Is the Internet Changing Your Brain?

Chris Horn, co-founder of Iona Technologies and commentator on matters technology raised an interesting question in a recent article in the Irish Times, when he asked do we really need to keep tabs on all the information that floods to us daily through tweets, feeds, inboxes and so on? Related to this is the issue of what is all of this information doing to our brains, as many of us, who have grown up processing things in certain ways struggle to cope with the overload that we now currently face. The notion that these machines are impacting on how we think is something that deeply troubles many people.

The bottom line is that, yes, using the internet is changing our brains. But then so does everything that we do because that is how your brain works. Brains are characterised by plasticity, which means that new connections are being generated all the time. So your brain changes if you learn how to play the guitar or do Sudoku. That is why, contrary to some conventional wisdom, you can choose to start learning a new language at 70 if you want to. The ability of the brain to adapt to new stimuli is probably one of the key reasons why we have been such a successful species.

The more interesting question is how the internet is changing the brain and this is the subject of a very insightful recent book by Nicholas Carr entitled The Shallows. In short, he provides compelling evidence that it is causing us lose some of our ability to think deeply as we scan content quickly moving between text, images, sounds and hyperlinks. Just as the neurons that fire together wire together, those that do not fire together do not wire together. Time spent scanning Web pages crowds out the time for reading books or contemplating ideas. As we gain new skills and perspectives, we lose old ones. There is a growing body of research which shows that our level of understanding is lower when we consume information through the Web than through print for example. With its characteristics of immediacy, interactivity and sensory stimulation, the internet is a distraction medium which impacts on the ability to think deeply.

Carr reckons that the Net might just be the most mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. Ever the entrepreneur, Chris Horn surmises that a facility which enables us to quickly find the insightful things that we have read while using it may just be the next big opportunity!

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Choices, choices, choices

In business, as in life, these days one of the biggest challenges that we have is the proliferation of choices available to us. What are the best choices to make in terms of growing your business? Where is the best place in the world to base yourself in terms of sourcing good job opportunities? What are the best blogs to read given your limited time!!! And so on and on and on.  

From both a consumer and business point of view, choice is a very important issue. As Barry Schwartz pointed out in his 2005 book The Paradox of Choice, choice is something that we crave, but when we have it, we do not handle it very well. It turns out that the more choices we have, the less likely we become to actually make a decision. And this has major implications for companies that pile on more options on their websites, add brand extensions to their ranges, increase their number of price points and so on. A simple jam experiment powerfully illustrates the problem Sheena Iyengar . A tasting booth was set up at the entrance to a grocery store that contained either 6 flavours of jam or 24 different flavours. The results were fascinating. When the booth contained the 24 jams, consumers were about 50 per cent more likely to stop and examine the display. However, only three per cent of them bought a jar of jam whereas when there were only 6 varieties on offer this number soared to 30 per cent. It would appear that, on average, we are not well programmed to deal with abundance!

If choice paralyzes us in the shops, can it do the same in the boardroom? A new book entitled Repeatability suggests that it could. As businesses grow, they become more complex and it is this complexity and the resulting inefficiency that is often their silent killer. The authors argue that firms need to engender a cult of simplicity, that is, build a core business model and apply it repeatedly to new opportunities. Witness for example the success of IKEA with its flat pack furniture or Nike with its branding expertise. This perspective rekindles the age old adage of ‘sticking to the knitting’ which can be effective but can also leave firms vulnerable to disruptive innovation. However, one thing it does demonstrate is that strategy is ultimately about making choices, difficult as that is for us humans to do.