What the internet is doing to our brains
I don't know if this is a problem that a majority of the population faces, or just a significant portion of it. But, from what I've gathered from similar threads on Reddit and other places, it seems like a common enough phenomenon.
We all know that the scouring through internet's text content, ripe with hyperlinks, is inherently a different form of reading experience than reading a book. I read that that instead of linear reading one does with a book, magazine, newspaper etc, on the internet our eyes follow the "F-pattern" of reading. That is, we read two lines in a paragraph, and scroll to the bottom. You'll notice that this is what we do often with Google searches and when looking for relevant content in a forum discussion or Reddit thread. Read two lines and scroll.
In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr high-lighted this phenomenon and related it to the change in human brain when it adapts to a new technology (historical examples would be books, maps, compasses, abacuses, T.V., Radio etc.). Our brains are re-wired, literally every time we adapt to a new technology, on account of neuro-plasticity. Like our brains literally change the way they are if we consistently do something over prolonged period of time. There are of course concerns over how the internet technology is affecting our brains, but in the end of the book, Nicholas Carr mentioned a few people who were advocating this phenomenon and viewed it as the next step in human intellectual evolution. The advocates condoned the faster processing and information-gathering ability of human beings, once they adapt to online reading.
Even the content creators adapt to new phenomena. A famous case is of Nietzsche, who said that typing on a type-writer instead of writing with pen on paper changes the way he thinks and writes. A modern example, I reckon would be of books like "Notorious RBG" and "How to be a bawse" which felt more like long printed blog-posts instead of books.
I've personally been vexed by the internet's affect on my brain. Every time I see a large paragraph, in the back of my head, there's a feeling a of dread and disappointment. It feels difficult to actively read large chunks of text. And even when I do read them, I feel that I haven't comprehended quite as much as I used to. I feel confused as to whether I should embrace the " spontaneous speed-reading" thingie, which is a result of surfing the web, or to take a step back and reignite the neurons that were formed by the act of years of deep reading prior to the sabotage by online reading habits.
