You're studying for your first crucial exam of the semester. Your notes are open on your laptop and you are ready to go. Suddenly, an advertisement for Petsmart flashes across your screen. They're having a sale which reminds you, you forgot to buy dog food. So you click on the advertisement and begin to browse when ANOTHER ad catches your eye. It's one of those super sad animal shelter commercials, and now you've opened up a new tab and are Googling if cats have feelings. Thirty seconds later, you're heading the nearest ASPCA to adopt a cat for yourself. This is what a few moments on the internet can do to you.

I'm not here to quote your great-grandmother in saying that the internet will rot your brain, but you would be naive not to believe that internet is changing our brains. First, with the evolution of technology has come the devolution of our attention spans. With countless sites and countless different companies pushing their advertisements all at once, it is hard to not get distracted. Not only are there an abundance of distractions, but consider the fact that my peers and I are part of the generation that can Google search the answer to any question we have in a matter of milliseconds. Sometimes, we even come across the answer without having to click or read a single link.

This high-speed access to information has both its pros and cons. On the upside, the knowledge of the world is at our fingertips and within reach at all times. It gives people who otherwise might not have access to news or media outlets the chance to be educated and informed about the world around them. On the downside, it has created a generation of students that quickly grow frustrated when the solution they're looking for is not immediately available to them. How many times have you clicked on an article only to deem it too long and quickly moved to find another, shorter one? You may even do this with some of the articles you browse on the Odyssey, including my own!

So if society as a whole is losing their ability to focus, what does that mean for our brains? Well, it simply means that we are simultaneously at risk for losing our abilities to be deep thinkers and successfully retain information. By merely skimming text to find the information we need, we lose the process of thoroughly learning concepts and transferring that knowledge to our long-term memory.

And of course, the most common rebuttal would be, "well aren't you using the internet to create this very article?" The answer is yes, obviously. There is no doubt that technology has created a worldwide spread of self-expression and a global phenomenon of being a part of the conversation. Society just should be wary of how much we rely on this technology. The internet is an incredibly useful aid in creating arguments and dispersing information but that is all it should be—an aid, not the sole source of human intelligence.

The more and more we depend on the quick and easy shortcuts the internet provides us, the more and more our minds will be consumed with just that, shortcuts instead of long-term thought processes. And if that is the case, humanity might as well begin trading in our brains for Apple's latest MacBooks now.