Will you read and immediately forget this?

Quote: “There’s a new disease out there. It’s called SRD — Scan Reading Disorder. Have you heard of it? It’s a newly diagnosed behavioural problem resulting from the overuse of email and online browsing. It’s closely associated with the visual impairment that sometimes results from squinting and staring at your mobile device or tablet for long periods.

“Some of the symptoms include: reading and immediately forgetting what was in the email; spying your name in the third paragraph and skipping the first two; reading every other line; reading but mixing up the details; looking for aaction items connected to your name and disregarding all others; ignoring the email because your name is in the ”CC’ line and not the ‘TO’ line; composing an email and forgetting to send it while thinking that you had; reading and not remembering a thing. These are just a few symptoms — there are likely many more.

“We get too many emails; hundreds per week. Some of you may get a hundred or more per day. One researcher says we send and receive on average 121 emails per day…. I know one engineer who has given up trying to empty their inbox.”

From “Scan Reading Disorder,” by Grant Koropatnick, P.Eng., executive director and registrar of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Manitoba (APEGM) in The Keystone Professional, Fall 2014, page 11.