Growing up digital: wired to their cellphones and computers, students are having more trouble focusing on other things. Will a generation of teens end up with brains that work differently?

• Author: Richtel, Matt
• Position: Cover story

The day before the start of Vishal Singh's senior year in high school, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

Vishal, a bright 17-year-old Californian who spends most of his time on Facebook, YouTube, and making digital videos, has read just 43 pages of his summer reading assignment, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Instead of picking up the book, he clicks to YouTube.

On YouTube, "you can get a whole story in six minutes" he explains. "A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification"

Students have always faced distractions. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, are a new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies is particularly powerful for young people. But because developing brains can get used to constantly switching tasks a lot more easily than adult brains, the risk is that today's teenagers will be less able to stay focused on anything, not just schoolwork.

"Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing," says Michael Rich, a professor at Harvard Medical School and head of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. "The worry is we're raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently."

But even as some educators express unease about students' digital diets, they are increasingly using technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them the skills they need. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet, and mobile devices.

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It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal's school, Woodside High School in Redwood City, California. Here, as elsewhere, it's not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.

27,000 Texts a Month

Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts a month. She texts between classes, the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school, and often while studying. But it comes at a cost: She blames multitasking for the three B's on her recent progress report.

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"I'll be reading a book for homework and I'll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, 'Oh, I forgot to do my homework.'"

Some shyer...