The Kojo Nnamdi Show

Credit: Illustration by Flickr user DonkeyHotey. Some rights reserved.

Alexander Graham Bell speaks into a protoype telephone, 1876. Credit: The Early Office Museum via Wikimedia Commons.

Lately it's been hard not to notice the cadre of tech writers who are holding a mirror up to themselves (or just checking their reflection in their iPhone screens) and confessing that they feel less smart and less socially connected after all these years of having had Google's instant search possibilities at their fingertips and Facebook's status updates to keep track of their friends.  The three main arguments we hear most often from this camp are 1). The ease of obtaining information on the Internet means most of us only have a superficial and fleeting understanding of the topics we read about and research online; 2). The frenetic pace at which most of us jump from source to source online is shortening our attention spans and turning us off from substantive treatments of issues; and 3). We're missing out on life in the real world because of all the time we're spending in the virtual one.

This month's issue of The Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology features an article by a team of researchers at Boston University who have discovered a link between repetitive head trauma and a type of brain disorder similar to ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease):

View of downtown Silver Spring from Silver Spring Metro station. Credit: Flickr user Mastery of Maps. Some rights reserved.