For sure we live in a time of distraction. Too many things vie for our attention. The number one culprit, the subject of this book, is the internet.
For sure the internet, the constant screen watching, wreaks havoc on our attention span, reducing our ability to concentrate on print, It has become harder to focus on long reading such a a novel, requiring concentration and extended attention. Our eyes become used to jumping around, scanning a web page, looking for the essence or the fact rather than reading everything in a linear fashion. It seems to be getting worse.
The author makes a huge point of citing research demonstrating the plasticity of our brains. Our brains are being rewired making it harder to concentrate by screen reading. Digital presentations are not going to go away. Strategies must employed to mitigate the damage.
The dissolution of the linear mind. P. 1
Losing the tyranny of the text over our minds. P. 1
A dumbing down of culture? P. 2
McLuhan was so right. The medium of content delivery is more important than the content itself. P. 2
McLuhan saw that in the long what matters most is not the content but the medium itself. P. 3
The medium is not just a tool. It can change how our brains function. It can change how we see reality. Which medium matters.
It's not just how it's used. P. 4
Has deep reading become a struggle? P. 6
Online we trip lightly from link to link. This cannot help but lead to our being scanners rather than real readers.
The author of this book presents a lot of research about the plasticity of the adult brain. A reliance on screen media is changing how our brains process information and is making us scatter-brained. No doubt.
The author details the history of silent reading. it is amazing to find out that silent reading, which we generally consider reading itself, developed historically and was once not practiced.
The internet chips away at our ability to concentrate and reflect. P. 7
It seems like that anything worth saying William James said something about it. P. 21
The hardened adult brain was a scientific myth.
Brain plasticity never completely goes away. P. 26
How the brain can reorganize itself. P. 29
Is behaviorism based on non plasticity. P. 31
Edward Taub's research at UAB. P. 31
Does playing the violin make you smarter? P. 32
We become what we think. P. 33
The internet changes the way our brains process information and not for the good. P. 38
"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Ralph Waldo Emerson p. 46
The oral state of mind was Plato's enemy. P. 55
Early writing did not utilize word separation. Reading was laborious, but it was accepted as normal. P. 61
Silent reading brought the capacity to focus uninterrupted on a single task. P. 64
Silent reading developed slowly over time. P. 66
Gutenberg originally printed 200 copies of his famous Bible before he ran out of money. P. 68
An explosion of print in the 16th Century. P. 70
The deep reader becomes the book. P. 74
The world of the screen is a completely different world from that of print. P. 77
Screen features distort and fragment our attention span; disrupts our concentration. P. 91
Books still have compelling advantages over screens. P. 99-100
The linearity of the book still rules. P. 104
I identify with the concept of the literary mind. P. 112
Online reading promotes cursory reading, distractedness, and superficial thinking. P. 116
The internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. P. 117
No doubt the internet causes extensive brain changes. P. 120
There are differences in reading web pages and reading books. P. 121
The mind is the experienced book reader is calm. not frenzied. P. 123
Screen reading makes us mindless consumers of data. P. 125
People who read linear text retain more. P. 127
The more you browse and scan the less you read. P. 137
Skimming becoming our dominate mode of reading? P. 138
The internet hinders in-depth learning, knowing a subject for ourselves with expertise. P. 143
Google feeds distraction. P. 157
I need to find out more about the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus. Annotate your books he said. P. 178
The internet, you can look it up, is not a replacement for memory. P. 180
Remembering is thinking. William James P. 183
Constant connectivity is overrated. P. 222
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