Dumbed down

In The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein has compiled a host of such studies and reports to build his case that “kids today” are the dumbest ones ever despite a wealth of external resources. Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, says that compared to previous generations of students, “they don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvass a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said that they compose better paragraphs.”

Does this matter? Or is it Old Brain thinking? In Grown Up Digital, Tapscott writes: “It’s not what you know that counts anymore; it’s what you can learn.” Until now, he says, “the educational model was to cram as much knowledge into your head as possible to build up your inventory of knowledge before you entered the world of work where you could retrieve that information when needed.” Now, information becomes obsolete quickly—and because it’s always retrievable at the click of a mouse, a well-educated person is not necessarily one who stores great amounts of knowledge, but rather one who knows where to find what he needs when he needs it.

The problem, Merzenich says, is that memory is a crucial part of learning. “It’s only when your memory is engaged in the learning process that your brain is really challenged,” he says. “It’s when I’m dealing with the details and really struggling with it that I learn it.” In other words, the more we depend on machines to do our thinking for us, the less we’re able to rely on our own mental resources. While we’ve always engaged in some forms of mental outsourcing—jotting down a grocery list so you don’t forget to buy milk, say—the extent to which we now depend on computers and other digital devices to find, store, analyze and communicate information for us is unprecedented.

The mental shortcuts the Web lets us take, in other words, aren’t always a good thing. A study of how we read online, conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm headquartered in California, found that only 16 per cent of subjects read text linearly online, word by word, sentence by sentence. Tracking their eye movement, Neilson found that users scan pages quickly, jump around, fixate on key words and phrases that interest them, and pass over the rest. In this sense, the Web promotes cut-and-paste learning. “It allows us on some level to be intellectually lazy,” Young says, “because that’s what’s out there on the Internet—other people’s information, pre-thought, pre-digested.”

All of this is why Bauerlein insists his English classes memorize poems. “The students groan,” he says, “but acquiring information means you store it in your mind. You think it through and you remember it. That’s a slow reading pattern, a slow analysis process.”

It’s a very different process from the one involved in mental multi-tasking—having five applications open on your computer, with a cellphone standing by. By necessity, our attention in this mode is shallow and diffuse. Small and others call it “continuous partial attention,” and it turns out to have costs of its own. “When paying partial continuous attention, people may place their brains in a heightened state of stress,” Small says. “They no longer have time to reflect, contemplate or make thoughtful decisions. They exist in a sense of constant crisis—on alert for a new contact or bit of exciting news or information at any moment.”

The brain isn’t built for this sort of protracted strain and eventually, over the course of hours, a condition sets in which Small calls “brain fog.” “Over time,” he says, “[it can] actually impair cognition, lead to depression, and alter the neural circuitry in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex—regions in the brain that control mood and thought. Chronic and prolonged techno-brain burnout, which we are all good candidates for, can even reshape the underlying brain structure.” Without the continual mental rewards that accompany interactivity, it becomes hard to hold the attention of someone with perpetual, low-grade brain strain.

Not surprisingly, one-third of Digital Natives, according to Small, use other media—particularly the Internet—to stave off boredom while they’re watching TV. Reading a book is even harder. “Why spend time staring at a dull and stagnant string of words,” he writes, “when they could be entertained and informed with fast-paced visual and auditory computer images instead?” In fact, Bauerlein believes it’s partly students’ discomfort with single-focus learning that’s created a generation of bibliophobes. In 2004, as director of research and analysis with the National Endowment of the Arts, he was involved in the report that found that leisure reading across all age groups had dropped significantly over 20 years in the U.S.; the biggest drop was among young people ages 18 to 24. In 2002, only 43 per cent voluntarily read anything outside of school, down from 60 per cent in 1982.

“They are entirely averse to books,” he says. “The percentage of them that read more than four books in a year on their own time—and this includes Harry Potter, romance novels, sports books, anything—it’s only 25 per cent. And 25 per cent of them don’t read any books. And these are the best kids, not the ones who don’t go to college or who drop out.”