I thought medical school had done it. Beginning in my first year of medical school, as I spent hours memorizing minutiae off of Powerpoint slides, I noticed that my ability to stay focused when reading texts was decreasing. I chalked it up to the tedious nature of the materials I was reading as anatomy and biochemistry texts are pretty dry stuff. In the past I was an avid reader who devoured fiction and even non-fiction books whenever I could get my hands on them. And, in tune with my liberal arts education, I enjoyed contemplating what I read and discussing it with others. I remember reading a couple of works of fiction during the summer after my first year had ended and feeling relieved when after a couple of days my ability to stay focused seemed to return.

But as the years of medical school went by, the problem seems to have grown worse. Perhaps I have gotten too used to having "important" ideas presented to me in bullet points on the Powerpoint slides or in abstracts at the top of the journal articles. Now I find that my attention span for reading has diminished across the board. Whether it is a textbook, journal article, work of fiction, or even blog post, it is hard to stay engaged for long.

It must have been medical school that did this to me, right? Memorizing and regurgitating, skimming articles to find one to bring up the next day on the wards... or even worse just pulling up an UpToDate clinical summary and presenting that. The type of learning one does in medical school is generally the antithesis of most intellectual endeavors. So it would stand to reason that after four years of this type of learning I now find it harder to stay focused and to actually slow down and to contemplate what I am reading.

Then today I stumbled across an article by Nicholas Carr in this month's Atlantic entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The second paragraph summed up my struggle of the past several years, "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.... 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." In his case the culprit is not medical school but the Internet with its vast amount of information that can be accessed rapidly with the click of a mouse. Following the trail from hyperlink to hyperlink, from text to movies, has apparently affected other bloggers and writers who are all noticing decreasing attention spans and changes in their way of thinking.

Maybe it is not just medical school that has changed my thinking. Ironically, all of my online reading and web surfing, which was often an attempt to keep reading and writing in the little bits of free time I did have in medical school, may have contributed as well. The article goes on to discuss the plasticity of the brain, how different changes in technology have shaped the way we process information over the centuries, and how Google's and the Internet's creation of an information network that essentially serves as a sort of artificial intelligence may have the potential to transform our culture. It is definitely worth a read and is great food for thought.

But, be warned, it requires staying focused through 4 hyperlinked pages of text and not getting distracted by any of the links in the sidebars that tempt you to skim rapidly and click away. Such are the ironies of Internet media.