The Overstimulated Sapiens

Your brain is responding to an environment it was never designed to inhabit.

We have never had more information-and fewer opportunities to be genuinely bored.
For most of human history, attention moved between effort and vacancy, conversation and silence, concentration and wandering. We walked without carrying an infinite stream of information in our pockets.

Then the environment changed.
Screens filled the empty spaces. Notifications interrupted concentration. Social comparison became continuous. Boredom became something to eliminate. Even solitude acquired a feed.

In The Overstimulated Sapiens, Gavin Thorne investigates what this extraordinary environmental shift is doing to a brain and nervous system that evolved under very different conditions.

Drawing on neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Thorne moves from wartime radar operators and the brain's activity at rest to compulsive checking, adolescent development, loneliness, empathy and the loss of spaces where generations once met.

A different picture emerges.
Perhaps our inability to concentrate is not a failure of discipline. Perhaps boredom is not wasted time, and the mind-wandering we interrupt serves a purpose. A nervous system saturated with stimulation may not need another productivity technique.
The Overstimulated Sapiens is not an argument against technology. It is an investigation into the biological bargain we made when technology became almost impossible to leave-and what we might recover by occasionally putting it down.

Because the next great leap in human intelligence may begin with something we have almost forgotten how to do.

Absolutely nothing.