Oh Noes! I have become hard wired!

I have been wondering for a long time at my apparent dementia and inability to remember…well, anything really. If I am thinking about something on the way home I can actually cause myself to get lost, even coming from work and I have been working 5 days a week at the same place for 10 years! I just calculated that out because my brain wanders off like that and that means I have made the same drive roughly 2,640 times and when you calculate the miles of the commute that works out to 124,080 miles. I think I am now too depressed to finish this, but I may as well since the whole point is about how to concentrate and stay focused. Anyway, I read this article in The Sun magazine written by Nicholas Carr about how the Internet is rewiring our brains. Apparently the ease of accessing information immediately and easily and learning things in a very superficial way without a depth of information has caused several things to happen. First of all, people are losing their ability to fully focus for any length of time. By binging around the internet like a monkey on meth we are becoming unable to concentrate anymore. Now see, I found that so fascinating that I immediately Googled the statistic to see if it was true (don’t know yet) then I went to check on a couple of my favorite blogs to see what they were up to and one of them recommended a book so I went to Amazon to check out the book and then a really good song came on over my Internet radio so I Googled the artist to see what they were all about…
Then a light bulb exploded over my weensy little brain, I think I just proved the author’s theory! I had gotten totally off track, looked up a bunch of random stuff that didn’t matter and then totally forgotten the information because it is so accessible that, should I need the information in the future, I’ll just look it up again. So, we no longer have to remember our orders (or whatever your work happens to be) since we can look it up. No need to remember phone numbers because your cell phone does that for you. It doesn’t matter when your favorite show comes on because you can Tivo. Don’t bother remembering birthdays because your email program will alert you. Instead of contemplating the Universe or the Meaning of Life, we surf the net for the answers to stupid questions that are good to know only if you manage to remember them and only if you are in a Trivia game in a bar somewhere. Well, I for one, would like my brain back. I have not gotten around to programming my new cell phone, I am just going to have to remember the number if I want to call someone. Hopefully, for those of you that know me, some of my hopeful new brain power will go towards remembering to plug the cell phone in occasionally. And I am going to spend a lot more of my free time reading and writing and a lot less time looking up the answers to questions like, “Why do mannequins have nipples?”. I’ll let you know how the little experiment pans out.