Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
JAMIE BARRETT Accounting for around 60% to 70% of cases of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease causes apathy and progressive loss of memory and cognitive function in later life. An estimated 50 million people worldwide have the disease, and in ageing populations this number will continue to rise, so there has been significant investment in this research topic. This has uncovered two unusual suspects that may allow us to treat the condition: the common herpes virus and bacteria that infect the gums. Early dementia research involved examining brain tissue after death. This linked Alzheimer’s to buildups of two proteins, known as tau and amyloid, in the brain. Deposits of tau create threads that join together and tangle up between neurons while deposits of amyloid clump together among cells to form plaques. In 198 4, this gave rise to the amyloid hypothesis, which suggests that these protein deposits directly cause Alzheimer’s. Subsequently, in the 1990s, large investments were made to develop ...