People do this already. To learn to drive a car, ride a bike, ski, or control any other type of vehicle, you go through a learning process where you commit the control procedures to muscle memory. Once you have that covered, you pretty much go where you want to go, without necessarily thinking 'ok, now I need to turn the steering wheel'.

By and large, barring any significant equipment failure, you pretty much go towards whatever has your attention - for better or worse. Target fixation is alive and well in pretty much all of us. If you're on your bike and you keep staring at it, you'll most likely hit it. If you look at the path around it, most likely you won't. It has nothing to do with your ability to control the bike, and everything with the ability to control your attention.

I'll be the first to say that, for encyclopedia-level research, I do just about ALL of it online. Don't think there's anyone on this site who does any differently.

But, as a teenager, I got a full Encyclopaedia Brittanica from my grandmother as a gift. And the nerd in me couldn't keep me from picking up a random volume, leafing through it and waiting for something to catch my eye.

The variation on that would be that I'd look something up, and, in the process of finding the right page, some other entry would catch my eye and I'd read up on something (usually completely unrelated) after finding what I'd originally gone looking for.

Hypertext kicks ass. Ain't no arguing against that one. But search engines show you what you were looking for - it's a lot harder to 'stumble across' completely unexpected stuff on online reference engines. I ain't buying another paper encyclopedia, to be sure... at least not at the price my grandmother paid for mine... but, in the quest for pure, unadulterated trivia, there ain't nothing like it...