What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

WH Davies’ opening lines of his poem Leisure came to me at the end of another hectic week in which I flitted from e-mail to tweet to blog, hooked on communication but managing to spend ever less time actually reading.

Only ten years ago I would read a novel a fortnight. Now I fill most of my reading hours with the sort of material I can consume in seconds: Twitter, Facebook, news alerts, blogs, e-mail and lots and lots of searches.

I am not alone. Nicholas Carr asked in the Atlantic this time last year “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  In it he speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to sustain attention.

Emily Yoffe followed up in Slate this summer, drawing on more than 50 years of psychology experiments to conclude that the internet feeds the “seeking” part of our brains, flooding them with dopamine, but never accessing the opioids to deliver pleasure to the brain.   

Our brains are designed to be more easily stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," according to University of Michigan research.

"The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it," Michigan researcher Kent Berridge explains. "And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants we'd be better off without."

So one Google search leads to another, although the information is not vital. It becomes easier to write an e-mail than a long paper. And we keep hitting "enter" to get our next fix.

If you’re still reading this article, then we’re not altogether lost. But do mankind a favour. Walk away from the blog and go and read a good book.

Image courtesy of Will Lion