Five Hours On The Internet And The Naive Subjects Had Already Rewired Their Brains

Nicholas Carr writes for Wired about the negative effect that web browsing has had on our power of concentration. Adapted from his new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Carr expands on concepts he considered two years ago for the Atlantic. He starts with the results of a study that point to how rapidly and profoundly Internet usage is literally changing the structure of our brain.

She Had Scratched Through Her Skull During the Night and All the Way Into Her Brain

From The New Yorker archives, Atul Gawande examines why we itch:

Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience. In Dante’s Inferno, falsifiers were punished by “the burning rage / of fierce itching that nothing could relieve”

I’m So Afraid I’ll Get Pregnant Again, I Freeze When You Just Kiss Me

“Joan and Ken Harper’s marriage was on the rocks — Because they loved each other!” So begins a 1956 comic book published by Planned Parenthood. The comic tells the story of a young married couple who, four years into their marriage, have three children and are terrified that expressing their love for each other might result in another pregnancy.