I usually write the first draft of this column each week in four or five different sittings. Ten or fifteen minutes is often the longest I can sit and fully concentrate. Likewise, the books and articles I read to find research material for the column, I’m only able to read for ten or fifteen minutes at a sitting as well. After that, I unconsciously interrupt my regular breathing pattern and begin to get antsy and anxious. Clearly, my brain has changed over the 25 years I’ve been working with computers, but it doesn’t feel like it’s changed for the better. It is a change wrought by the Internet that many of our children however, will never know – the strength and joy of having much greater powers of concentration.
Harvard Business Review editor, Nicholas Carr had to move from Boston to a cabin in the Colorado mountains and turn down his own consumer electronics consumption in order to write his recent bestseller, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. In that book, Carr argues there is a downside to Internet Culture – we are at risk of raising a generation of fast-twitch airheads, sentenced to live their lives in the “intellectual shallows.” It’s a generation that regularly fails to realize that greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge, that breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge, that multi-tasking is not the same as engaging complexity, and finally, that ever-increasing mountains of facts and data are not the same as wisdom. Princeton philosopher, Cornel West has intimated that this description unfortunately fits our current president, making too many critical choices solely from his intellect.
Creativity Crisis
Another unexpected outcome of the electronic revolution was recently detailed by Nurtureshock authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman in Newsweek: America is a country in the middle of a creativity decline bordering on a crisis. To come up with that determination researcher Kyung Hee Kim at William and Mary College analyzed 300,000 Torrance scores, which are generally accepted as an accurate measure of Creativity Quotient (CQ). What Hee found is that American creativity has been in steady decline since 1990, just as computers and computer games began their great cultural infiltration. And the greatest decline has occurred in schoolchildren from kindergarten through sixth grade.
Wisdom is Embodied
It’s interesting that this decline in creativity also seems to run parallel with a reduction in physical education in our public schools. According to the Surgeon General’s Report, beginning in the early nineties, overall enrollment in daily physical education classes declined among high school students from 42 percent to 27 percent by the end of the decade. (Astonishingly, the baseline starts out at less than half of all kids – 42%!).
This is but one aspect of a very complex process, but here’s how I think physical education and wisdom might be related. The brain’s neural network processes energy and information. Generally, the more neurons we possess making more connections, much like a computer network, the more energy and information we can process. The more energy and information we can process, the wiser we have the potential for being, perhaps particularly if we can be aware of and make sense of the energy and information being regularly transmitted from the neurons in our “ancillary” brains – our hollow organs like our stomach and our heart – to our insula, where “gut” feelings get processed.
Inhibited and/or Enriched
Neuron growth and connectivity in our brain can alternately be inhibited or enriched. Internal and external environments have the capacity to do either. Internal environments that inhibit neuron growth and connectivity, particularly in critical limbic and prefrontal brain areas, respond poorly to excessive amounts of stress-generated neurotoxins like adrenaline and cortisol. Exercising the body thus serves an exocrine function – we literally sweat these neurotoxins out of our system (Interestingly, tears of grief also serve a similar exocrine function).
Sitting at a computer or in a classroom or in front of the television for most of the day does very little in the way of providing an exit strategy for neurotoxins. Just the opposite, as many classrooms, computer games and television shows probably generate more stress chemicals than they clear out. This recent study seems to suggest that simply so much sitting is the biggest part of what ails us.
What to Do?
Move yourself and get your kids moving. This might be a male thing, but I don’t like exercising for exercise’s sake. I like exercising with goals in mind. I like cutting and stacking firewood, for example, or riding my bike into town to get the mail, rather than just to ride. I like moving in order to build things or to discover things in my local environment.
Limit or circumscribe exposure to electronic media. This includes television (reduce those 200 billion hours spent watching every year), iPads, iPhones, Gameboys, wiis, Kindles, Xboxes and anything else that results in kids’ physical movement being significantly reduced for hours on end.
Spend time in nature, meditating. It’s pretty clear that most all forms of contemplative practice provide great neural benefit. Here’s a recent study on how meditation increases attention span. Forests, too, engender healing, as this study confirms. Nevertheless, it continues to astonish me how little the open space preserves in Northern California are actually used by people for camping, hiking, exploring meditation. To this day, I can hike into Big Basin Redwood Preserve from the Pacific Coast Highway, hike up to Golden Falls and Silver Falls and encounter only four or five other people on the whole day-long trek. We seem to have lost our memory for the healing, restorative power of nature, and our minds, bodies, brains and souls are paying the price.
There is a lot information out there about the link between the brain and vigorous aerobic exercise. Excellent book: “Spark,” by Dr. John Ratey. His studies agree with what you’ve written: the more time spent sitting and being passively entertained, the less our brains can actually learn effectively. We didn’t survive as a species because we had the internet. We survived because we moved, observed, ran, climbed, and learned how not to get eaten by predators, while staying together socially as a tribe. The internet can create community (it’s fun finding old friends on Facebook), but it also creates isolation that would have ensured death back when we were roaming the savannas of Africa. The brain is so plastic….and it’s so important to choose how you want to allow it to form. I am now going to send this post to my growing children….thank you for another excellent post!
Martha
Yes, my older children will get a copy of this post also.
Give me a meadow, willow tree’s with the breeze flowing by, wild flowers, and a brook and I am one happy camper!!!
Outdoor destination exercise is my deal as well…..who invented the tread mill anyway ??
Well done!
My doctoral project was on the hidden dangers of teen messaging. (2007) I had to argue my cause to research and write it. Three years ago, no one saw the coming “crisis” I saw. Technology designed to connect us, is in the end, disconnecting us. I see it every day in my work.
Maybe I’m wrong here, but I don’t believe we can access God, or whatever you want to name that which is greater than ourselves, via the computer or cell phone. S/he is outside, in the wind, riding on the sun rays, twinkling in the stars, etched in our friends faces…. We lose something when we lose that connection to the divine, and to each other. Our brains don’t grow and organize properly when we aren’t connected. We need play, love, novelty, movement, and more love, both giving and receiving.
Thanks Mark for another good Sunday morning read for my latte time. Now, off to meditate in the summer sun here in California. (we miss you down here by the way!)
I read an interesting book in 1997 on a broader account of this subject, of impending technology crisis. It was very non biased, which I am not! So I am unsure as to whether or not we know about, and see the potential hazards of such. In my world it is more about whether or not we are willing to take a stand and create change…in the direction that we believe is healthy for our loved ones and humanity. Creating awareness is the first step–so bravo for your work and for going against the grain. I do question whether or not technology has been furthered to the point at which we now have experience/access–with the express intent of connecting us. But I am curious as to what the initial intention was….
Mark – Thank you! This is a nice essay on the connection of physical exercise, brain activity and the effects of screen time. There are some wonderful studies showing that kids in California who were more physically active demonstrated higher test scores in math and language, which supports the retention of physical education in public schools. In addition, this has translated to specific recommendations regarding 1 hour or more of physical activity daily for young people to help combat obesity. As for screen time, kids are not only sedentary during much screen time “activity,” but research is also demonstrating that they are engaging in mindless eating as well (much of this supported by the 1000s of advertisements for junk food and soft drinks seen during children’s TV programming). So, let’s unplug our kids! The positive effects of connecting with nature are well documented in the ecopsychology literature.
It might be interesting to look at the correlation between loss of creativity in school children to the high stakes testing imbedded in the No Child Left Behind law. The emphasis on passing the test and mastering test taking strategies rather than being immersed in deep learning would seem to be a crucial factor in the failure to grow creativity and wisdom in children. Pacing guides, numerous benchmark assessments, a “one size fits all” educational environment, and the demise of art/music/drama/PE/social studies/science to concentrate on language arts and math leaves little time for creativity for students or teachers.
Well its interesting to me that you have a self professed, and somewhat limited concentration tolerance for reading and writing, for all the great information you bring to us it would seem otherwise, but then perhaps that is indicative of my shortcoming in un-intentionally evaluating the time, and skills required to write such an always awesome, and informational column.
I have had to train and retrain myself to step away from my writing–I can go 8 -12 hours a day, when motivated to do so, before realizing I am in my pajamas, and have not eaten. Stepping away (moving) is complimentary to integration, and to the creative process… something to embrace? Could anxious and ansty be the natural indicator that the the neurotoxins are ready for exit? Aren’t you lucky to have it built in at 15 min. or less.
I have always liked the idea of relocating to a rural cabin or to a historical era specific hotel room to write a book. I’ve been attracted to the romantics of such a move–to write the book, but in this case (The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains ) the ironics involved are much more interesting.
As far as the decline of the creative instinct; isn’t it a matter of what we (teachers, parents, & elders that know better) provide for stimulation and calming sessions to our children? So go figure…meanwhile maybe those few die hards that make up the creative population will have job security in the future –starting now! My friend Marin– a creative die hard or junkie–take your pick…has come up with one solution for coupling mathematics and movement with her math by hand http://www.mathbyhand.com/
The what to do section is right on… and I have faith the return to such natural tendencies will be on the rise.
Thanks Mark
Thanks for this Mark. I’ve been saying much the same thing all week on my Facebook page. As a one-time Waldorf teacher, I was steeped in the idea that too much media is not the best recipe for healthy growth, and that heart-centered and hands-on learning is a much better recipe! I’ve developed a hands-on math system for grades 1-4 that includes language arts, crafts, and lots of movement integrated with math lessons. Take a look at the website: http://www.mathbyhand.com (there’s a link to my Facebook page on there as well). I did pass along the Kahn Academy link (there’s a lot of homeschooling parents on my Facebook page) and advised that it would be a great site for them to hone up on skills, but that it wouldn’t be best to sit their kids in front of the computer for it. I asked them to consider using Math By Hand as a good option for the kids. Well, I am glad my friend Cheryl Zellers who shared the Kahn Academy with me sent me to your blog! I will be checking in regularly from now on, and will post this one on my Facebook page. Do you know Jane Healy’s work? She wrote a couple books on the dangers of too much tech. One is “Endangered Minds” and another is “Failure to Connect.” Thanks again, Mark!
Yes. To everything. Well, except one little bit of tentative sexism. My experience suggests that the “practical” gene – the one that has you and me preferring a destination bike ride to a day of “exercise” is not gendered.
Watching families on my street – especially the ones with school-age kids, but not only them – the men, while often doing more of the “heavy lifting” chores, are very often the ones who would go for a ride just to go for a ride. Us women often band together for our walks-social time combo. We walk to shopping half a mile away, we paint our houses, mow our lawns, and throw the ball for the dog. In fact, adding them up I think we are probably half-and-half in the gender split for outdoor activities with purpose versus the treadmill, the kayak in the ocean, and marathons. Two women go to the gym. One runs around in circles for exercise.
Do you know about “blue zones”? The places in the world where people live the longest. Most of them don’t do exercise for the sake of exercising. They sit on the floor and stand up. They follow the goats, or walk to the store. No one is putting in hours on the computer or watching TV.
Excellent post. Your thoughts on breadth of knowledge vs. depth of knowledge are a concept I attempted to analyze (in a far less exhaustively researched manner) on my own blog recently. You managed to explain what I was attempting to in much more succinct and scientific terms.
The article you point to re: short attention spans seems interesting as well, though I didn’t read it as it seems far too long…
(Incidentally, we’re both randomly mentioned in this guy’s blog http://www.farmfreshmeat.com/ which is how I ended up here in my random, distracted surfing of the internet).
Cheers.
Greatly appreciate your valuable blog – and indeed most of the Comments – and just want to add an extra aspect, which I believe only exacerbates the problem.
I worked in UK manufacturing industry for 30 years and noticed that the number of developmetal technologists shrank in proportion to output, as companies merged, or bought each other. Sometimes, I watched helpless, as inventors with great experience were ‘laid off’ by younger, less experienced bosses, their knowledge and ideas lost to the community in most cases.
Now I note that the “share of job seekers starting their own businesses in the US dropped in the first half of 2010 to the lowest two-quarter rate since outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas started tracking data in 1989” (San Francisco Chronicle 7/26/10, page D1). This makes the underlying effects of the exessive use of internet, lack of exercise, and so forth, all the more potent.
Moreover, there may be a more sinister aspect: there seems to be less committment to education – even the clunky, vocational kind – now that material goods can be purchased cheaply from rapidly-industrializing countries.