How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? ed by John Brockman: review Thankfully, many of Edge's essayists violently disagree with each other. To some, the internet is "a work of genius, one of the highest achievements of the human species" (Richard Dawkins) and "the most human of technologies" (the historian Noga Arikha). To others, it is "the greatest detractor to serious thinking since the invention of the television" (the neurobiologist Leo Chalupa) and "nothing more... than a very useful, and very dumb, butler" (the neuroscientist Joshua Greene). The essays are peppered with insights. These include a theory that virtual cities will encourage states of psychosis, as real cities already do, and the observation that what we call old media (books, newspapers, television) are, in fact, very recent inventions, whereas websites based on communal sharing, such as Facebook, signal a return to prehistoric, tribal patterns of communication. Some essays are detailed and logical, advancing their case via bullet points; others verge on the poetic: "where has slowness gone?" The answer to the question posed in this anthology's title appears, at least in biological terms, to be no. Or rather, not yet. "We know this," says Mark Pagel, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading, "because we can still visit some people on Earth who don't have the internet, and they think the same way we do. My general-purpose thinking circuits are hard-wired into my brain from genetic instructions honed over millions of years of natural selection. The internet may not have evolved Pagel's brain but it is clearly influencing his choice of metaphor. It is true that learning a new skill - such as solving crosswords or playing the piano - does reshape our brains. The hippocampus enlarges in the brains of London cabbies as they learn the Knowledge. It doesn't mean, however, that cabbies think in a fundamentally different way from the rest of us. They do, of course; it's just not the fault of their enlarged hippocampi. It is also pleasing to read that people who claim the internet has improved their "multitasking skills" are talking rot. "Genuine multitasking, at present, probably exceeds the limitations of the attentional system of Homo sapiens," the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says. To illustrate the same point, Steven Pinker quotes Woody Allen's joke about how a speed-reading course enabled him to read War and Peace in 20 minutes. Allen's exegesis: "It involves Russia." The process of compiling and reading this book is an example of how the internet is both a help and a hindrance. Canvassing the opinions of so many far-flung thinkers would have taken months, if not years, of correspondence prior to the invention of email. Yet I'm glad it is available as a printed book. If its 140 short essays had been displayed on a website, there is no way I would have finished them. My mind would have flitted elsewhere, you would now be staring at a blank white space and I would probably have lost £25 playing online poker. In fact, the only moments when I was able to think in a steady, concentrated way about the impact of the internet on my intellectual capacity came at times when I was forcibly disconnected from it: standing in the shower; going for a jog. The internet may not have changed the way we think, yet. But it is affecting our ability to concentrate. Nevertheless, is it fair to blame a brilliant new technology for our failure to use it productively? Instead of playing poker, I could have downloaded War and Peace. How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? ed by John Brockman 408PP, Atlantic t £17.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy this book from Telegraph Books (RRP £19.99, ebook £7.16)