Are we living in a stupidogenic society?

The cognitive muscles we no longer exercise

The photo below is of me with my grandmother standing by her market stall in Petticoat Lane, a street market in London. When that photo was taken, she’d worked on that stall every Sunday for nearly 50 years. Working on a market stall gives you many skills, and one of them was that she was incredibly quick at mental arithmetic. A couple of years before that photo was taken, I remember asking her if I could count some of the coins from a day’s takings. I had seen her do it so many times, and she made it look so easy. After a minute or so, I realised it wasn’t. My hands and my brain just…

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