation practices involve learning to train one's attention and focus. So yes, you can definitely learn to have the brain "switch" modes.

I agree they can 'live together' through some kind of deliberate training (like meditation) - but also with the right tools (for example http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom)

Well, there's another reason for me to keep alive the interest in meditation!

TL;DR: Reading web formatted text reduces our attention span [http://twitter.com], comprehension [http://reddit.com], and data retention [http://google.com] just by having embedded links.

I need to work on my attempt at humor.

You do. I don't see what is humorous about it. It was an insightful statement with a few very relevant links.

I particularly liked your linking of Google to "data retention", and Reddit to "comprehension" (or lack there of).

I think you're reading the list wrong. The list is...

- reduces our attention span (blame Twitter for this.)

- reduces our comprehension (blame Reddit for this.)

- reduces our data retention (blame Google for this.)

There's a pretty good argument for all three, don't you think?

"We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting."

This does have some interesting implications for society as a whole. But, it seems that individuals who are able to maintain sustained, focused attention will have quite an advantage.

I read every single word anyway and more than often enough have to relies on my personal memory to mettle out arguments. I also don't skims through information.

I also eliminated all sort of information feeds except hacker news and a few economic resource. Emails, web statistics, etc, are not worth checking out often since they don't have much actionable insight or interesting insight.

I have a big craving for super long articles and essay just like this wired's story. I want more just like it. (Which is also why people enjoy Kalzumeus, Steve Yegge,T-A-W, and other writers of super long essay)

This essay is "super long" by web standards only.

Let's fix this hunter-gatherer analogy up a bit.

When I find some good information to "eat" it never runs out. I can share it with the tribe endlessly. I think a better analogy is that we are all on watch, looking out for the tribe, ready to raise the alarm. That is why FUD is effective and the media is becoming strident about the mundane. It speaks to the alert. And to be fair, innovation is breeding obsolescence, with we all must fear.

So fellow tribespeople, keep a sharp lookout, but don't forget, it's very cheap for others to do so also. What we really need is a few of us to focus and crank out some arrowheads, or, better yet, invent gunpowder.

Every time I read an article like this I plan to spend less time online, but never seem to actually manage it.

Tools like leechblock do provide some help in blocking access to the biggest distractions.

I'm working on the meditation thing a little and plan to increase.

Has anyone come up with a good structured approach to getting focus back?

After reading this PG classic http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html, I have a machine only for work. (Which, ironically, I'm posting from right now, heh.)

I only connect via Ethernet, and often physically disconnect my laptop from the net, so when I feel the urge to get on Twitter, HN, etc. I have to reach for the cable again, which is enough of a red flag to get me back to work.

I've managed to keep myself from "needing" to be connected. My business partner is great about never bugging me when I'm coding, we use status.net to do asynchronous communication (think a private Twitter), Google Wave to collaborate, and phones for anything urgent and plenty of meatspace every week, of course.

When I'm coding, I have offline copies of all the web pages and documentation I need, so I can't use that as an excuse to get online.

I also use Firefox browser profiles extensively, one for Personal stuff, one for Work, one for <Projectname> etc. Between that and Firefox sessions, I can leave a bunch of shit open, but come back to it when I have time.

For a while I was a night person and just hit Twitter/HN/reddit once or twice a day, kind of got a digest in the "morning" (6 pm) and then worked all night, w/o too much happening on the Internet. (Yes, I'm an American, yes, I know about the rest of the world, but the point is that less happens at night and so you don't feel like you're missing something. Now that I'm a day person for the first time in years, I feel the urge to keep up every hour.)

I also have started exercising about half an hour a day (just a walk around the neighborhood) and limiting my online time to mainly using Twitter as a newsfeed, HN as a feed of interesting stuff and that's about it. I don't have time to keep up with world events too much anymore, sadly. No New York Times or NPR.org for me, though I usually read our little local newspaper in about 10 minutes each day.

Don't fight it, embrace it. :) My strategy has been to try to spend my time in places on the internet that promote deep engagement with the subject matter. To that end, I started this: http://www.reddit.com/r/learnit

A test I would like to see is learning abstract algebra by reading Wikipedia articles versus learning it by reading the better textbooks, such as the Artin textbook. My bet is that the textbook users would come out ahead by any reasonable means of assessing their understanding and performance.

People would come to a deeper and more complete understanding of a subject by reading a document whose actual intent is to bring them to a more complete and deep understanding of that subject.

Fascinating.

I did much better in some of my classes learning math, CS, and EE concepts through Wikipedia than I did from the textbook or lectures.

Edit: possible cause: textbooks designed for selling to universities rather than designed to educate, and courses designed to maintain the professor's royalties.

I would guess that it was more likely due to the pick-and-choose nature of most courses. When I take a class, the material that is actively tested is usually only the general concepts and only the ones the professor deems important. Wikipedia is designed for you to be able to get a general idea about specific topics, where a text book is designed to include in-depth and comprehensive knowledge.

Many of my friends whose jobs are associated with intense, abstract thinking (professors, researchers) tend to "not have time" for much websurfing. Interesting how they may have inadvertently protected their brains this way.

Your brain makes you good at the things you do. So if the internet really is the best way to get the information you're looking for, it makes sense to practice internet surfing instead of book reading.

That said, it still makes sense to make web surfing easier if that's possible. This Firefox extension looks promising:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111/

There's definitely a lot of crap on the internet, so I'm thinking of doing something like skimming Hacker News at the end of each day, emailing important and content-rich articles to myself to read in the morning. It seems relatively safe to indulge in this distractable mindset right before I'm going to sleep, during which my mind will presumably be reset to its default state. And by browsing the web in different modes at consistently different times of the day, classical conditioning will be on my side. It'd be interesting to play with other ways of using classical conditioning for this. For example, always wear certain clothing or eat certain food during one type of web browsing.

There have always been news junkies. It's just that the price of crack has dropped. Anything done to excess can harm you, and even if not done to excess, give you cancer.

Is there any evidence that what this article suggest happens to our brains while we are on using the web affects us when we are not using the web?

This seems close enough:

>Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

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