Are we really that shallow?

Reading this review in the London Review of Books of Nicholas Carr’s criticism of web culture in his book The Shallows lead me to consider how the act of teaching information literacy has changed as a result of the ubiquity of easily accessible information.

Near the end of the essay, Holt argues that—despite recent advances—neuroscience still can tell us remarkably little about the specific cognitive elements that spark creativity. Although tools like Google provide us with the ability to instantly retrieve massive amounts of facts and information without the need to remember them, we might well need all of that stuff swirling around in our heads in order to reach that indescribable “Eureka!” moment of creativity. Holt’s description of the French mathematician Henri Poincaré stepping onto a bus and suddenly devising a solution to a problem that had long been bedeviling him is illustrative.

‘The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable,’ he (Poincaré) wrote. ‘These sudden inspirations … never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless.’ The seemingly fruitless effort fills the memory banks with mathematical ideas – ideas that then become ‘mobilised atoms’ in the unconscious, arranging and rearranging themselves in endless combinations, until finally the ‘most beautiful’ of them makes it through a ‘delicate sieve’ into full consciousness, where it will then be refined and proved.

One of the biggest struggles that I have had in the library instruction classroom is to explain to students that there is frequently no discrete “answer” to the question that they are researching. I have found myself explaining that a key task of the researcher is to synthesize disparate elements (e.g., academic journal articles, primary sources) into a coherent whole. With a little guidance, most students seem to be able to become adept at searching. However, when some are presented with a lot of academic journal articles that address their topic in a general sense it takes awhile for them to catch on to the idea that each article might just address a very small aspect of their question and that they can use a specific piece of research as being illustrative of a more general concept or argument. It takes a lot of work and time to develop a sense of what that general concept or argument might be.

This reminds me that as library instructors we cannot expect those gratifying “Eureka!” moments every time we step in front of a class. If Poincaré can serve as any guidance, such moments may be just as likely to occur on the bus ride home as they are in the classroom.

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