"No problem - let me just enter that into my sat-nav…"
unless drivers pass a formidable test - called "The Knowledge" - they are not
allowed to head out onto the roads in one of the iconic vehicles
"The particular part of our brain that stores mental images of space is actually
quite enlarged in London cab drivers," explained Nicholas Carr, author of The
Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
The key to making us concentrate, Mr Carr suggests, is perhaps to make tasks
difficult - a theory which flies in the face of software designers the world
over who constantly strive to make their programs easier to use than the
competition.
Mr Carr says that this simple experiment could suggest that as computer software
becomes easier to use, making complicated tasks easier, we risk losing the
ability to properly learn something - in effect "short-circuiting" the brain