Quote #1: “The plasticity…Nature predominates.” p. 28
Quote #2: “The placing…difficult texts.’ ” p. 63
In the first quote I chose, Carr talks about how there are two views when it comes to how our brains, or rather, how the synapses in our brains truly work. Empiricists believe that the mind is a “blank slate” and that experiences determine what we know while rationalists believe that our minds come pre-equipped with tendencies of how to look at te world around us. These two views are the basis of the nature vs. nurture debate. When I read this I was conflicted about which view I tended towards because I had already thought about this topic many times before without knowing the proper scientific name for it. The best way that I thought about this debate was how different students behaved in school. Each person I knew always had a certain subject that they were good at because they were naturally good at it, they had an excellent teacher, or both. Students who were naturally good at subjects seemed to prove the rationalists view that our mind comes pre equipped about how to deal with the outside world. They were able to study and understand subjects much easier than others, almost as if their brains were hardwired to do so. Conversely, many students I knew were almost like sponges, doing well in their respective subjects because they were able to soak in information and record it in their brains. These people were filling the “blank slates” of their minds. In my opinion, our minds tend to be a mix of both views, as Carr later shows, because in some ways, actions are instinctual or seem easier than others while others we must learn from scratch.
In the second quote from The Shallows, Carr highlights how putting spaces between words helped make reading easier. As reading became easier, our brains adjusted to recognizing and interpreting letters and symbols as it developed regions of the brain dedicated to processing this new information. This allowed for people to switch from merely reading and deciphering information form reading to actually thinking about what they read, leading to the idea of “deep reading” becoming possible. When I first read this passage, I was shocked that the first examples of written work did not contain spaces between words and I kept picturing examples where mistakes would be made. I compared my own history of reading fro kindergarten where I learned the alphabet and struggled with words like “cat” to today when I could read whole paragraphs and understand them almost instantly. Then I thought about articles we had read in the beginning of the semester and how our minds are slowly turning away from the “deep reading” era and more into short bursts of information. The best example of this in my life is how I often find myself reading a book intently and my mind wanders until I realize that I do not remember what I have read. Conversely, I can most likely tell you the top 5 tweets I have read in the past week. Just as our brain developed areas to read and understand long pieces of information, it now has developed synapses that can track multiple sources of information at once, so that “deep reading” may soon be a thing of the past.