A doorway to knowledge. We live in a time where knowledge is greatly valued and information is easily accessed. How you make use of the knowledge you have and the information that is at hand can greatly affect your ability to focus.

We all know the internet can be a great source for information, and we all know what is usually said next with that sort of statement—and I’ll advocate for it myself: The internet can be a huge time-sucker granting useless information of things you never knew you needed to know. Sure there are some good bits of info I’m happy to have found, but if I didn’t go looking for it rather than just stumbling upon it, chances are it’s clogging up the door taking a lot of my time. 

Frequently browsing social media, YouTube, or other sources of media for something to fill the next moment actually rewires the brain affecting our ability to focus on a single task. When reading a book for instance, your brain is storing information in your short term memory so you can relate what you just read to the paragraphs that came before. Once getting distracted by something like a text message, the brain will dump what was in your short term memory to focus on the new subject—then, when going back to the book, suddenly you don’t know what’s going on and have to re-read the previous paragraphs. When jumping from individual blurbs of text, images, and videos—often a few minutes or seconds on each one—the brain gets use to always dumping the short term memory making it difficult to later focus on a single subject. 

So the internet can be a doorway to knowledge or an addictive habit that trains your brain to always be looking for something to shift your attention to. Hey, what’s that in the next post?