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manage it more effectively.Because of today’s data deluge our attention is being chopped into shorter intervals.With some people ing, texting and talking simultaneously, continual partial attention has bee monplace. Yet recent research suggests multitasking usually makes one less efficient because the brain is less adept at memorising bits of information.At the same time, much of what people are exposed to is superficial. In turn, this raises the question, what is the impact on our brains?. Does the bombardment adversely affect our ability to think at a deeper level? Is this volume of munication at the expense of intelligent thought?Currently, the jury is out on whether the web will change how we think? For example, neuroscientist, Joshua Greene of Harvard argues that ‘‘the Internet hasn’t changed the way we think, it has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn’t changed what we do with it’’. Similarly, cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, also of Harvard is sceptical. On the other hand, Howard Rheingold, a munications scholar believes that the internet fosters ‘‘shallowness, credulity, distraction’’, whilst Evgeny Morogov, an expert on the internet and politics argues that ‘‘our lives are increasingly lived in the present, pletely detached even from the most recent of the past. Our ability to look back andengage with the past is one unfortunate victim’’.One result of the ubiquity of information is that we are less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the internet. In turn, there is less sustained thought.Information overload can stifle effective decision making. So, one should aim to keep in one’s head the information that impacts on one’s goals, and it is essential to have an action plan to achieve them.Our shortterm memory cannot deal with more than five to nine things at the same time.Hence, it is no wonder that things get forgotten. Shifting from one task to another plicates matters by knocking out what information we had in our shortterm memories.So, we need to get things out of our brains as fast as possible.This can be achieved in a variety of ways, many of which are very simple, and very effective.For example, one can carry small cards in one’s lefthand jacket pocket. For things which are important and require