From Douglas Coupland’s latest Financial Times column, a bit about the way we live now, with brains not yet literally plugged into hardware though they might as well be:

“It is incontestable that we are collectively rebuilding our neural structures. For example, notice how, when telling people about an idea to be researched later, the goal is to rattle off search words as a means of establishing future locatability. ‘When you get home just google MOTHER TERESA, TOPLESS and LAWSUIT. You’ll find what I’m talking about right away.’

The way we’re collectively redefining searchability is a reflection of the way we now collectively file away information in our brains – or the way we don’t. One of the great joys of life in 2014 is that we’re all getting much better at knowing what it is we no longer need to know. Freedom from memorisation! Having said this, there’s a part of me that misses being able to bullshit people at dinner parties without having an iPad coming out before dessert to sink an urban legend or debunk a stretched truth.

I wonder if nostalgia for the 20th-century brain is a waste of time. WhiIe I may sometimes miss my pre-internet brain, I certainly don’t want it back.

Everyone’s quick to dump on new technologies but how quickly we forget a two-hour trek in the 1990s to the local library to find something as mundane as a pet supply store phone number in the Yellow Pages in a city 20 miles away.”