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Using the Internet is changing the way your brain works. A brief article in the Autumn 2009 print edition of Wilson Quarterly explains how.

Numerous studies have shown that we don’t so much read online as scan. In a series of studies from the early 1990s until 2006, Jakob Nielson, a former Sun Microsystems engineer, and Don Norman, a cognitive scientist, tracked the eye movements of Web surfers as they skipped from one page to the next. They found that only 16 percent of subjects read the text on a page in the order in which it appeared. The rest jumped around, picking out individual words and processing them out of sequence. …It is particularly hard to hold readers’ attention online because of all the temptations dangled before them. Psychologists argue that our brains are naturally inclined to constantly seek new stimuli. Clicking on link after link, always looking for a new bit of information, we are actually revving up our brains with dopamine, the overlord of what psychologist Jaak Panksepp has called the “seeking system.” This system is what drives you to get out of bed each day, and what causes you to check your e-mail every few minutes; it’s what keys you up in anticipation of a reward. Most of your e-mail may be junk, but the prospect of receiving a meaningful message—or following a link to a stimulating site—is enough to keep your brain constantly a bit distracted from what you’re reading online.

The article cites another recent study by three Stanford researchers of people considered expert multitaskers. What they found is that these stimulation addicts are worse at paying attention, controlling their memories and switching between tasks than people who prefer finishing something before moving on. One of the researchers said, “They’re suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.”

Statistics we keep for theTrumpet.com show that the majority of our visitors stay for less than 5 seconds—not exactly enough time to process the world of prophetically relevant geopolitics and social trends we cover. We encourage our readers to subscribe to our monthly print edition; like everything online, it is available at absolutely no cost to you. Apparently the average person stands a better chance of actually reading that than they would the online version. The WQ article concludes,

[T]he surest bet for undistracted reading continues to be an old-fashioned book. As historian Marshall Poe observes, “A book is a machine for focusing attention; the Internet is [a] machine for diffusing it.”