Put a blank in place of “studied” and then fill in with whatever activity you’d like and see if this doesn’t describe your experience:

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

This from “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price” which appeared in yesterday’s NY Times.  And that is just one of three articles in the Times on the theme of “Your Brain on Computers.”  The other two are

An Ugly Toll of Technology – Impatience and Forgetfulness, by Tara Parker Pope, and

More Americans Sense a Downside to an Always Plugged-In Existence, by Marjorie Connelly.

The impact of internet use on the brain continues to get a lot of attention and while the news is not all bad, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be more than a little concerned about much of it.

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains likewise continues to get a great deal of attention.  Jonah Lehrer’s review “Our Cluttered Minds,” also in the NY Times, takes issue with some of research Carr employs.  Here is Carr’s rejoinder.