A New Stimulation
From The Millions:
I’ve been on the Internet since I was fourteen years old. I’ve always loved it here. But a few months back, I found myself a bit troubled by what I perceived to be a difference in the way my mind was working. I would be at my desk writing and then I’d be on Twitter or Gmail or CNN, with no clear recollection of having decided to drop one task and switch to another. It was as if my brain, craving stimulation beyond the meticulous working out of plot issues, had jumped to a new task of its own accord. I wasn’t always this distractible.
The problem reminded me of muscle memory. I used to be a dancer, and my training was intense. After a certain amount of physical training, either in dance or in athletics, certain actions become almost unconscious. After all these years away from dance I can still assume a perfect arabesque line. I have a visceral memory of exactly what a triple pirouette feels like, the precise coordination and timing required, although I doubt very much that I could execute one anymore.
I began to realize that after all this time on the Internet, I’d trained my brain to expect a new stimulation every few minutes. After a short period of concentration on a given task, my brain would do what I’d trained it to do: it would turn its attention to something else. Concentrating on a single task for an extended period of time—as is required when one’s reading a book, for instance, or writing one—had become unsettlingly difficult.
