Is the Internet Re-wiring Our Brains?

I was just thinking about this very concept again last night, as I contemplated why I was no longer the voracious reader I once was. Even complex non-fiction books would be consumed in a week or so. A week? Who has a week to spend reading a book now? And yet, I actually do have plenty of time on my hands. Times when I sit around bored, tinkering around with social networking sites, but still the prospect of picking up that book seems daunting rather than rewarding.

This is also a concept I have considered when writing some of my articles. Will the reader even bother to read it through to the end if it is more than 3, maybe 5 short paragraphs long? And if they do, will they be able to retain the information or process the more complex concepts and information contained in the article?

Often, even in my own personal life, I will see a friend or family member suddenly shocked by something or have a sudden revelation about information that I had already shared with them on numerous occasions previously, but that they failed to actually process and retain for one reason or another. I tend to be a bit of an outcast these days in fact, branded a "conspiracy theorist" as if that were actually a bad thing, because much of the information I share cannot be captured in a 30-second soundbite and is therefore relegated to being "out there" regardless of how factual the material may be. The information may not be popular, something that the coffee break room is abuzz about, or directly pertinent to a person's next hour of life, and is therefore discarded as somehow being irrelevant, but in the meantime the person is actually suffering each and every day for reasons that are actually quite easily explained.

Take money for example. We never seem to have enough of it, there always seems to be less and less to go around, indeed, today one in seven Americans actually live below the poverty line. But does anyone bother to actually learn why? Do they actually understand how the economy works? Of course not. It is easier to just blame the victims, and say that poor people are poor by their own choices and "bad decisions." And even if you are the victim yourself, sitting around wallowing in self-pity wondering where you went wrong, but never bothering to actually learn why you just had to apply for foodstamps, much less formulating a practical plan to deal with poverty. Nevertheless, the information is right at your fingertips, here, and here, and here, and here. The reasons that things are so bad for so many people is no mystery, yet so many of us walk around in a daze, overwhelmed, zombified, and willfully ignorant.

Well, without further distraction, let's get to the video here. And don't be put off by the guy's messy hair-do, don't go thinking to yourself  "oh what the hell is THAT guy gonna teach ME?" What he says is brilliant...






And now that you've seen that, this begins to make a lot more sense...






Still with me? The book I am trying to read? A classic tome on the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank entitled The Creature From Jekyll Island.