Back to today. Modern life is a juiced-up tornado. It is speed, flux, efficiency, and connection. The Technological Revolution has expedited progress in countless fields: science, arts, health, economics, politics. But like the Agricultural Revolution, the outcomes aren’t entirely positive.

As Thomas Friedman, celebrated New York Times

That reliable rate of innovation has vanished. Science fiction-styled technology is being introduced hourly, and humans are having trouble keeping up. Self-driving cars, wildly efficient microchips, lightweight laptops, the ‘Lasers’ effect on iMessage. All these inventions would have been mind-boggling to generations prior.

Describing how to pay for legal marijuana through Interac E-Transfer to a child of the 1910s would necessitate a frustrating, multi-day conference, a platoon of inter-generational translators, and a sky-high number of afterhours demonstrations.

One of Friedman’s anecdotes embodies technology’s new pace:

• In the late 1990s, in response to the nuclear arms moratorium with the Soviet Union, the American government prepared to develop advanced, low-cost super-computers.
• They did this to digitally arm themselves and stay ahead of their enemies abroad.
• They succeeded, and established the first computer able to process a teraflop. A flop is a functional operative process. A teraflop is the ability to perform a bunch of calculations involving decimal points. This is vastly more complicated than decimal-free calculations.
• If a system can process a teraflop, that means it can process one trillion of these calculations every second.
• The system that the American government developed cost $55 million, drained the electricity equivalence of eight hundred houses, and was the size of a tennis court.
• Nowadays, an example of teraflop-computing system is a PlayStation 3. It’s as big as a shoebox and costs $200.

This type of progress is discombobulating. To box-out chaos and maintain order, we have to advance at the same pace as technology — or at least be within spitting distance. But, as Friedman shows, technological advancement has far exceeded what we’re capable of matching by mere evolution. Like the sore and bloated foragers-turned-farmers, we haven’t prepared for the side effects.

We’re modern people living with medieval brains, a mismatch that attracts anxiety, depression, and a host of other conditions.

In a paper written by Gwenn O’Keefe and Kathleen Clarke Pearson titled The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents and Families, it’s revealed that “researchers have proposed a new phenomenon called Facebook depression, defined as depression that develops when preteens and teens spend a great deal of time on social media sites, such as Facebook, and then begin to exhibit classic symptoms of depression.”

The mere thought of the online world is, “thought to be a factor that may trigger depression in some adolescents.”

Norman Doidge, M.D., is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author of two bestselling books. He does research at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and he teaches at the University of Toronto. He knows the brain betterthan the back of his hand.

Doidge is troubled by the incoming effects of social media obsession:

“Everywhere we see people who must check their phones every few moments — according to Adam Alter’s book Irresistible, the average office e-mail goes unanswered for only six seconds. That’s compulsive! They check while driving — that’s harmful — and feel agitation when they can’t. They stay up late, stuck on their computers, and then can’t sleep. In this case, it’s plummeting attention spans, patience, memories or how social media is creating insecurity. So, there are significant mental-health issues involved.”

It’s not just mental health, either. As New York Times columnist Amy Cuddy states, “the slouchy, collapsed position we take when using our phones makes us less assertive and thus less likely to stand up for ourselves when the situation calls for it.”

Scientists have pointed out the health implications of cell phone use in another aspect of our physical well-being, too: sleep. People are sleeping between one and two hours fewer compared to the 1960s, exacerbating everything from cancer and Alzheimer’s risks to Type-2 diabetes and hypertension.

Cuddy’s Times colleague Matt Richel piles on, emphasizing the double-edged dynamic of technology:

“Technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.”

In other words, what if Isaac Newton heard a buzz from his backpack, lurched for his phone, dodged The Falling Apple, and, after getting a new Tinder match, just got a hit of dopamine to the head instead?

It’s another cycle of history, revealing the strain that emerges when excitement and innovation tag-team the human brain. We tire of the status quo, we want change, we innovate. But sometimes it’s too fast, it’s too complex. We try to sail with the current, but the gales above and the waves abroad form the perfect conditions for a shipwreck.