We have outsourced our brains to Google

It’s always worrying when you see some made-up hybrid word in the papers, the kind intended to encapsulate a terrible new development in the zeitgeist, and then you start worrying that this modish word does in fact give an awful warning of the shape of things to come. The sinister creation I currently find myself seeing is “Googleheimer’s”, whereby you think of something to Google but by the time you come to do it you’ve forgotten what it was. But it could come to mean something quite different.

Like many people, I’m prone to taking out my smartphone at any and every opportunity – in answer to questions like “Hey, what was that … ?”, “Who starred in … ?”, “What’s that word that means … ?”. While talking in a group, questions like this increasingly elicit a stumped silence while we all wonder how much time we’re allowed to let go by before admitting defeat and reaching for our phones. It may just be my imagination, but I think I’ve started doing it a bit more lately.

Could it be that we are increasingly outsourcing our memory capacity to Google? Surely the firm itself should be devoting some of its staggering corporate wealth to medical research into Googleheimer’s and the general deleterious effect this highly accessible website is having on our brains. Soon the day will come when, as if in some sci-fi dystopia, we shall see the streets thronged with bewildered, dead-eyed people of all ages droning into their phones: “Google … where do I live? What’s my name?”

Ow does that help?

The Journal of Pain, a scientific publication, has released research showing that when we hurt ourselves, saying “Ow!” is an important and necessary thing to dobecause “Ow!” interferes with pain messages travelling to the brain. Erm, excuse me? The word I use is “Owffff …” with the swear-word (sometimes) curtailed.

Surely what the Journal of Pain should be analysing is the mysterious and occult power of swearwords to impede the transmission of these pain messages. Swearing always seems to me to have a function entirely different from language and the expression of meaning. Shouting the F-word is basic, physiological – like sneezing.

And each language system constructs its own taboo expressions, and effectively licenses transgressions in moments of crisis. But it still baffles me: when French people stub their toes, or when Italians bump their heads, what possible relief can they get from words such as putain or stronzo? Please. And what relief can any of us seriously get from “Ow”?

People are enthralled at footage ofStephen Fry giving the RTÉ presenter Gay Byrne both barrels on the subject of God: “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?” Clearly nettled by Byrne’s sly opening remarks about Oscar Wilde’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism, Fry made this interviewer rue the day he presumed to invoke his hero. Byrne looked a bit stunned at having his bum kicked so mightily.

A few years ago, there was a fashion for onstage debates on the subject of God, with the likes of Fry, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens hammering their opponents, who were generally prickly reactionaries or gentle clerics. Hitchens even debated with that tiresomely obvious bogeyman Tony Blair. It’s all too easy. When will the atheists find an adversary worthy of them?

Well, this week David Oyelowo was interviewed in this paper by my colleague Ryan Gilbey. Oyelowo is the brilliant British actor who has given an electrifying performance as Martin Luther King in Selma, and also a highly charismatic and articulate man who has spoken of his Christian faith and how it guided him in this role. Fry v Oyelowo on the subject of God? That’s something we might have to book the O2 Arena for.