Carr and Pinker

Nicholas Carr takes on Stephen Pinker's recent Mind over media NYT op-ed on the debate about whether Google is changing our brains. Pinker is of course a formidable foe and Carr goes to some lengths (ie. more than normal blog-post length) to refute his arguments. The most important of those concerns the brain's neuroplasticity; Pinker cites evolution and says Carr's argument is impossible, the brain being physiologically oblivious to technologies that have been around for a couple of decades, while Carr cites recent research on neuroplasticity that undermines such a view.  I don't have the patience to read an entire blog post of this length right now (point to Carr!!), as other chores beckon (point to Pinker!!), but will return to it later. Pinker's position, incidentally, is also summed up in a bite-sized chunk adapted for the inernet-impaired brain here, in his response to the question edge.org's posed to 168 writers, "How is the internet changing the way you think" (Pinker's answer: "Not at all")