Hey everybody! Turn off your computers and think for a change. (Okay, after you’ve read this post.) I’ve written about this before but the problem is only getting worse so I feel the need to beret you again.

All of our interconnectivity has lead social scientists to coin a new symptom: FOMO, or “fear of missing out.” For those of you who are wired 18 hours a day–with cell phones, email and Facebook connected directly to your veins–you may be damaging not only your personal relationships but also your brain.

In his new book “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” social critic Nicholas Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf, a development psychologist at Tufts University: “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.” Wolf frets that the style of reading promoted by the Net may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that helps us make “rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction.”

We’re reduced, instead to “mere decoders of information.” Exploring the science of neuroplasticity–the way the brain can be rewired–Carr writes that we may be rewiring our brain cells to make them incapable of “calm-linear thought, the ones we draw on when we reflect on our experiences or contemplate an outward or inward phenomenon.”

Instead, we become like Pavlov’s dogs, snapping at whatever bits of electronic stimuli come our way, acquiring lots of information but little wisdom.

Given that the average executive receives 178 messages a day, including phone and email, according to British psychologist David Lewis, we fall into information fatigue syndrome or “data smog.” Given this berrage of information, is it any wonder that our major corporations are in a continual state of financial crisis? We know both too much and too little.

When I was still practicing law, one of my favorite clients called me one day, to complain about his bill. Girding my loins to listen to his lament, I heard instead that he loved all the little codes on his bill that told him how much I spent my time on his case in tenths of an hour but wondered why there was no code for thinking, “the most important activity for which I am paying you?”

How about you? Do you have a code for thinking? Are you actually engaged in this most important activity at any time during your day?

If not, tune in, turn off and shut down. Think for a change today.