This is your brain on the internet – stop and think about something important, meaningful, interesting, challenging….do so quietly, without any devices, apps or noise – can you do it? Please read the following study that explains what you are compromising by always being tuned in, turned on (an in essence, dropping out of “traditional” methods of knowledge discovery): Benjamin C. Storm, Sean M. Stone & Aaron S. Benjamin (2016): Using the Internet to access information inflates future use of the Internet to access other information, Memory, DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2016.1210171 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2016.1210171

“The ways in which people learn, remember, and solve problems have all been impacted by the Internet. The present research explored how people become primed to use the Internet as a form of cognitive offloading. In three experiments, we show that using the Internet to retrieve information alters a person’s propensity to use the Internet to retrieve other information. Specifically, participants who used Google to answer an initial set of difficult trivia questions were more likely to decide to use Google when answering a new set of relatively easy trivia questions than were participants who answered the initial questions from memory. These results suggest that relying on the Internet to access information makes one more likely to rely on the Internet to access other information.”