What if too much online activity is adversely affecting our brains? What if continuous partial attention and multiple interruptions are encoding poor learning habits? What if multitasking is a false theory?

John J. Medina, developmental molecular biologist, writes in “Brain Rules” that the brain’s attention ability is not capable of multitasking. When it comes to paying attention multitasking is a myth.

Our best way to get answers is to rely on credible scientific studies. Even without controlled testing, we know that here in America we live in a saturated media environment. We know that constant social media distraction causes accidents. Is it possible that on average children ages 8 to 18 spend 7 hours and 38 minutes a day using entertainment media (Time magazine, Feb. 21).

A recent public survey in Readers Digest reported 43 percent of adults think they spend too much time online; adults spend an average of five hours per day online; 64 percent of adults think kids spend too much time online; and 1 in 16 kids under the age of 5 has a Facebook page, most without identity protection.

Have computers, social networking and other forms of electronic entertainment become the opiate of today’s youth? If we add online shopping to this list the results might be that the entire population of America is addicted.

As we spread our addiction to the underdeveloped nations of the world, the question becomes this: Should entertainment replace working for food and shelter?

But for Georgia the current question is whether a pilot program of replacing textbooks with laptop computers is nothing more than passing out clean needles to new drug users.

I say no thanks to that. Our children need more input to the hippocampus area of their collective brains. They can get that most important input from a book.

CHARLES R. DICKERSON, Cave Spring