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Buy the Book
Dead From the Internet
Reading is the most obvious casualty of the digital age.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our
Brains
By Nicholas Carr
(W.W. Norton, 276 pages, $26.95)
Nicholas Carr has written a deep book about shallow thinking. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains relies on scientific studies, troubling anecdotes, and societal trends to show that online culture has resulted in offline brains. “A new intellectual ethic is taking hold,” Carr holds. “The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted.”
The human brain is malleable, plastic, ever-changing, Carr posits. Just as clocks, mass-produced books, and typewriters affected the way people behave and think, the Internet is again changing the way the brain works. Citing scientific research, Carr notes how the Internet stimulates once dormant mental pathways but closes down previously traveled ones. And when it comes to retaining and understanding information, scientists are finding that stimulation doesn’t necessarily equal smarts. The sensory overload of a graphically aggressive video game or of a pornographic image stimulates the brain. But it anesthetizes the mind. And it is not as healthy for the brain as a simple book. “When it comes to the firing of our neurons,” Carr holds, “it’s a mistake to assume athat more is better.”
Technology has made communications, media, research, and so many other sectors more efficient. But what drawbacks have accompanied the benefits? “I don’t read books,” Carr quotes a Rhodes Scholar and recent president of Florida State’s student body. “Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense.” He googles his way to expertise. Similarly, The Shallows reports an English literature professor at Duke candidly confessing, “I can’t get my students to read whole books anymore.” These aren’t dropouts scorning literacy, but the young people touted as the best and the brightest. Smart people are using reason to rationalize intellectual laziness as progress and to ridicule time-tested methods of acquiring knowledge and wisdom as outdated. By this way, a literary culture is giving way to a passive digital culture — and a literary subculture that may appear to posterity the way monocles, duels, and arranged marriages appear to us. Intuitively, intelligent people sense that this is not advancement. But the agents of the technological juggernaut, whose billionaire bottom lines are at stake, tell us it is progress. And who can compete with their advertising/propaganda?
Reading is the most obvious casualty of the digital age.
People generally don’t read online. They skim. Since the Internet increasingly serves as the source of newspaper, magazine, and even book reading, the differences between reading from a screen and reading from a book are profoundly important. Researcher Jakob Nielsen studied the eye patterns of web users, discovering that web surfers generally scan the text in an “F” pattern. For every 100 words added to a web page, surfers will spend an extra 4.4 seconds. This is enough time to grasp very few words — even for a speed reader. Nielsen advised his clients that surfers will read less than 20 percent of the posted words. It’s not called a web “browser” for nothing.
Reading online doesn’t encourage concentration. The reader is bombarded with links luring him away from the text, pop-up adverts averting his eyes elsewhere, and sonic notifications of incoming mail demanding attention. The background noise flashes brightly and the visual distractions hum loudly. “Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle,” Carr counsels; “that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”
The Internet has legitimized a Cliff Notes version of reading, in which mining Google, Wikipedia, or other online sources for information passes for comprehension of a given subject. Context and understanding lose out to the utility of possessing a collection of disjointed facts. Pre-internet, such uncouth practices as the “index read” and passing off reading a review for reading a book marked one as a poseur. Post-internet, the Google Expert, the Lexis-Nexis Archivist, and the Wikipedia Wizard are no longer figures of scorn who mistake a fragmentary knowledge for a thorough understanding. The Shallows posits:
A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we’re searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole. We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.
In the proximity of its release date, likeminded mixed-bag view of the digital age, and jarringly similar invocation of such works as Plato’s Phaedrus, Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows invites comparisons to William Powers’s Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Though derivative of Powers’s famous 2007 “Hamlet’s Blackberry” research paper, Carr’s book compares favorably with Powers’s book.
“We want friendly, helpful software,” Carr concedes. “Why wouldn’t we? Yet as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, we are likely diminishing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways. When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind.” The relevant question is: What will humanity look like after it delegates its mental exercise to electronic gizmos, gadgets, and doodads?
Nicholas Carr mixes neuroscience, pop culture, technology, education, psychology, and other seemingly disparate topics into a gratifying stew. It is light reading on a heavy subject. In its crowd-pleasing style of separating weighty chapters with brief “digressions,” and its topicality in focusing on an issue that affects virtually everyone living in the virtual world, The Shallows makes for good beach reading. Just leave the Kindle behind and bring the hardback. You’ll still be able to read it after exposure to sun, surf, and sand — and you might actually read a book instead of skimming one.
About the Author
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America. He blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (50) | Leave a comment
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Maddox| 8.10.10 @ 6:49AM
Maybe you're right, I am reading your article.
Miss Alabama| 8.10.10 @ 9:48AM
What we get from surfing the internet is an assault of blips and blobs of information.
I prefer the old technology--the printed word on paper--to digital information, and I do not use the computer more than an hour a day.
I know so few people that I consider literate in the old-fashioned meaning of the word. Even the teachers of literature in local high schools--according to my granddaughter-- have never read Jane Austen, Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, and many of the other greats of English literature, and they never will.
While attending college to become a "teacher" (a school teacher) they read their assigned college texts, and this is the extent of their reading, except for the blips and blobs of book reviews they skim from the WEB. They try to have a passing knowledge of what books are making the best- seller lists so they can occasionally chatter about them to give the impression they are "well-read."
And we all know that school teachers are less educated than ever. And as for cultivated, they do not even know the meaning of the word.
Appleby| 8.10.10 @ 7:18AM
This is the argument that was made when printing became ubiquitous. Write things down and pass them around, and people will stop memorizing and remembering things. It was also the argument when measurement was standardized and rulers and measuring tapes became avilable everywhere; now nobody can measure by eye anymore. And how about sundials? Who can tell time by a sundial now that we all have clocks? Heck, most kids cannot tell analog time since all the clocks in their binkies are digital!
Every time something is invented, some older something disappears except in those who value the old way.
I do notice of course that no binkie-slinger can spell, punctuate, write a grammatical sentence, or even worse, read aloud. When your boss is dictating a letter over his binkie while parked at the side of the road (we assume) and then says *Now read that back to me* -- well, its hard for us old folks to keep from bursting out laughing at the result, which turns 30 year old women into five year olds. But one day soon we will all retire, and then the world will be run by only those people who do not know how to do anything without binkie support, and this chaotic nonsense will seem normal.
This is the way it works.
Tammy| 8.10.10 @ 11:05AM
Hey! I represent that comment! I'm one of those evil millenials you hear tell about. Granted, *most* of the reading I do is online, but I can spell (sort of--I do gladly accept the help of Firefox's spelling feature, and Word's spell check to make up for my deficiencies), and I'm capable of reading books without pictures (BUT WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO?) or the aid of computer-generated back lighting. Oh yeah, and I know how to use a semicolon :)
I get what you're saying about obsolescence of technology (hey, even the pencil is technology, compared to what came before it), and obsolescence of ways of life. Granted I have no idea how to milk a cow, and if it came down to that for my survival after the zombie apocalypse, I'd probably be dead. However, a hundred and fifty years ago, I'd be a house servant with no education and little prospects due to my being born into the lower classes, and female. I like modern society better :)
Why don't kids learn how to do things "right?" I have a lot of theories. One is just the natural resistance kids have to authority. You want them to do it "right," and "right" according to YOU, and they want their new ways of communicating validated. Another is a lack of actual advocacy for true literacy. Part of that is teaching to test--we're not teaching them to learn and enjoy the discovery process, we're teaching them to check off boxes of pieces of knowledge stored in their memory. Wikipedia will help them tick off those boxes a hell of a lot quicker than reading The Picture of Dorian Grey from cover to cover, especially when they have nine hundred other things to do and the test is only going to cover the Cliffsnotes themes anyway.
Keep in mind, that form of learning isn't for everybody. In the past, we'd have just called those kids "not academically inclined," or they'd drop out at a young age. That's one of the "problems" with compulsory education; we keep the kids who would have otherwise moved on to trade school or other opportunities in school and they "bring down" the scores of the rest of us.
I think the issue goes well beyond "computers are making us illiterate and are removing kids' ability to think critically." Societal structure has changed, education has changed, and tools for communicating have changed. And they've all made these leaps and bounds far faster than the ability of the educational system to comprehend, or utilize the changes fully. Holding onto the past and saying "you should do it this way, because the past is better" may seem like a great plan; we did have some awful smart people in our past, however, people like Einstein, Faulkner and Hemingway was not outliers in their generation, not representative of the whole.
Things're changing, and it's stirred up a lot of dust, which can obscure the bigger picture. The modern era has its challenges, and its advantages. We just need to learn how to address both.
PolishKnight| 8.10.10 @ 12:36PM
"However, a hundred and fifty years ago, I'd be a house servant with no education and little prospects due to my being born into the lower classes, and female. I like modern society better :)"
There were no feminists on the Titanic. :) As everyone knows, low class men all had it easy 150 years ago...
dance...dance to the radio| 8.11.10 @ 1:44AM
There are never any feminists on titanics.
And there are no environmentalists in a depression.
Douglas Fletcher| 8.10.10 @ 8:02AM
Horse hockey. I read more widely and frequently since the internet has become ubiquitous than I ever did waiting for the 8 magazines I could afford to show up at the beginning of the month, added to that the 2 or 3 books I would have time to read in a month.
I must say, dinosaurs do make a hell of a noise on their way out.
Mark| 8.10.10 @ 9:26AM
I love the Internet, so does the author of the book. But if you don't notice that the Internet has changed the way you think, then you haven't been paying attention. I have an idea, why don't you add this book to the 2 or 3 books a month that you brag about before making an uninformed post?
Evanston2| 8.10.10 @ 1:31PM
I agree with the author's comment that we tend to skim when reading on the Internet. So what? I used to slog through page after page of things I already knew to learn one new thing (or listen to Peter Jennings tell me that "Up Next" they'd cover a subject...for 2 minutes). Just because I'm not interested in your forest doesn't mean I can't make my own, a tree at a time, by reading different ideas and "drilling down" on a topic on the Internet. It's a better day.
Douglas Fletcher| 8.11.10 @ 7:06AM
I wasn't bragging about anything.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 8.10.10 @ 8:02AM
In fact, it would have been easier to make the argument that the majority of citizens are trained in public schools and perhaps that's the real problem
Rote memorization is a thing of the past, frankly because teachers don't have the patience to help students remember anything.
Couple that with the equivalence of central economic planning out of D.C. applied to national education, and we are reaping the results of what we have sown.
At least with the internet they may learn a trade. They won't learn one in school. In that sense the internet and not the public schools may save us. And at no cost to the taxpayer.
Steve| 8.10.10 @ 8:13AM
Standing at the seashore yelling at the tide will not turn it. Newspapers first, books second, and education (all levels) is next. I can't think of enterprises more deserving of scorched-earth reconstruction treatment. Any book that is readily available at a competitive price I read on line/electronically. You get used to it and you do not need the promise of someday floppy electronic "paper" to hold you over. By the way, this all does more to "save" the environment than, say, checking your tire pressure.
JimH| 8.10.10 @ 8:28AM
Another skill being lost in the modern age is cursive writing. It is no required in school. Once kids get past the printing stage they are expected to type using word processors. Kids can barely sign there names.
Appleby| 8.10.10 @ 10:37AM
Take a look at autographs signed by hockey players (who generally had Grade 8 educations) in the 1960s and 1970s. You can read every letter. Today, the university educated players "sign" with what looks like a scrawl made by a three-year-old, and if he doesn't put his number next to it, you will never be able to prove to future generations who he was or what he wrote.
Tammy| 8.10.10 @ 11:11AM
I sign my checks and such horribly, probably out of laziness, and too many things going on at the checkout register. When I sign books, for some reason, it's very neat (y'know, the one time when it is supposed to be messy and quick). To the point that I *really* annoyed this other author in an autograph line cos I was holding up production. Neatness doesn't count for everything and you're annoying people more famous than you :) So it was enforced more in primary school in the 70s. Not really evidence of much of anything, I'm afraid.
KyMouse| 8.10.10 @ 4:46PM
JimH, you beat me to it. I've been doing most of my communicating on a keyboard for the past few years, and I've noticed that my handwriting has changed dramatically for the worse. As a southpaw whose cursive style has always been bad, I started printing everything (except my signature) many years ago. I became able to print quickly and elegantly.
Now I hardly recognize my own handwriting -- the letters often slant in alternating directions, and their size isn't as consistent as it used to be. And I'm not writing as nearly as fast as before.
JimH| 8.11.10 @ 10:05AM
I feel your pain. I'm a lefty (handedness not politics) too.
Le Cracquere| 8.10.10 @ 8:51AM
What the Internet takes away, it gives back with two hands. Unless you grew up in a tolerably large city or a place with an unusually endowed library, your reading horizons were incredibly limited. The likes of Nicholas Carr--and of too many journalists of left & right alike--are afflicted by the parochialism of the media centers: "why can't kids just go to the NYPL like I did?"
Thanks to the Internet, an incredible degree of information and learning is at least AVAILABLE to people outside the metropoles. The previous monopolists of said information occasionally deplore this fact.
dance...dance to the radio| 8.11.10 @ 1:55AM
I grew up in a city with two newspapers and now live in a city that has one.
I didn't consciously realize their bias, even though I felt it viscerally until I could read all of them online.
Donna| 8.10.10 @ 9:00AM
Most of what is written anywhere is crap, unimaginative and so banal, one can hardly hold to reading it to the end. My 9th grader can read a book to the end, write a complete sentence, construct a proper compare and contract paper and gets A & Bs. He cannot write cursive which is just as well b/c most guys hand writing can’t be read. Granted he is in private school but he has a PARENT who is training him and not watching Bachelor, biggest loser, Dr Phil, Oprah or Rachel Ray…oh and let’s not forget Ellen. If he doesn’t achieve the grades (3.0), he’s asked to be successful elsewhere, if he doesn’t behave and respects others no matter if they are adults, peers or children-he out of school period. This is not an Internet problem!
Ken (Old Texican)| 8.10.10 @ 9:01AM
"My phone vibrates!" (Grin)
(Actually, I don't even know how to turn off the ringer, and don't care to learn.)
I won't buy this book. I buy too many books.
Louis Jenkins| 8.10.10 @ 9:04AM
They're closing the libraries in a city near me. Except of course the statuest artwork out front to the tune of $35,000.00. I guess folks can go down to the library and view the work, although they can't get in the building. That's how the new digital age is. Can't get in the building, but you can find out about it on the internet in the comfort of your own home.
George True| 8.10.10 @ 9:20AM
Mr Flynn may have a point, but I still see the internet replacing newspapers and periodicals as a very good thing. For one thing, it has broken the stranglehold on information that the mainstream media has had for the last 50 years.
For another thing, I find that these days I can quickly peruse about 8 different websites early in the day and zero in on the articles that contain unbiased and in-depth information about the issues of the day. It allows me to skip over the content that is biased or incomplete (largely by considering the source), and also allows me to drill down as deep as I want to go on the content that is meaningful to me. Is it any wonder that newspapers have fallen on hard times and magazines like Newsweek are being sold for one dollar?
I don't believe the internet will ever replace books, for those who care to read them. Sitting at a computer screen and reading voluminous content can become tedious after a while. A book is the original Kindle - compact and portable, and you can read at your own pace and take breaks when you want to while sitting in a comfortable lounge chair. The fact that younger generations don't read books cannot be blamed on the internet, but rather their teachers who never taught them the value of reading books.
DonDuke | 8.10.10 @ 9:29AM
Well listen, I am a techie (I'm on the web hours each day, build my own computers,etc) by most anyone's standards but I am also 60 years old and know what it's like to get lost in a book. I know what it's like to explore far away places through the pages of a novel. I know what it's like to relive history through books. I don't think the web and books are mutually exclusive nor do I think the web will supplant books. I do agree however that the skills of reading and writing seem to be suffering in our youth and I hope that things come around to recognize this.
Petronius| 8.10.10 @ 10:09AM
Flynn is stirring the pot by comparing apps to oranges. Blackberries, I phones, and Droids oh my, are for supplying instant amusement and tweeting same to ones inner circle. Good books go hand in hand with good Single Malt Scotch. They are to be savored. Most of the time my phone is off. I'll take the latest from Bernard Cornwell and a Highland Park, very neat.
Stephanie| 8.10.10 @ 12:11PM
Ditto Pet. Ditto.
I love the tactile experience of a new book, though I do buy used ones too. (they are new to me) I enjoy the internet, but love my books.
Stephanie| 8.10.10 @ 12:13PM
Good Lord! I almost forgot! I love a good Single Malt as well. I like mine over ice though.
Petronius| 8.10.10 @ 3:23PM
How could You? I can forgive people who take a blend on the rocks because they don't count, and most are junkahol. Half a teaspoon of cool bottled water, (55-59 degrees f) to the dram is pro forma. Ice kills the flavour.
George True| 8.10.10 @ 12:26PM
A good single malt is plenty fine. But curling up with a good book and a snifter of 18 year old Jameson, neat, is sublime.
Martin McPhillips | 8.10.10 @ 10:37AM
Before I comment on Carr's theory, I want to say that Dan Flynn's book 'A Conservative History of the American Left' is just great. I read it last summer and it jumped right onto my list of favorites. Deserves to be widely read.
As for Carr's theory, the internet must have been designed for me, because I've never read or written more than I have since I first went online in 1995. So, I don't know what the internet is doing to "us," but it sure has been a great help to me.
dennis2j| 8.10.10 @ 11:06AM
Such a pity that a generally thoughtful review would end with a gratuitous swipe at the Kindle, which has little in common with the internet. Since I acquired my e-reader, I have read more, and reflected more deeply on what I have read, than I had done in many years.
Stan Redmond| 8.10.10 @ 11:09AM
Newspapers, good riddance. Aside from the practical uses like lining bird cages and cleaning windows they aren't of much use. Magazines...No big deal.
As for books aside from the archival value they are too inconvenient to use with the new e-readers on the market and an INSTANT access to any thing you want to read. Aside from the emotional attachment people have it's old tech and going to change.
I make my living on computers. My employees make their livings on computers. I don't really care if my engineers can memorize Shakespeare or argue Socrates. NOT ONE of my engineers can use a slide ruler, which got us to the moom, and yet we still produce great products. Our office supply cabinet is dangerously low on vacuum tube yet we still plug along somehow. I don't care if they read Tolstoy. My cup of coffee does not taste any better or worse when it is made by an unemployable English major. If it's not a skill that makes you profitable, I have shocking news, it's not economically useful outside of personal enjoyment. I grew up around this technology and have always embraced it. I have horrible hand writing yet I still sign paychecks for people. I am always surprised by how many people cling on to the emotional attachment for skills of the past that really have limited use today. The only place useless skills makes any sense is teachering. How much money do universities bring in with 2 or 3 years of useless classes? Useless education by useless educators.
Our quick access to instant information is a good thing. Our brains are adapting to this for the better. People who are enamoured by the latest tweet from Paris Hilton would not have been any more thoughtful before the invention of the blackberry. Would the words of the bible be any less important scribbled by someone with bad handwriting?
Vern Crisler| 8.10.10 @ 11:11AM
I only skimmed the article, so missed some major points probably.
Sy Kwell| 8.10.10 @ 11:22AM
Skimming is a form of indexing. Indexing helps you find and correlate various data quickly and efficiently which is how one deals effectively with information overload. See Codd's 12 Rules of Relational Database Management for further insight but it's seems we all great instinct on what to do. People will focus when it's important and pertinent.
Scotchieguy| 8.10.10 @ 12:15PM
Didn't they say records would become obsolete when CD's first came out. Now they are making a resergence, due to the wamth of vinyl. Young people are discovering them. Same thing w/ tube amps (I'm a guitarist). In the 70's transistorized amps became the rage (didn't have to replace the tubes), but it didn't take long for people to long for the "warmth" of tube amp technology. They said cooking was dead w/ the advent of the microwave, and fast-food restaurants. Funny, lately, there has been a huge resergence in old fashioned gourmet home cooking, not to mention the fine restaurants emphasize healthy, authentic foods. Just because something is invented doesn't mean it is an improvement. The net is a great invention, but it need not replace books or magazines. Video games are great, but they don't actually replace real sports played outside. If it is good, it doesn't mean technology will necessarily render it obsolete. People will still enjoy the quiet at home, sitting around a real fire in the fireplace w/ a real book. Somethings will just never change.
Petronius| 8.10.10 @ 3:31PM
Here's to ya.
That's why I collect pinball machines from the 50's and prefer analog stereo. If I could get good N.A.B. open reel tape, I'd buy that Revox on Audiogon. The best new gear going is from Electrocompaniet (Norway), MLB (Germany), and Audio Research (Minnesota).
scotchieguy| 8.10.10 @ 12:23PM
One other thing. The one thing I fear from the net, I-phones, etc. is the lost art of the written word/sentence. "R u ready to hav a gr8 time?" This is pure insanity. If we lose the art of communicating via written word, no matter how sophisticated the technology, we're doomed.
Jason Sullivan| 8.11.10 @ 12:59AM
The purpose of communication is, shockingly enough, to communicate. If your recipient understands R u ready to hav a gr8 time?", then what is lost in the process? Should we mourn the loss of Shakespearean thee's and thou's as well?
Wake up, language changes. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it won't happen.
LS | 8.10.10 @ 12:25PM
I do read a lot online, but it's mostly skimming. The majority of what I read is from online, except that I print it out. Stacks.
I'd rather sit on a park bench, or in a cafe reading with a print-out in hand, than stare bleary-eyed at a monitor all day. I do enough of that at work.
Am I alone?
Ken (Old Texican)| 8.10.10 @ 1:18PM
Bah Humbug, LS
You just like to kill trees. (Grin)
So do I. Hopefully, my new book will a bunch of them.
JEffT| 8.10.10 @ 4:31PM
Reading is reading, whatever the format. I like both books and the Internet. There is nothing like reading a book from cover to cover. I read abut 30-40 books a year and also read copious articles from the Internet. I can't lay down on a nice soft pillow and hold my laptop over my head, but I can do that with a good book. Read, no matter what the format.
Jimbo| 8.10.10 @ 9:04PM
Hey! Can anyone tell me how to download a pdf version of this book?
Sam H| 8.11.10 @ 12:56AM
LS,
I do the same exact thing at work and then trade the stacks for books when home. There is just something about holding the paper or the book when you read; it is a completely different experience from reading off the screen.
SJM| 8.11.10 @ 3:04AM
I teach adults who are expected to write papers on a number of subjects. For each, there are suggested readings from the books which are provided as a part of the course. What I am seeing is that the books are completely unread while the "research" behind the papers consists of cutting and pasting from the Internet with little consideration as to the quality of the information. I also note that the papers do not reflect my lectures much as well, which brings up the related subject of the loss of the ability to take notes.
Bill| 8.11.10 @ 2:47PM
Those of us who still read the demanding books find it simple and elementary to out-argue those who rely on the net for their information. Our arguments are also demonstrably more effective, more detailed, and more sensitive to nuance.
The people who both use the net and read books (cover to cover) -and there are many of them- are excellent debaters.
Cuffs| 8.11.10 @ 3:06PM
I read & collect books.
I read the internet news because I can't stand
television news.
The internet lets me choose the news I care about without all the noise and posturing of
tv news readers. I prefer the quiet of reading-
books & internet to crazy, noisy network or
cable news. Also NO COMMERCIALS!!
ujijin| 8.13.10 @ 12:12AM
Of course the Internet changes how we think. As an associative-type thinker I love how the Internet allows me to find things quickly, but I make the connections between what I find. News amalgamators like Drudge are great but I do have my favorite topical and regional news and commentary sites. I do notice, though, that I read entire stories or columns, not being distracted by ads or other doodads, unless the story is illegible to begin with, as in being written by a wire hack fresh out of J-School. So: I believe, with some others here, that the Internet has enhanced literacy in my case, chiefly in terms of access. But perhaps it's only helping neurons fire more frequently in my, er, particular idiom. To quote Arthur of Camelot.