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drowns out their awareness of everything else around them or maybe an overestimation of their own ability to multitask is leading to more subtle cognitive drawbacks than being hit by a bus.

Whatever the reason, many people are becoming too dependent on their smartphones for their own good. One of the classic measures of overdependence is automated, unthinking behaviour. How often have you seen people in your midst failing to resist the temptation to pull out their phone the moment they hear it beep, buzz, ring or feel it vibrate? Have you noticed that this often happens regardless of whether or not the circumstances make it appropriate to do so? The most popular times seem to be during meetings, in restaurants or while attempting tricky driving manoeuvres.

      Should such unsociable, at times rude and potentially dangerous tech habits be tolerated on the basis that “you can't stop progress?” There is no definitive answer to this; it is down to each and every one of us to decide for ourselves. One thing, however, is becoming apparent, whether it is you, family members, friends, colleagues or complete strangers that you've witnessed doing this – it's a fairly safe bet to make that you are now so familiar with these scenarios that you're beginning to accept them as the norm.

      On a related topic, “cybermigration” describes a phenomenon where certain new behaviours slowly become acceptable online and then, before you know it, those same types of behaviour suddenly become tolerated in the real world too. When this kind of thing happens, people can unwittingly find themselves affected by cultural changes driven through technology, even if they don't use it themselves!

      Social cooling effect

      Tech natives who spent most of their adolescence in a world where more or less everyone owned a smartphone may have become more self‐conscious than previous generations. Teens used to be notorious for acting out, taking risks to show off to their friends or play the fool. Now that everybody has a camera on them and in seconds the photos they take can end up on the internet forever, young people have become more wary about taking the chance of getting snapped doing something stupid.

Will technology ruin our brains?

      To date, most of the available evidence on whether digital technology is good or bad for your brain is still in its early stages and is a bit of a mixed bag. Studies are being conducted at this very moment in an attempt to provide hard data to establish whether our obsessive use of gadgets is having unintended negative consequences. The trouble is that, with lightning‐fast changes in technology, it's a bit of a moving target. Trying to study the impact of any given type of technology is hampered by the fact that it often changes dramatically from one year to the next, as does how people actually use it. This makes it very difficult to work out exactly what causes the various changes in behaviour and brain structure. That said, a few studies have already hit the academic press from which we can start to forecast the likely future findings.

      The truth is, technology in and of itself is neither good nor bad. The problems generally arise when people overuse it. Your malleable brain, as you are now more than aware, will accommodate the demands of any environment, whether it is physical or virtual in nature. The ongoing adjustments to the demands of the digital environment happen, for better or for worse, whether you like it or not, for as long as you continue to engage regularly, intensively and consistently with any given technology.

      In addition to this, as we know, old habits – once formed through repetition – die hard. For instance, eating habits adopted in childhood (when metabolism is relatively high) almost always continue into adulthood (when metabolism inevitably slows down). In the absence of regular intensive exercise to burn through it, the consequent excess of calories leads to an expanding waistline – a scenario familiar to all but the most disciplined of eaters.

The same principle can be applied to technology. Once a person develops a reliance on technology, including an expectation of regular messages and online updates, any interruption to the flow of communication can lead to panic. They might find themselves throwing a hissy fit when unable to get a connection or, worse still, fall into a spiral of depression when a whole day passes by without hearing the reassuring ping of messages or seeing likes on their social media posts.

      Smartphones: the adult pacifier

      Many people effectively use their smartphone as a “comforter.” Just as a crying baby can be calmed down when given a dummy (aka pacifier) to suck on, many adults these days gain a similar comfort from picking up their smartphones. The trouble with this is that recent research suggests that the more people look at their phones each day, the less self‐insight they have. Personal realizations and breakthroughs in interpersonal problems usually follow periods of intense internal debate. But these internal debates simply don't happen very often if a person is constantly looking at their smartphone whenever they're alone.

Staying in to play

      With some people spending up to two months per year glued to it, a big concern for a long time was the amount of time people spent watching television. With the average household now having more screens in it than people, the latest worry is over the amount of time being devoted to computer games. With so many spending huge chunks of their lives participating, a major concern with video gaming has been that the violent nature of many titles might be leading to a new generation of morally corrupt individuals. It turns out that there is little evidence to support this.

      In the case of both excessive TV watching and video game playing, the main problems revolve around displacement of time that could have been spent doing something more useful, such as socialising with friends face‐to‐face, rather than connected by microphones and headphones to enable fluid team coordination in the latest gaming craze to hit the “massively multiplayer online game” world.

A huge amount of valuable information is lost in any form of communication that doesn't do a good job of conveying a person's facial expressions and body language. This is this case when socialising through videoconferencing apps and video games, but also it also happens when socialising in person under circumstances where everyone spends most of the time looking down at screens instead of at each other's faces. Because body language is the raw material our brain circuits use to help us understand the emotions that other people are experiencing – circuitry that enables us to empathise with others – the concern is that these brain areas might not develop very well in the first place or might struggle to maintain these important interpersonal skills according to the principle of “use it or lose it.”

      It's not all bad, though. There are actually several brain benefits to be had when gaming enthusiasts clock up many hours playing “first‐person” action video games (where you see through the eyes of a character as you shoot anything that moves). Brains adapt to the perceptual and cognitive demands of such virtual worlds, leading to unexpected, positive enhancements in several areas. Superior visual perception, visual short‐term memory, spatial cognition, mental rotation, multitasking and rapid decision‐making improvements have all been demonstrated, compared to an equivalent amount of video game play that doesn't involve running around shooting at fast‐moving objects.

      The trouble with the youth of today

      When driving in my car I often stop just down the road from where I live to let a group of teenagers coming home from school cross the road. Every time I do this, I get the distinct feeling that both my car and myself are invisible. I don't think in the past two years any of them have ever put their hand up in acknowledgement of me stopping for them or even given me so much as a nod of recognition that I exist. This worries me.

      It could be that they simply lack the confidence to engage with others outside their group, particularly an adult. Maybe they just don't have the social skills to do it or perhaps common courtesy isn't particularly high up on their agenda. They appear to be so wrapped up in their own worlds that they are oblivious to everything around them. I've often thought that the possible cause

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