Category: EPPP Preparation Materials

In my previous post I shared about the distractions created by hyperlinks. But what can we do to mitigate these distractions?

There are a couple of ways you can limit the distractions caused by hyperlinks. If you are reading a webpage that contains hyperlink you are interested in pursuing, right click on those links and select “open in new tab.” Then read those new webpages when you have finished browsing the current article. Continue reading →

The first step to keeping sharp when studying online seems beguilingly simple, and yet it is crucially important. It has to do with how you use hyperlinks. Put simply, do not let hyperlinks distract you from what you are currently reading.

Given how the human brain has been designed, we need very little encouragement to shift our attention from one object to another. The primitive state of man is to be in a condition of constant distractability. In earlier stages of human history, this helped us to survive. By being attentive to the smallest changes in our environment, our distractable brains helped us avoid being eaten by a predator or missing a crucial food source. As Nicholas Carr explained in The Shallows, “Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we’d overlook a nearby source of food. For most of history, the normal path of human thought was anything but linear.”

This means that, in one sense, the activity of attentive reading is unnatural to the brain. Attentive reading is work. It takes practice. It takes a concerted effort to ignore the visible distractions in our environment and the invisible distractions in our mind. Attentive reading goes against the human propensity for distraction, since it forces us to give sustained focus on one thing at the exclusion of everything else competing for our attention. The sustained, linear concentration of the reader develops neuro-pathways that are valuable yet somewhat unnatural to us as human beings.

But while it takes effort and practice to develop the neuropathways necessary for attentive reading, it takes very little effort for those neuropathways to be compromised. If we are not careful, the internet can change the reading experience from one of sustained concentration to one of perpetual distraction. It can turn mankind back to the primitive condition in our hunter-gatherer days when the state of perpetual distractibility was necessary for our survival.

In short, the internet can quickly become, what Cory Doctorow termed an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.” From animations, to hyperlinks, to pop-ups, to audible email notification, to live feeds, the internet seems designed to be always distracting our attention from one thing on to something else. In the process, the internet can compromise the neuropathways needed for attentive and reflective reading.

What does any of this have to do with managing hyperlinks? Simply this: refusing to immediately click on hyperlinks is one very small—but crucially important—way to resist the internet’s propensity to constantly distract our brain. But more about that in the next post.

In his article, ‘The Neuro Transformers: Culture & the Malleability of the Human Brain’, Robin Phillips drew attention to an interesting fact about brain scans done on London taxi drivers in the 1990s. Researchers found that, in the cabbies, the posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that stores spatial representations, was considerably larger than in non-cab drivers.

Commenting on this, Phillips noted that “clearly, a London taxi-driver’s genetic make-up is not fundamentally different from a London mechanic’s or a London web designer’s, yet there are very clear structural differences in their brains. How did this come about?”

Once again the explanation lies in what we explained in our previous post on neuroplasticity: the brain is not static and fixed, as scientists used to think; rather, it is an organism that is continually changing to meet the demands we place upon it.

One example of this was given in an earlier post where we shared a report from Susan Greenfield on an experiment at the Harvard Medical School involving piano exercises. Volunteers without any experience playing the piano were taught piano exercises. Those volunteers who practiced piano exercises for five days showed marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement. Interestingly, however, another group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises had changes in their brain structure just as pronounced as those that had actually had the lessons.

The plasticity of the brain should offer hope to those who find learning difficult, or who struggle to get their brains around certain complex concepts. We can literally improve our brain by how we use it.

But this also brings with it a certain challenge, as we hinted at the end of our previous post. Neuroplasticity not only means that the brain is capable of improving and strengthening itself over time; it also means that the brain can be weaken because of how we use it. If we are not proactive to use our tools in the most neurologically efficient way, our tools can come to dominate us, ultimately weakening the brain’s capacity to store and process information. As technology historian and Pulitzer Prize nominee Nicholas Carr put it in his book The Shallows, “a central theme of intellectual and cultural history” is that “the tools we use to write, read and otherwise manipulate information work on our minds even as our minds work with them…”

As our tools work on our minds, this sometimes means that we become smarter. But it can also mean we become dumber. The issue isn’t just the tools we’re using, but how we’re using them.

This is especially true when it comes to the internet. As the most powerful information conduit in the history of human civilization, the internet’s potential to make us smarter is almost staggering. But the internet also has the potential to change our brains in less positive ways. The difference comes entirely down to how you use it.

So here is a question for you. Are you using the internet in a way that keeps your brain sharp, or in a way that leads to intellectual decay?

As we have studied the latest findings in brain science, we have assembled various steps for equipping you to achieve your fullest potential when studying online. Applying these steps could literally make a difference between success or failure in your EPPP Exam Prep.

Further Reading

• EPPPocalypse: Our Changing Human Brains, Good or Bad? Modern technology is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist

• Review of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains 

In my previous post, ‘From Localizationism to Neuroplasticity’, I explained how cutting edge brain science has disrupted the old notion that mental processes are fixed to specific functions of the brain.

In Norman Doidge’s fascinating book on the subject he explains how scientists have only recently been comfortable using the term ‘neuroplasticity.’

“At first many of the scientists didn’t dare use the word ‘neuroplasticity’ in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notion. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many ‘circuits’ and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not.”

The science of neuroplasticity is so recent that the practical benefits of the brain’s malleability are only just coming to be discovered. Last year Psychology Today shared a handful of some of these benefits:

• Reactivate long-dormant circuitry. The expression “it’s like riding a bike” is very true when it comes to your brain. Often, you never completely forget a skill once learned, though you might need a short period of practice to kick your neurons back into gear.
• Create new circuitry. For instance, the neurons in your nose responsible for smell are made new and replaced every few weeks, and new neurons are made in other parts of your brain as well. Also, whenever you learn something new, your brain can strengthen existing neuronal connections and create new synapses that allow you to maximize new skills.
• Rewire circuitry. Parts of your brain that were used for one purpose can be retasked to other uses. This is often the case with stroke victims who relearn to use a limb or to speak after some neurons are destroyed.
• Quiet aberrant circuits and connections (such as those contributing to depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), phobias, and so on). Some parts of your brain (your prefrontal cortex, for example) can exert control over others (the amygdala, for example) and change how much they affect your mood, decision-making, and thought processes.

Above all, neuroplasticity means that the brain is not programed with numerous prefabricated adaptations, but is actually able to evolve and adapt itself within the lifetime of an individual. It does this by forming specialized structures to meet the demands of the environment, whether those demands include having to learn new language or preparing for the EPPP.

This kind of adaptation occurs every time we use a new tool. Scientists have found that whenever human beings learn to use a new tool, the brain forms new neuro-pathways to deal with the demands of that tool. Whether the tool is a hammer, a clock, a book, or the structures of the specific language we speak, our flexible brains literally rewire themselves around the requirements of the tool. In each case, this involves strengthening some neurons and weakening others. As Walter Ong put it in Orality and Literacy, “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”

Although this process of adaptation occurs in our brains all the time, we would do well to be aware of it. Sometimes the adaptation is good, but sometimes it is not.

Nowhere does this apply more than when it comes to the internet. As Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan point out in iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,

“Daily exposure to high technology—computers, smart phones, video games, search engines like Google and Yahoo—stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening olds ones. Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now—at a speed like never before.”

By being self-conscious about this process, and learning about the ways our tools are affecting our brains, we can encourage the positive side of neurological adaptation and lessen the negative. In short, you can take control of your brain’s evolution.