The Internet is a Frying Pan

Losing the use of my dominant hand in July forced me learn to how to become left-handed. For months, I could literally only use my left hand because of no mobility and extreme pain in my right wrist. Being left-handed felt awkward and unnatural. After the acclimation period, all of the awkwardness started to go away. My brain had started the reconfiguration process. Along with the broken wrist, my right index finger suffered some pretty severe nerve damage to the point that I lost feeling in it. And my right thumb went numb after my first surgery to rebuild my wrist. Now that my wrist is better, I have become almost completely ambidextrous. And I have feeling back in my both digits. This just confirms what in now generally accepted, brain plasticity, in the scientific community and general public. People have been going through obstacles like that since the beginning of people. It just took a long time for someone, Merzenich, to come along and prove what the brain is actually doing. His discovery was just before computers started to become easily available to the general public. And then came the Internet.

The Internet and everything associated with it has been and is causing information overload and also brings many distractions. This is most likely increasing our ability to filter information quickly and also helps us learn how to block out and retain information. The Internet does not just include browsing the web. It is an experience. This experience involves browsing the web, online gaming (console and computer), instant messaging, checking/sending email, listening to music, watching videos, transferring files, video chatting, and the list goes on and on. And many people carry around smart phones, so those people are always connected. Some say this non-stop stream of detrimental information overload and constant switching of tasks is confusing us and causing jumbled memory.

I see validity to the idea of confusion originating from non-stop switching of activities when using the Internet and technology because humans tend to only be able to concentrate on one to two tasks at a time. But like I trained myself to become left-handed, I think we all have the ability to overcome nature and train our brains to do more than one to two tasks at a time, become information filters, and overcome the information overload. There is no debate whether the Internet is changing how we function. The questions are how much and good or bad. I cannot answer how much, but I do think it think it is making us more efficient as information filters and multi-taskers.