Are we all becoming pancake people?

[Mind's High Mailinglist]

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicholas Carr - july 2008

Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the
supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in
a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a
deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly
disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain.
“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can
feel it.”

I can feel it, too. 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.... Read the article at
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

....And print it!