The Internet Is Turning Us Into Rats

“Our gadgets have turned us into hi-tech lab rats, mindlessly pressing levers in the hope of receiving a pellet of social or intellectual nourishment,” says Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. And what is it doing to our brains, other than crawling out of the computer at night to make our dreams so embarrassingly dull? It “gets in the way of deep thinking” and it “obstructs understanding, impedes the formation of memories and makes learning more difficult.” But the good news is that makes our thoughts “thin and scattered,” which sounds kind of pretty.