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In my clinic, a woman in her early 40s recently described something she called “brain lapse”. She is an academic and sharp as a blade, a voracious reader and someone who has held many tasks front of mind for many years. She told me that now, however, she finds herself struggling to follow a television drama. She loses the thread of conversations with her partner and states that she picks up her phone to check one thing (a single thing, she swears) and emerges 40 minutes later having watched a stranger assemble a complicated recipe from scratch and cried at a video of a dog reuniting with its family after a weather disaster. “I feel like my brain has been replaced with a knock-off,” she said. “It’s like I’m running on low-power mode all the time.”
She’s not alone. Across my practice, clients of all ages from teenagers to people in their mid-50s are reporting the same symptoms: reduced memory, shortened attention spans, reduced ability to concentrate. Nearly all of them trace the decline to the same source – the smartphone that lives in their pocket, their palm, their bedside table, their bathroom counter, sometimes even the toilet. The almost permanent fixture in the space between them and every moment of potential boredom.
