This is the subject of Nicholas Carr&#x27;s _The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains_.<p>In a nutshell, he argues that our brain gets better at things that we do a lot, and worse at things we used to do a lot but now do a lot less. Reading is not different from any other activity in that sense.<p>And many people nowadays don&#x27;t read many long, hard books anymore, and instead quickly skim short articles and then switch to the next.<p>So we get better at quickly getting bits of information from short articles, and worse at staying focused for an hour on the same demanding text.<p>I find it hard to argue with.