I always marvel when I see the handwritten manuscripts of authors who wrote in the period before computers existed. The ability to organise information so well in our minds in this way may have been lost to the word processor. Now a neuroscientist [here] warns that artificial intelligence could ‘… kill your memory, fracture your attention span and wreck your creativity over time’. As computers offer new abilities, we may lose our mental equivalents. This could result in a kind of ‘digital dementia’. With mental as well as physical abilities, the phrase ‘use it or lose it’ would seem to apply.