Before I toss away yesterday’s copy of The Wall Street Journal, which I occasionally buy while in Zagreb, I give it another quick look. A moment later I am surprised by a book review that I have missed thus far. It starts with “information overload,” a term coined by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970, which has become a chronic condition in the western world in the meanwhile. The reviewer is a professor of psychology, and the writer a cognitive neuroscientist. The focus of the review, and apparently the book itself, is on the brain’s working memory and attention, both of which are stretched to the limit in the information age. “We are easily distracted because we vastly overvalue what happens to us right now compared with what comes in the future,” I read, “and also because novelty is intrinsically rewarding.” The first thought that crosses my mind is that under conditions of chronic information overload we overvalue what happens to us right now even more than ever before. In fact, we have become locked in the present. The present has become permanent, as it were, while the future and the past have been banished from our minds. After a quick glance through the rest of the review, which fails to reach such overarching conclusions, I toss the newspaper away.