In the old days—old days for us anyway—when you were doing the washing up or mowing the lawn, you’d have time to think. And these days, we increasingly seem to be accomplishing these tasks with headphones on, with YouTube and podcasts. So are these inputs helping us think? Or are we stopping ourselves thinking by importing other people’s thoughts, ... See more

obsessionally attached, non self-aware mind-wandering with no interrupt mechanisms (Ctrl-Z for you programmers), is bad.

What happens when we replace boredom with constant distraction and stimulation? Warnings about the harmful effects of too much stimulation are nothing new. “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli,” Sigmund Freud observed. But given the range and speed of stimuli at our di... See more