"Digital dementia and digital overload are new phenomena,” says Dr. Robin Hsiung, a clinical neurologist at the UBC Clinic for Alzheimer Disease and Related Disorders, pointing to a study that shows how just one newspaper today has more information than a person in the 1800s accumulated over their lifetime. “And now we have digital information constantly coming at us. This is a changing phenomenon that’s not yet well studied, but what we do know is that we have more distractions from screens than before and we’re seeing issues like shorter attention spans in the younger generation, for example.