If too much reading of Twitter has driven you a bit mad and you’ve started to fancy yourself an online knight in shining armor, make sure you too have someone like Sancho Panza around.

It can be and has been argued that Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the first modern “novel.” It has been a hugely influential work. Don Quixote contains a quote that seems to be more relevant today than it was in Cervantes’s day:

“In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

Any present or former college student has likely felt like this has happened to them at one point or another during an all night study session, but anyone who spends a lot of time online will easily relate to this as well. If you go online looking for information on anything going on in the world today and you read more than one source, you often find yourself faced with multiple conflicting documents. Spend too much time on some issues, and it can make you feel like you’ve lost your mind

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on keithmathison.org—however, the link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]