We all know the perils of kids and computers -- I don't mean that whole thing about how sexual predators find kids online, I'm talking about things like kids buying term papers on the web or skipping actual research for school projects by deferring to the not-always-accurate entries at Wikipedia. The Internet is an incredibly useful way to connect with people and find information, but new research is showing that too much web surfing may be changing the way our brains work.

In a long essay in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr looks at how Google is making us stupid. He talks about a phenomena that is familiar to many of us who spend long hours online: we've lost our ability to read, to lose ourselves in text. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Scientists and theorists are looking at how this kind of virtual jet skiing is changing our brains, moving us from readers who follow the sense of long, complex sentences to decoders who "power browse" for information only. Because our brains -- even our adult brains -- are plastic and malleable, this constant skimming may be rewiring the way we think.

As parents, it seems important that we are aware of this, for a couple of reasons. We all know how important it is to read to our pre-literate kids, but once they are old enough to read on their own we may slack off. But the new findings about the Internet and reading offer one more reason to push traditional books on our kids -- and on ourselves as well. Because while it's easy to skim a blog post for information, there is great value in real books, with long sentences and complex ideas. We just need to keep our brains in shape for that kind of reading.