Merryn Somerset Webb

And I'm really interested in this bit because I actually got some rouse on social media about this recently.

About whether if you read very fast, which I do, that...

affects your ability to recognize faces because it's the same part of the brain.

And what you say here is that the connection between the hemispheres thickened.

I'm not quite sure what that means.

I'm going to leave you to explain that.

But this intellectual shift led to a biological shift.

We had the author of that on the podcast a while back.

Such a good book.

Interesting, because we tend to think that, as you say, that's evolutionary and it should take thousands and thousands of years.

There should be generations of tiny little bits of change until the result appears.

But this can happen in no time at all.

And reading spread quite slowly, right?

Not everybody learned to read in a year, but everyone who can read now has access to AI immediately.

So it's much faster.

Yeah.

And you say as well that you now understand why Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Interesting.

OK, so it sounds when you put it like that, it sounds as though civilization itself will be transformed by these three things.

Okay, well, let's look at what happens when we allow it to happen passively, right?