WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS by P Tucker. The Futurist, Jul/Aug 2010 : Vol 44 Issue 4, p61-62

Some food for thought in here especially since I can identify with "The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted, to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention".   I do think there are some fundamental differences if I compare the mental activity of "working through a complex analysis problem" vs "doing research scanning the web".

Maybe the important thing is to learn how to do both and not let the one completely dominate the other.

'Nicholas Carr achieved notoriety after a July 2008 article in The Atlantic, in which he asked, “Is Google Making us Stoopid?”   ...the Internet may actually be a diseducating force, gradually and invisibly rendering the surfing public incapable of reflective thought or sustained attention, argued Carr.
As our reliance on ever brighter and faster Internet content increases, a new force is taking hold across the culture of the Web-connected world, leading to changes in reading habits and even in human brains. The Internet trends of today foreshadow the surfing, the teaching, learning, and thinking of tomorrow.
Studies show that constant exposure to highspeed Internet is making us quicker in our ability to make connections and more adept at finding what we’re looking for online using search engines. But we’re losing something of great value in the trade: the literary mind-set.
The Internet has many virtues...; however, the effect that the Web has on the brain is rather distinct from that of books and more traditional literary activity. If sitting and reading a piece of static text for long periods of time feels “less natural” or “less intuitive” than zipping through the various pages, applications, and comments of a Web page, that’s because it is. The patience and focus required for sustained engagement with static text must be cultivated, a primary benefit of reading. Our most significant achievements as a species — the discovery of the scientific method, the recognition of universal human rights, and the exploration of space — would have been impossible without the rigorous, stubborn, disciplined, and unnatural literary mind-set; brains, in other words, capable of understanding and analyzing extremely complex narrative and dialogic arguments.
The traits of the informed intellect are essential to the furtherance of scholarship, particularly in difficult and abstract domains like science or philosophy, but the educated mindset isn’t characteristic of the brain’s natural state.   ...the Internet, in the speed and randomness with which it presents new information to the user, encourages a return to the feral mode of information gathering.
 “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted, to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention.” Herein lies an explanation for why so many of us feel challenged to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers.  Every day, every hour that we submit to the furtherance of Internet culture, we are creating a new type of civilization. Its schools and offices shall be populated with individuals who lack the mental circuitry required to read beyond a few sentences.  The postliterate being whom Carr conjures up is a subtle sort of monster.  
He is incapable of reflection or contemplation and doesn’t care to remember much. He is limited in terms of his capacity for original thought,  He communicates constantly but only in sparse bursts. He can think with great speed but cannot know anything with certainty. He cannot conceive of hard-won knowledge yet is isolated in his hastily reached convictions.'...  [53%]