There were three items of interest forwarded to my inbox last week. They are factual but sound like science fiction because in them, the Web emerges to become the "ghost in the machine", a kind of amorphous link between bodies, minds and even machines.

First off, are your conversations increasingly interrupted by the need to go online and check information: What was the name of that guy? What year was it? Really? And how often do you turn to a search engine rather than expend the mental energy on recalling those facts or fictions? Increasingly, according to the latest study.

We are adapting to the Internet by adopting it as a cloud computer, an external hard drive for our own brains. It's a similar line of reasoning that hits speed dial on the phone rather than recall a long series of digits. And possibly why names learned long ago stick better than recently learned ones - though this truly does sound more symptomatic of advancing senile dementia.