According to Carr’s recent article, throughout our lives our brains adapt to the way we gather and process information. Performing an action over and over changes the brain’s circuitry. The new firing patterns of neurons become more stable and push aside older patterns. If you give up performing an action, then neural circuits formerly dedicated to it get weaker and are eventually used for other activities. No wonder Management Gurus harp on the need to have ‘focus.’ As they say, ‘what you focus is what you get.’ The more you focus on something, the more neurons are fired towards realizing that task.
Anything we do on a regular basis rewires the brain. There’s a saying among neuroscientists that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” When you practice a certain skill, the circuits get stronger, and the area of the brain dedicated to performing the skill gets larger. Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers that it takes the brain 10,000 hours to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time."
Well, now the unfortunate part. With the Internet increasingly becoming our universal medium for gathering information, we’re training our brains to take in information in the way the Internet supplies it — that is, with an emphasis on speed and with continual distractions. There are some who do it for 2 hours a day and there are people who only do this. The point is that the extensive search – information overload- is making all of us more productive but with convenience we forget to exercise our thinking cells, losing the analytical bent. Does it impact our decision making abilities? It certainly does as we increasingly rely on web as a source for information. Imagine Gen Y - they might not even know what they are ‘losing’ as they get exposed to the ‘web’ at a very early age.
Anything we do on a regular basis rewires the brain. There’s a saying among neuroscientists that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” When you practice a certain skill, the circuits get stronger, and the area of the brain dedicated to performing the skill gets larger. Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers that it takes the brain 10,000 hours to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time."
Well, now the unfortunate part. With the Internet increasingly becoming our universal medium for gathering information, we’re training our brains to take in information in the way the Internet supplies it — that is, with an emphasis on speed and with continual distractions. There are some who do it for 2 hours a day and there are people who only do this. The point is that the extensive search – information overload- is making all of us more productive but with convenience we forget to exercise our thinking cells, losing the analytical bent. Does it impact our decision making abilities? It certainly does as we increasingly rely on web as a source for information. Imagine Gen Y - they might not even know what they are ‘losing’ as they get exposed to the ‘web’ at a very early age.
