“Believe me, this is not nourishing the mind with literature, but killing and burying it with the weight of things or, perhaps, tormenting it until, frenzied by so many matters, this mind can no longer taste anything, but stares longingly at everything, like Tantalus thirsting in the midst of water.” That was 14th-century Italian scholar and poet Petrarch on the technology he thought was tormenting the human mind. What was it? Books. Joe Stadolnik in Aeon: We’ve always been distracted. “Worried that technology is breaking your brain? Fears about attention spans and focus are as old as writing itself.”