Several years ago, I read (or more honestly dipped into) Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, with its quite alarming subtitle What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
One of the things that Carr talks about in the book is how the way we consume information is changing the very nature of our brains.
When we mostly read online, our brains get used to clicking links, chasing the next dopamine fix, and not being able to stay in the present moment. We are, as the title suggests, swimming in the shallows.
A technology that human beings created is now working upon us, changing the basic fact of how we pay attention.
This felt very disturbing to me when I first read it. In the previous few years, I’d noticed how much harder it was for me to focus on reading one book. And I was the kind of kid who would look forward to the Library period in school. A friend and I would even exchange books we’d checked out, so we could get to read two books a week. What deliciousness!
So, as someone who had always been an avid reader, the fact that I was finding it hard to focus on reading just one book and the fact that when I read on my Kindle app, I felt like I was missing out on the hundred other books or online articles out there AND felt this great need to hop, skip and jump felt truly disturbing to me.
I could sense, in my own brain, and in the way my attention felt fragmented, cut up into little pieces, almost threadbare, the proof of what Carr was talking about in the book.
The internet HAD changed my brain without me even realizing it.
And so, in the past few years, I have been trying to get my attention back. It’s not that I gave up reading online. I still have the Kindle app on my phone. But I really took a step back.
Last year, for example, I decided that I would buy any books that I want to really spend some time with as paperbacks, and not as a digital copy. So, the “lighter fare” can stay on my Kindle, but if it’s something intellectually challenging, then I have to get a physical copy of it.
I also joined a couple of reading groups to read some of these books.
For example: I read Edward Edinger’s classic Anatomy of the Psyche in a guided reading group last year. It’s one of the most amazing reading experiences I have had in a long time! This would have been a hard book to read on my own because there’s so much context I didn’t know.
But with someone who guided us through the book, it felt so rich. I almost felt like I was entering liquid time in our discussions.
I also read several essays from Carl Jung’s major collection of essays Dreams with another group. It was so cool to get to discuss them.
There are a couple of things I’ve realized through this.
There is something really important about being able to turn physical pages, to realize exactly how wide or slim the book you’re reading is, to mark your place in it. It’s a very different experience from reading a book on your Kindle app or even a dedicated Ebook reader.
The same thing that makes having digital books and magazines so exciting, on the flip side, also gives us a false sense of limitlessness.
Here’s what Nicholas Carr says about our constant feeling of being overwhelmed by information these days.
He says that in today’s online world, we mostly no longer have to face the needle-in-the haystack problem that previous generations faced.
If you’re looking for something specific, there are really good chances that you can easily find it. Even if it’s something which will take a few days of research, that’s still a whole lot better & a whole lot easier than ever before.
What we’re really drowning in today is “haystack-sized piles of needles.”
We’re surrounded by SO MUCH information that is of direct interest to us that we feel the unconscious, unnamed pressure of keeping up with it.
And filters and algorithms have become so good at giving us things that genuinely interest us that our problem now is not one of scarcity, but one of plenty.
We experience these seductive signals beckoning us all the time. And so, “we keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations – and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.”
Let’s hear that again. The pile of interesting information NEVER shrinks.
So, there’s no realistic way to ever keep up with all the information that is now available to us.
If you’re interested in psychology like I am, there are literally thousands of great books and online pieces you can potentially read. And the same goes for literally any other topic under the sun.
But if you’re the kind of person who thinks deeply about anything you take in, as most sensitives do OR are a highly sensitive person who is ALSO a high sensation seeker (like I am) who loves variety and novelty & almost gobbles up information, this unconscious FOMO can feel like a huge mental overload.
The key is to recognize that we’re getting paralyzed & distracted by a veritable buffet of choice. It is to accept that we have to choose a few things so we can fully taste them instead of getting inundated with the unconscious pressure of the ever-growing stack.
Remembering that an ocean of knowledge is now available to us, but that all we can do is take a few small dives to bring back a pearl or two can stem the free-floating anxiety that comes from being assigned (or unknowingly assigning ourselves) an impossible task.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.” SIGN UP HERE for Ritu’s newsletter The Highly Sensitive Creative or Get the book HERE.
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