Nicholas Carr feels our Google-induced pain in an essay for the July issue of The Atlantic: The once-unified attention span has been fragmented, leading us to skim across the surface of information whose depths we’ll never penetrate; or else to penetrate straight to some particular depth without passing through all the others—a journey without context or commitment. In the article, Carr asks “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He doesn’t quite answer the question, but it’s a good one.

Google isn’t really entitled to be the solitary villain in the piece, but because it functions as the Internet’s index page it is surely the hub of our Great Distraction. Carr therefore strikes a chord (I was unable to read the piece in one sitting). Of his friends and acquaintances he writes in his essay, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.” Of himself, he writes, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

We all know the beauty and bane of hyperlinking’s fickle mechanics—one click and you’re gone. A matrix of gaudy enticements often surrounds a piece of text and tempts the reader to check a stock or a score or the weather. I can’t say that these phenomena are making us stupid—there’s too much compensating value that weighs against that harsh judgment—but I absolutely believe that they’re making us different.

Not better, necessarily, but different. It’s true, as Carr writes, that a Google search can do in five minutes what “once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries.” Like Carr, however, I miss the ability to focus, and I suspect that this deficit has compromised my thought process in yet undiscovered ways. I know this isn’t a singular affliction—it’s not just me and Nick Carr. Businesses are filled now with similarly compromised attention spans. The growing incapacity to dive deeply into long, intellectually demanding sources of information may constitute a cognitive disability that threatens a wide range of business competencies.

But recognizing the problem is the first step to solving it. Why can’t we recover the skills we’ve lost without surrendering what we’ve gained? If sedentary workers can regain their physical fitness by going to the gym, can’t someone design a cognitive workout that restores the capacity for focus and concentration? Where is today’s version of Evelyn Wood (the speed-reading coach of the 1960s), someone who can train us to read deeper rather than faster?

Roderick Gilkey and Clint Kilts argue that not only can individuals enhance their cognitive fitness, but leaders can promote “brain-positive” cultures. Edward Hallowell also recommends several tactics for counteracting “attention deficit trait.”

What techniques have you found for improving your attention span—without banishing Google from your desktop?