You cant concentrate on what youre reading

Even if youve shunned all distractions, you still wont absorb information you read online as well as you would if youd read it in a book. And you can blame hypertext for that. Those colorful little links scattered throughout online articles (including this one) make your brain work harder than it would otherwise, leaving less brain power to process what youre reading. Even just reading on screens, like a laptop or iPad links or no links has been shown to diminish comprehension. Research has shown that reading linked text entails a lot of mental calisthenics evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats that are extraneous to the process of reading, Carr wrote in The Shallows. And giving your brain more work to do makes it harder to absorb information. Text thats peppered with photos, videos and ads is even worse.