A lot of your mental energy goes to figuring out where does one word end and the next begin.

I think if you look back through the intellectual history of human beings you can trace the way that intellectual technologies influence the way we think.

What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction.

The book, I think, like the map before it, like the clock, created or help create a revolution in the human mind in the way our habits of mind and ultimately the way we use our brains.

Culture is sustained in our synapses...It's more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.

It's interesting to think about how the book changed us.

The brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you're exercising, it's pulling - it's weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you're not exercising so much.