Ah, the good old Wikipedia Effect. I think we could phrase it more precisely like this: when following anything anecdote-like, your mind becomes unaware of the

Ah, the good old Wikipedia Effect. I think we could phrase it more precisely like this: when following anything anecdote-like, your mind becomes unaware of the causal process of following connections, and perhaps even unaware of the time spent doing so (although that might be more of an effect of Flow[1]). If anything, this article is too shallow: I have actually gone past the consumption level and into a further abyss, at times. What I mean is, it's possible to crave an even deeper high, and to receive one. The "trick", if self-destructive behavior can be called that, is that your brain has many different centers, like a language center and an audio center -- some of which are mostly idling while you're consuming information. You can use those zones to consume other information. So, like, I will sometimes play FreeCell (or solve other logic puzzles) while watching a lecture sped up by 33% to eliminate the time wasted by the "ums". The only limitation is eyestrain from staring at a screen too long and that feeling you get after about half an hour of delicious "too-much-ness". Not all of the mechanisms of addiction transfer. So, here is one of the central mechanisms of addiction, the mechanism of escalation: an addict consumes Z in order to feel better in some sense -- a rush or an altered mental state -- but as time goes on, they build up a tolerance. They stop consuming Z to feel better. They start consuming Z to feel normal instead. That particular situation doesn't happen nearly so much with information, unless you count being nonplussed when you hear someone say something that you've already thought about. The central problem of addiction is also only incompletely transferred over. I am not consuming information in order to lose control, which is what seems to shift e.g. alcohol-abuse into alcohol addiction. I was for a while addicted to the game Morrowind because I would actually jump into it in order to waste a day -- that was my goal, to lose control of myself. We need to make this distinction early: there is information abuse -- getting so saturated with information that you don't actually do anything with it -- and then there is information addiction, where the information itself wouldn't be interesting to you, if you weren't going to get lost in it. [1] What I mean is that creation is not an antidote to losing-track-of-time, and therefore that's not really central to the problem. It is easy to create so much that one forgets to be productive: I will often lose track of the time when I am helping people with mathematics and physics; or even just now, as I am writing this on Hacker News. I could have been programming something useful to my larger goals instead.