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Reddit mentions of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Sentiment score: 29
Reddit mentions: 56
We found 56 Reddit mentions of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Here are the top ones.
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- W W Norton Company
Features:
Specs:
| Height | 8.3 Inches |
| Length | 5.5 Inches |
| Number of items | 1 |
| Release date | June 2011 |
| Weight | 0.55 Pounds |
| Width | 0.8 Inches |
It's 'cause the internet has shifted the capacity of our brains away from deep focus and towards shallow multitasking. It's why we do shit like close Reddit on our computers then pull out our phones and open Reddit again without thinking about it. If you're really curious to learn more about it, try to stay focused long enough and read The Shallows; If you're really interested in pushing back then look into meditation.
> instant access to knowledge and infinite diversions ought to change brain connections
I just want to give a shoutout the The Shallows. It's a book that goes into detail on how new technology changes the way people think (including changing the connections in brains as you mentioned).
> Change mustn't mean in a bad way though.
This is a frequent topic in the book as well. There are things that people lose when they adopt new technologies, and there are things that people gain. Basically all technological advances have caused humanity to both lose something and gain something. For example, our ancestors may have been better at remembering things or had a better sense of direction compared to us. We would be better at assimilating many facts in a short period of time compared to our ancestors though.
Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows talks about this at length. It's backed up by some pretty solid science and does an excellent job tracing the history of the written word, and its relationship with our physiology and consciousness, up to the modern age. The book is biased by the "Baby Boomers are inherently less vapid than Millennials" mentality but it's definitely worth a read.
Ironically, your solution may lay within the pages of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. The author describes how his undying love for books seemed to fade, how picking up and getting into a book seemed much more difficult than before and how distracted he felt he'd become.
This book resonated with me. I am a book lover yet I found myself losing my desire to spend time with a book. I would pick one up and I'd feel my mind start to wander or I'd feel fidgety before the end of a page.
There is a solution. I restructured my approach to the use of the internet and I'm glad to say that I'm reading like a champ again. All the joy and fun is back.
For anyone interested in the book, it's actually called The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to our Brains. I read it last year and it made me realize how much of my media consumption is essentially wasted on things like Facebook and yes, even Reddit. I resolved to read more and use the internet less, which has definitely resulted in some good habits forming and some bad ones being broken. I started a reading challenge on Goodreads in January with a goal of reading 30 books this year, and I'm already nearly halfway there in Mid-March.
I personally need to read from paper books. Kindle screens, even the paperink ones, still distract my brain. I need to feel the weight of the book, the flip of the page. Reading for me is both a tactile and intellectual experience.
This was an extremely fascinating read. I've felt this way for a while about social networks and it was part of the reason I finally got off Facebook after so many years.
One clear indication of this I saw frequently was the fact that no one called someone on their birthday any more (or even texted). I was seeing parents even wishing their children Happy Birthday or family members just liking another Happy Birthday post. This kind of impersonal interaction always bugged me.
This article has some great points in it and I hope there is a lot further research put into it. There are a few books cited, and a few others I found related. I've ordered ALL of them and plan to read them all as this is a really fascinating subject for me (a person who was born at the beginning of this era and has become an adult in it with two children who are going to grow up and have to adapt to this).
Books referenced:
You Are Not a Gadget - a Manifesto
Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Eachother
And one related:
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
This is the subject of the book "The Shallows", by Nicholas Carr. I don't completely agree with the guy, but it's thought provoking at least.
Ninja edit: Wait, I just saw the irony of recommending a book.
I have a similar problem to yours, but it centers more on social media than the internet as a whole. Between random memes, constant political posts/debates, and the generally atheist/anti-religious tones of everything I read, it can be very discouraging and distracting. Particularly if I waste valuable time going down the rabbit hole of comments. Taking breaks from social media has been helpful to me, and it's timely that you've posted this, because I'm considering doing so again.
Related to this, I recommend a great book called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains which dives into how the habit of quickly scrolling for small bites of info and moving on can damage our attention spans. Like how people put "TL;DR" at the end of posts because readers get turned off by "walls of text".
Prayers and best wishes to you on regaining your digital footing.
Thanks, I share your feeling. The first time I visited this subreddit I was looking for similar posts. I wondered how people could combine Reddit with their busy life or how they would be able to indeed create stuff by at the same time consuming so much. I could not find any of this idea at that time and I just kept surfing until a few months ago when I started frequenting Reddit less and less.
In the meantime I did not stop thinking about it, read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and wondered how people could combine all this easy, distracting input (Reddit, Facebook, just surfing in general) with bigger things that require no distractions or 'alone time', like reading, learning a new language, or in your case hoolahooping with fire. My conclusion was that you can't. If you want to go for it, you just have to go for it.
Of course you can combine Reddit with taking a test, but you can not combine it with finishing cum laude. I also realised though that this does not count for most people, they can combine these things, but they do not have the intention to become the new Einstein. It is a whole different discussion if this should even be a personal goal, but my idea was that these new Einsteins are so into the achieving of their dream that this would be really hard to combine with the great entertainment part of the internet and our society. It requires an opt-out, you will have to be an einzelganger at some times and that is exactly what what internet tries to prevent.
You worded this very well in your statement and I agree wholeheartedly. As you can see I'm still on Reddit but not for long. The past few months when I paid Reddit a visit I noticed that the lesser frequency of my visits also made me see the content better. And although I'm subscribed to a whole lot of interesting subreddits and described from all these fun things, I still noticed that I did not need all of this. It gave me a sense of passivity that I should not want in my life.
Nevertheless there are a lot pro-arguments to this website and I see that as well. Because I'm living in the Netherlands, I do not necessarily have to suffer some of the ills that the United States is made of. I can really understand that you need some inspiration of sanity if you live in a small conservative town where everyone is the personal friend of Jesus. So yeah, Reddit should inspire you, but maybe more as in a caravanserai. You meet a lot of new and interesting people, have a good night's sleep and travel on. Staying there also means that you will not arrive at your destination.
The people who say that you should do everything in moderation do not see that this is really hard for some people, but these are the same people that will give you some of the most interesting stuff. They can immerse themselves, lose themselves in Reddit or alike, but if they learn to use this energy in a more enduring way they can use it to write books, build houses or govern countries (just some examples).
In my view it works just like torrents. You have the seeders, who make things. They put in the effort. They show themselves once they finish their product. Their creations will surprise or disappoint. Then, there are the leechers. They wait. They need the seeders and they will criticize or praise the products of the seeder. Most of the time a seeder also leeches, but a lot of leechers tend to forget that they can also be seeders.
TL;DR: Reddit should inspire you, but maybe more as in a caravanserai. You meet a lot of new and interesting people, have a good night's sleep and travel on. Staying there also means that you will not arrive at your destination. Just like torrents, the society consists of seeders and leechers. The OP decided he wanted to be a seeder, I as well.
The Scharff and Dusek reader has been mentioned, but I'd like to put a plug in for the Kaplan reader as well.
The following are also worth checking out...
Peter Paul Verbeek's What Things Do (this is my "if you only read one book about Phil Tech, read this book" book)
Michel Callon's "The Sociology of an Actor-Network"
Don Ihde's Technology and the Lifeworld
Andy Feenberg's Questioning Technology
Albert Borgman's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life
Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"
Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization
Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society
Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics" and The Whale and the Reactor
Hans Jonas' "Technology and Responsibility"
Sunstein and Thaler's Nudge
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death
Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and The Glass Cage
You might take a look at Nicholas Carr's 2011 book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain. The same author also has a new book out on the effects of automation in general on the human brain. Carr's 2011 book was a finalist for the Pulitzer, though it's not without it's detractors -- at the very least, it cites a lot of research and should give you some background on some of the major researchers and ideas in the field. BTW, I think the field is called Human-Computer Interaction (and that's what Amazon calls books on this topic), though HCI also covers making computers and technology easier for people to use.
It's a scary validation of all the technological-dystopian theories like The Shallows. I used to be much more dismissive of the idea that facebook/media bubbles/instant gratification was hurting society.
But here we are.
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains
I think NoFap is really just a niche part of a bigger drive to get away from the internet (or at least use it differently), and I completely agree with all of it. The internet (if used without taking precautions) and porn both change the physical structures of our brains in ways that preclude having a fulfilling life with longterm satisfaction. Fortunately our brains are very plastic and it's not too late to fix them.
I've tried quitting the internet cold turkey, and it's haaaaaard. The problem is that it's a global addiction that's deeply intertwined with our social and work lives. You can't really get away from it without totally alienating yourself, so quitting all of the internet is not viable. It's very difficult to draw the line between useful or necessary internet usage and bad internet usage, so moderating your own internet usage can be tough.
Here's my attempt at drawing that line, though:
Obviously education and entertainment are important, but the internet is just not the place to do it. With respect to education, the internet will promote distractedness and a habit of multitasking, and ultimately your learning will suffer (the book I mentioned focuses on this). If you want to learn, try to use the internet to find books, and then use those books to learn (or take a class, etc).
There are, of course, certain things you can learn only through the internet. Tutorials, for example, are online, as is the vast majority of modern journalism. You need to be careful with either of these. When it comes to reading the news, I like to use my tablet and the Pulse application, and I'm only subscribed to longer-form journalism like the type you'd see in The Atlantic. When it comes to tutorials, do whatever you can to not open additional browser tabs. In either case, you should at the very least read these things like you would read a book. Don't allow yourself to get distracted by hyperlinks, and if some topic confuses you, usually it's okay to just ignore it (or mark it) and press on, rather than try to immediately learn about this other topic through outside sources.
As for entertainment, that's something you can do in real life with real people (or again, with more reading, which is always healthy). Entertainment online is a process of overstimulation and isolation. Porn falls into this, but so do videogames and even mindlessly clicking pictures on reddit. In general, if you get on the internet without a clear purpose, you will probably be using it for entertainment, so always try to tell yourself why you're getting online before you do it.
The first good use for the internet is data acquisition, by which I mean it's a good place to go to find a fact or set of facts. For example, if you want to go see a movie it makes perfect sense to get on the internet and look up movie times. In these situations, you'll get online, find the information you want, and then quit.
Communication is a bit iffier, and maybe it should come with its own set of restrictions. Email and social networking are great, insofar as we don't use them for entertainment. I don't really suffer from this problem, but when I get on facebook it becomes pretty clear that many people are sort of addicted to self-posts and being heard. This might be absolutely fine for all I know (you could liken it to journaling), so for now I'm going to just assume that social networking, love or hate, is something we're going to have to live with if we want to partake in the 21st century.
This might warrant its own post, since I've got quite a bit to say on it (I've kept most of it inside my head, so it might be totally rubbish for anyone else as far as I know).
I am now. I was aware of his famous interview on Crossfire with William Buckley, but I didn't know his politics were expressed in his music.
I've read too much about media ecology to stomach the state of telecommunications as it stands today. While I primarily mentioned the capitalist appropriation of TV in my first comment, I think its much more than that. Even when we adopt socialism and kill advertising, TV must be eliminated as a medium of communication. It is inimical to rational thinking. It is inimical to learning and truly understanding. The way the brain processes information from the medium is inherently insidious.
Similar arguments can be made about computers and the internet. I'm not against telecommunications completely, but I am extremely cautious of new technology. Read these books, and you'll be scared of even touching your phone.
The Shallows
Alone Together
The Digital Divide
Distracted
The Dumbest Generation
As an engineer who became a socialist in large part because I saw that technology was being used to exploit the people I want to help, I can tell you that the question posed to mankind will be that of our relation to technology. We will already have tackled that problem indirectly when we deal with climate change, but that is really a problem of capitalism. We will have to confront it honestly when capitalism falls.
Fantastic book by Nicolas Carr called "The Shallows" which deals heavily with how technology has influenced how we think, perceive, and retain information. link is here!
*edit link fixed
Once you sober up from all that weed, you might want to read this - it's basically a cogent version of what you're talking about here.
This is the list I have right now, but I might take something off before tomorrow.
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins
The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains – Nicholas Carr
Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics – John J. Mearsheimer
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster – Svetlana Alexievich
It's sad, isn't it?
But still, there is a lot more to the Internet than just consumption and advertising. Wikipedia has changed how we approach something so boring as an encyclopedia. Stackoverflow is the Q&A site - spawning many more under the StackExchange roof (or maybe you're more a Quora-type?). edX, Coursers, MIT OpenCourseWare and many more make it easier to get access to top-notch information (although you still have to study it yourself).
Google Maps brought cheap navigation to the masses and my be the best tool at our disposal to help the ever-increasing traffic jams.
Facebook has the potential to create diverse communities around the most obscure things.
And then there's Reddit - a plethora of communities of interest culminating into one front page.
The Internet (just like any other medium) is what you make of it.
P.S.: If I may suggest a book on this The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
You just reminded me where I learned this.
Social media is a good call, but I actually think it's not only that, but browsing in general - it's been very well described in a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. I'd recommend to minimise browsing the internet and try to replace it with reading longer texts (yes, it's quite ironic to give this advice on Reddit).
How would you describe your attention span/focus in general?
I would suggest reading this wonderful wonderful book on internet addiction.
I very strongly associate to this void of porn being filled by other useless stuff on the internet. I also strongly relate to the fact that if I'm wasting time on the internet, it means I'm escaping from something else - usually some difficult work.
I realized that a huge amount of time wasting for me started off from an impulse. For example, I'd just type facebook blindly into the browser. I first used a pop-up kind of plugin for reddit and signed out of my facebook account. This forced me to "agree to see website" or sign in manually into facebook, which made me much more minful of these impulses. Following that, and after I completed reading the above book, I deleted my facebook account and started using only throwaways for certain subs that I was interested in. I still have to deal with youtube however.
As is mentioned in one of the other comments, buying a newspaper or magazine subscription really helps. It's amazing to see how much of deep-reading skills I'd lost due to mindless internet browsing, clickbait headlines and bite-sized memes. I'm also reading a book for a half hour a day before sleeping, but this is hard to enforce too, given netflix.
Thanks actually! While writing this I've become more mindful of what I need to do next :D
If you enjoyed the article, Nick Carr wrote a follow-up book called The Shallows which expands greatly on his argument. One of the best books I read last year.
Well, to paraphrase this book, the way the internet (and tv. think cnn with all those news tickers) deliver information to our brains creates new neural pathways that become accustom to so much information and input bombarding us at once. It's easy to get distracted reading a Wikipedia article and click a link to a related (or unrelated) topic.
Did it make you stupid? No.
How do you learn to think again? Practice. Force yourself to concentrate and soon it will become more automatic. I find it easier to force myself with an actual book of some length (ie, not the internet). Pick something that will hold your interest for awhile. It won't work if the book is too heavy or boring. A bunch of people have enjoyed The Game of Thrones series. Maybe you could give those a spin.
Reading books of course, it will greatly improve your ability to focus which has been really harmed by internet surfing. You may also work on improving some marketable skills, like programming, graphics design, etc., whatever you choose. To dive more into those topics I recommend you to read Cal Newport's books, especially Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, he also has interesting blog: calnewport.com/blog, old posts touch this topic in more depth. Another book that I would like to recommend you is The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains which will show you how damaging internet can be.
Same boat, man; my eyes tend to skip around paragraphs and sentences trying to get the 'gist' of something, not like real reading.
If it's not too weird to recommend a book to someone having trouble with reading - I'd really recommend The Shallows; What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. There are audio versions of it, if that helps!
It really put into perspective how your daily habits influence the way your mind works, and vice versa. Really interesting, 100% recommend.
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr explores this idea. It's a pretty good read.
"Patience is a muscle" is a great metaphor, but what you're really doing is rewiring your brain. Your brain is very malleable and it can be retrained via repeated effort.
I highly recommend Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains if you want to learn more about the science of it.
You're absolutely right. The phenomenon is covered well in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
I've spent a lot of time today seeking information about dopamine and its active role in motivation and reward seeking behaviors.
Not specifically about procrastination but this book talks how the medium can sometimes be as important as the message that it carries, and how thrill-seeking characters can end up seeking the "high" of novelty through internet (we already see this with people who use pornography instead of building social skills and their appearance to find girls, people who play video games for either cope with stress or to reminisce their childhood years.
It's different for everybody but moderation won't harm. But I'm talking about actual moderation. Don't become like the smoker who says "I can quit whenever I want" and keeps smoking uncontrollably.
As for dopamine and its role 1 and 2 (ctrl-F 'dopamine' on that).
There's a book called The Shallows that goes into how spending excessive amounts of time on the internet actually rewires our brain in the same way doing anything for long periods of time does (such as practicing a musical instrument), except this rewiring causes us to lose our ability to focus and maintain our attention span for long periods of time.
While I didn't quit social media entirely, it did make me be more cognizant of the amount of time I spend on social media and reddit. In fact, I think I hardly go on Facebook anymore, and I don't mindlessly click through links on reddit anymore.
Great book, I highly recommend it.
Raveofthrones to-do list for 08/04/2014:
This isn't necessarily related to computer science- but it's a book about the effect computers, and technology in general have had over humanity. It's called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Super interesting read, gives a lot of cool perspective.
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750/ref=zg_bs_3508_19?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=72HMTJQ0YSB5JCKGP45W
You might want to check out the quite excellent book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brians.
It's written well, and well researched with a lot of supporting references to the underlying studies that have been done. Some of it creeped me out a bit and actually got me off the computer a bit more and out into nature more.
Edit: fixed incorrect formatting code
The article linked at the bottom of the post was used as a launching point for an entire non-fiction book called The Shallows (not related to the upcoming movie). It's same author.
I strongly recommend reading it. Or at least read the full article if you can't get the book.
Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains addresses how nonlinear reading adversely affects our brain. If anyone's interested.
Someone had written a book about this.
Here is it's review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Lehrer-t.html?_r=0
And the book itself.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
Some research points out that human brains have not evolved fast enough for the transition between regular books in physical form to the electronic text format.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
And internet encourages us to multi task, which is not how our brains are designed.
All these factors contribute to the decline in concentration and comprehension.
Mindfulness meditation is supposed to remedy this situation, of only we could get off FB and reddit for 20 min a day.
You might want to read this book then:
The Shallows
Gives you an insight as to how the web has changed the way your brain works, reduced your attention span and makes it so much more difficult to focus on longer tasks (e.g. finishing a game).
139557749| > United States Anonymous (ID: EwRHxNzN)
>>139557219
>internet is cocaine
You're not the first person to have thought of this.
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
100% relevant book. I can highly recommend reading it. There's an audiobook out for your car stereo too.
The man analyzes the interdependency between information technology and intellectual culture. The major historical paradigm shifts from storytelling to written story, to professional literacy, to mass printed books and mass literacy and finally automated information networks and their increased ease of use. With focus on the latter.
The way we work with information substantially changes with the tools we use to work with them. These tools become an integral part of us, we outsource functions to them and use the freed power for other processes. Always.
It will probably look pretty retarded, judging by the way cell phone culture is rewiring brains. http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374247166&sr=8-1&keywords=the+shallows
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
No offense, but just wait for 5 or 10 years and you'll see !
The porn industry know very well how the human brain works, and they use it against us. There are a lot of book dealing with this issue, you can check them out if you want :
Other books which explain how the makers of facebook, porn, twitter, videos games... hook us to their products
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There are not enough research papers specifically on gaming addiction because gaming addiction together with social media and pornography falls under the umbrella of internet addiction - Like you said a rather new field. Some breakthroughs are being made in the last years to have it recognized as an addiction per se (at least in Europe) the problem with conducting enough research is that there are no funds and insurance companies have no wish having another area of responsibility to potentially give away money to people suffering from it. If gaming addiction become completely recognized by international bodies of medicine then insurance companies might have to pay preexisting clients for passed and current treatments ---> something they definitely do not want to do.
Nonetheless here are some videos of legit men of science (not some random ex gamer) that research the field.
"Here is a short interview with Dr. David Greenfield talking about some of the mental and physical applications of gaming and internet addiction"
There are also longer talks on his channel like this one.
Dr. Greenfield has been researching Internet addiction since the 90's.
"Dr. Klaus Woelfling, from the University of Mainz. Germany is taking steps in treating Internet addiction and especially gaming addiction" - this one is a difficult watch primarily because the speaker is very uncharismatic (try watching with the speed setting on 1.5).
Last but definitely not least is "Your Brain on Porn"
Yes, yes I know, you might not want to hear that another of your favorite pastimes is bad for you, but this video covers on a very scientific basis the damages that watching excessive pornography causes to the brain, and no this is not some kind of NoFap cult propaganda, it speaks only on the subject of internet porn. Like I said before, porn together with gaming fall under the umbrella of internet addiction because the reaction we receive from these negative habits has the same structure. If you actually watch the Your Brain on Porn video you will hear him mention numerous times that the damages caused to dopamine receptors is similar to the ones cause from gaming and extensive internet use.
This is just some of the evidence done by men of medicine and science from the top of my head. If you want to go deeper I'd recommend The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains By Nicholas Carr an American author and Pulitzer Prize winner (for that book), witch contains truly numerous examples of scientific studies and references you might want in the bibliography.
Also The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge M.D that talks mainly about brain plasticity and how different behaviors and habits cause the brain to form new cells , create new neural pathways etc etc . He also gives lots of examples how positive and negative behaviors causes various changes IN THE BRAIN, Internet addiction stuff included.
If you really want proof and not just searching for a reason to dismiss things you dont like the sound of then I hope this comment will serve you. If you do nothing less at least watch the first interview with Dr. David Greenfield. It is only 6 minutes long.
Hope this post that took me 50 minutes to put together and find all the links, will be of service to somebody.
Peace.
Edit: Grammar and formatting
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicolas Carr
Fascinating! And scary as hell. It has helped me to start cleaning up my mental hygiene habits in regards to screen time and helped me re-appreciate extended quiet concentration time.
That's a problem with the definition of "intelligence" and not with whether our "brain abilities" have biological limitations or not.
What we should be discussing is how easy people blame their genes for their shortcomings before they first rule out other potential problems, such as short attention span due to bad habits or impatience due to upbringing because yes, turns out if you condition yourself to scroll Reddit for funny pictures and cats you will eventually find anything else that doesn't give you that rush boring and will blame yourself for lacking in the attention span department. A great book that talks about that is The shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
You reminded me of a coworker I had who kept insisting that I should do an IQ test and I told him that it doesn't fucking matter how much I score because at the end of the day here I am getting paid for peanuts to fix computers. Like, if I scored high I would just get more depressed and if I scored low I would feel lucky for even having this job. I'm more of the type of person who judges himself from his actions, not "potential".
And to be honest, you don't even need to be gifted to work and sustain yourself in the long run in any profession unless you really care about procuring exceptionally great results such as winning the gold medal in the Olympics.
It could be due to how the internet age is changing our brains. No longer do we need to rely on memory as much when we can do a search and be ninja-like in our fact finding. The brain is like any other muscle, and when you don't use certain parts, they grow weaker. I work an accounting job and I make sure to do memory exercises because I started noticing the same thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
And of course, always check with a doctor to make sure nothing's structurally changed in your brain.
It happens to me a lot. I tend to just remember the highlights.
The book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" [0] has a lot of insight into this process. Quick, easy access to lots of information doesn't always lend itself to retention.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
good luck with the video games. I suggest reading The Shallows it details what the internet does to the neuro-plasticity of the brain. Super enlightening read!
I think this is something that a lot of people, not just those with ADHD, are dealing with. I really believe that the 24/7 use of phones with their constant notifications plus the constant mindless browsing of news, social media feeds, entertainment sites are sapping people's attention spans and ability to focus. It conditions our brains to crave excessive stimulation and when we don't get it (such as during a 2 hour art film), we get bored and can't focus even if we enjoy what we're doing on some level. It's even worse for delayed gratification tasks like studying which can be boring in the moment but pays off at some later time.
I've been meaning to read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains to get a better understanding of how this all works. But the book was published in 2011 and even in the 6 years since, the way we use our devices has changed a lot.
Perhaps it's best if we really cut out a lot of the mindless browsing and view out "screen diet" similar to how we view nutrition. Reddit, Twitter, clickbait news are all "junk" which are fine in moderation but can mess up our ability to focus on stuff that matters. Or even our ability to enjoy fun stuff like movies or books.
There's also the fact that internet companies want you to have a short attention span. It makes them money. Whether it's ad revenue or impulse buys, more eyes constantly browsing their sites means more money for them. And a shot attention span for the rest of us.
It's funny, I remember having conversation in my journalism classes about how freeing it would be to present content online, because we would have no limits on length. We never once considered that people wouldn't have the attention spans to absorb that extra content. Now, here we are 20 years later, and longform journalism is struggling.
(An aside: If you're interested in that notion of how the Internet is shortening our attention spans, check out The Shallows by Nick Carr).
ALL technology? As in you're not even allowed to listen to music? Because that's what I'd recommend if you can get away with it; a lot of people listen to music while they do other things but very few people sit down and relax and focus on listening to their favorite music without multitasking, it's a great way to pass time.
Failing that, taking up drawing or writing are economical options considering you're tight on cash. A loaner guitar or cheapo from a pawn shop could be healthy hobbies, but they're tough to learn without your computer to access resources.
You said you don't like reading but I'd suggest you try to learn to love it, because it's going to be one of the cheapest and most fulfilling ways to pass time given your constraints. I think as you spend time away from technology you'll find reading more enjoyable as your mind recovers some of it's ability to focus. Just going out on a limb here (and projecting a bit), but do you often feel unable to focus on tasks like reading long passages or say sitting back to watch a movie without interruption? I know at least one author who's written a book suggesting that the way we're presented with rapid-fire and incredibly diverse information/entertainment on the internet has left our ability for deep focus impaired, while our ability to multi-task has improved.
Another option that occurred to me mid-post is that you might try to find some cheap model airplane kits or something like that, they're quite time consuming if you can be meticulous.
Been reading a book right now that talks about all of this - you guys should check it out (because we should all ALWAYS be reading something during our transformation :) )
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
Hey, thanks for your insight. Just to make sure, is it this the book you were referring to? https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750.
That entire smug sub needs to read this
The research is there. You can:
And many other benefits. I'm sure if you google around you'll find the relevant research. Not having it shoved in your face by advertisements or school like smoking was doesn't mean you can ignore what's out there.
Saying it's bad makes us look like a cult? I think it would be worse if we DIDN'T have this research but everyone was around chanting the praise of not fapping.