July 03rd, 2026

                                The Internet-Broken Brain: Write to Repair It, or Simply Write to It?
The internet is screwing up our brains, or has already screwed up our brains quite a bit. I imagine that I’m not telling you anything that you do not already know. Then again, if the internet has really screwed you up, you may be too screwed up to even realize you have a problem. You may just be sitting there watching one YouTube video after another with drool falling from your mouth and onto your keyboard, blissfully unaware that you’ve allowed the box to lobotomize you.
I’m not picking on you, by the way. I’ve allowed the box to lobotomize me, too. Almost all of us have. And those whose brains haven’t been destroyed by the internet are pretty annoying. They’re like those people who used to always find a way to interject into every conversation the fact that they didn’t own a TV.
There is all sorts of evidence that constant exposure to an array of overstimulating content—and the option to always seek out more and newer stimulation—has done great damage to our ability to think. Like lab rats pushing the feeder that dispenses cocaine and ignoring the feeder that dispenses food pellets, we’re more interested in the short-term high that comes from dopamine rather than the long-term sense of wellbeing that comes with serotonin.
As a result of this hyperstimulation (I like that word more than “overstimulation,” in this context) our memory and even our ability to hold a thought in our mind for any length of time has been greatly harmed. This damage naturally shows up in many realms, from our ability to hold a conversation to our ability to remember things.  
One of the things that has suffered—or has at least changed drastically—is our writing and reading habits. A short time ago, for instance, I read a study that found the average sentence length is continuing to grow shorter and shorter. In the eighteenth century, an average sentence was something like twenty-five words. Now it’s down to something like seventeen. I don’t imagine that all the aids like Grammarly and the AI tools are going to do a lot to add nuance and depth to our increasingly staccato, shortened, and simple style, either.
It isn’t just the length of the sentences that’s changing, but the construction of them, the way they’re built and what that framing reveals about our frames of mind.
A blog entry on my ill-frequented website is not the place to get into a big thing on syntax, so suffice it to say here that sentences basically show one of two types of construction: there is parataxis and hypotaxis. Parataxis is the straightforward sentence, the sentence that reads like a bullet, without a lot of subordinating, coordinating, or relative clauses. Here’s an example of a sentence showing good parataxis:
“Bob went down the street looking for his sister Bertha.”
See? It’s straightforward, the words (like Bob) taking no detours, sure of its mission (also like Bob.)
Here’s a sentence that demonstrates hypotaxis: “Although Bob had never intended to spend his day looking for Bertha, and even though he hated chasing her around town, he still felt compelled to try to find her, if only to mollify his mother.”
You can argue about which kind of sentence you prefer, but I’m pretty sure you can guess what kind of sentences are more common these days, and what kind were more common in the past. If you said the paratactic sentence has won out over the hypotactic, give yourself a gold star.
You also probably don’t need me to explain why this short and straightforward kind of sentence has thrived while the more ornate and complex has begun to languish. The hypotactic sentence requires holding multiple thoughts in-mind—sometimes in juxtaposition with each other—deferring completion of those thoughts until the very end of the sentence.
Conversely, the paratactic is much easier for those with short attention spans or myriad distractions before them to follow. I had a buddy who worked in corrections and said the only thing he could read while doing his shift as guard was Vonnegut. The writing was so straightforward that nothing short of a riot would have short-circuited his enjoyment of the novels while seated behind his desk.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rules. I’m sure if you scour the literary works of the eighteenth century you’ll find authors who kept it short and simple. And there are more than a few writers who, despite having their brains turned to mush by the internet, still insist on keeping it dense and complex, and demanding thought of both themselves and their reader as they compose.
And there is, of course, more to the change than the rise of the internet revolution. There are people who prefer shorter and simpler sentences for aesthetic reasons, people who tend to regard the more complex as more given to pretension, artifice, falsehood.
The writer Charles Bukowski wrote some dense and flowery stuff in his twenties, but soon after abandoned this style and made (in his words) “simplicity his god.” A test was developed years ago—called the Flesch-Kinkaid—that claimed it could calculate the readability of a sentence based on many factors. There’s a chart online that shows how to grade a sentence, if you’re curious. Needless to say, the test favors simplicity and shuns complex sentence construction.
And the shift was well underway before personal computers became a thing and long before people had the internet. The switch from writing longhand on paper (or even old-school parchment or vellum) to typewriters certainly helped to change writing, as did the much faster pace of the modern world.
For all I know James Cain and Dashiell Hammett found Proust as unreadable as would your average high-school student these days who spends half their day texting.
All that said, there is a difference between preferring to write a certain way and having no choice, being rendered a mental cripple who can either avail themselves of parataxis (or even sentence fragments) and not write at all.  
Another study I read, for instance, found that constant overstimulation from the internet has made the myelin sheaths around adult brains smaller and thinner than in the past. Myelin sheaths are typically much thicker in adult brains than in child brains. This allows adults to be better at concentrating, focusing on tasks, and resisting distractions. We aren’t quite at the point where we’ve lost our sense of object permanence—I’m not going to be stunned by someone playing peekaboo disappearing and reappearing behind a washcloth—but we are clearly hurting ourselves. Kids of my nephew’s generation call it “brain rot,” and many of them deliberately avoid those short videos that tempt the eye (and thin-sheathed brain) when scrolling through YouTube videos and seeking distractions—courting the kind of dangers it would be best to avoid.
Fine the reader who’s followed me this far might be saying. The internet is screwing up our brains. What, then, is to be done? Can we write to repair the damage? Should we get out the longnose revolver and, a la Elvis ensconced in his Graceland mansion, start shooting every glowing box in the house? 
You and I both know neither one of us are going to do that. Moreover, I’m not sure that anything can be done, by which I mean, I don’t think we can write our way out of this, write to heal the internet-broken brain. I think, instead, we might just have to write to it, in the knowledge that the damage is done and cannot be undone.
Is that too defeatist? Depressing?
Maybe. But telling a man who’s paralyzed from the waist-down to just get up out of his wheelchair and start breakdancing is simply cruel. And I’d frankly rather write to the broken brain than not write at all.
Still (to end this post with a white pill) it may be possible to not only undo the damage, but undo it rather quickly. Prior to writing The Adderall Diaries, author Stephen Elliott conducted an experiment in which he gave up the internet for a month. He described the experience as giving him back his ability to concentrate, to think through complex problems. To, in a word, make him think more like an adult rather than an overstimulated baby.
However (and this is a big “but”) Elliot—despite noting all these benefits accrued from abstaining from the net—shortly thereafter not only returned to his old habits, but started his own website and began spending even more time online.
I guess, then, that promised pill is not quite as white as I thought it would be.
Sorry about that.