Rewiring your brain

Is the Internet rewiring your brain? Here is an article from Atlantic Monthly that claims the Internet is rewiring our brain. The article provides anecdotal evidence that people (the literary types) are having a hard time concentrating on long pieces.

The story quotes a study by University College London that states:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power
browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for
quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the
traditional sense.

The story continues with differentiating the effects of internet and television. The story also quotes a psychologist by the name Marryann Wolf who argues that:

...is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our
genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the
symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or
other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play
an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our
brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as
the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from
the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an
alphabet.

I can say that I have personal experience with the above statement. During my time in Japan and China, as I learned the various Chinese characters, I could tell something was changing inside my brain.

After concentrating and getting to the end of the article, I can summarize the thesis of this article is the internet makes us Skimmers and mere decoders of information and we lose our ability "to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction..."

If this is the case with previously formed brain just imagine how our students who have grown up with the internet read!