This class we discussed the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, I wasn’t in class for the discussion as I was sick, but I was intrigued by his thoughts and analysis of our media culture. He states that our consumption of technology and our access to vast amounts of knowledge through our connection to the internet is changing the way we think, how our brains work. As a nursing student, what I found most interesting about the book is his connection to synapses, part of the neural tissue and how our neurons communicate with one another. As we grow, so do our number of synapses, usually until some point during puberty when they are ‘pruned’, or in other words, the ones we don’t use are destroyed. Carr’s argument that we are becoming hyperactive and unable to give our full attention to one thing at a time is connected to synapses and this pruning process. He states that since we are no longer working as hard for the information we are getting, it is affecting the number of synapses that are formed and then pruned, we are literally killing our brain cells by looking at a screen.