From Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in next month’s Atlantic:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncom­fort­able sense that some­one, or some­thing, has been tin­ker­ing with my brain, remap­ping the neural cir­cuitry, repro­gram­ming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s chang­ing. I’m not think­ing the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m read­ing. Immers­ing myself in a book or a lengthy arti­cle used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the nar­ra­tive or the turns of the argu­ment, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case any­more. Now my con­cen­tra­tion often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fid­gety, lose the thread, begin look­ing for some­thing else to do. I feel as if I’m always drag­ging my way­ward brain back to the text. The deep read­ing that used to come nat­u­rally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time online, search­ing and surf­ing and some­times adding to the great data­bases of the Internet….

For me, as for others, the Net is becom­ing a uni­ver­sal medium, the con­duit for most of the infor­ma­tion that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advan­tages of having imme­di­ate access to such an incred­i­bly rich store of infor­ma­tion are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded…. But that boon comes at a price. As the media the­o­rist Mar­shall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just pas­sive chan­nels of infor­ma­tion. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chip­ping away my capac­ity for con­cen­tra­tion and con­tem­pla­tion. My mind now expects to take in infor­ma­tion the way the Net dis­trib­utes it: in a swiftly moving stream of par­ti­cles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the sur­face like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one.

No, friend, you’re not, which is why I’m happy to intro­duce a new fea­ture, pre­vi­ously avail­able only on air­planes and in movie the­aters, right here on dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion: an emer­gency exit door. It’s up there on the right at the top of the page, just under the sub­scribe link. Use it early and often. Who knows? The brain you save could be your own…