The Brain is Wider than the Sky

Award-winning features writer Bryan Appleyard draws on past interviews and research to examine today's IT cloud, or "the various networked devices that have insinuated their ways into our daily lives". A gadget man himself, he isn't advocating binning your iPad but rather, warns against oversimplifying oneself in order to fit within the limitations of today's technology. "On the one hand, they [new technologies] seduce us, we want them to contain, include and involve us; on the other hand, they demand that we become more 'machine readable'." He cites phone trees, the automated systems that when calling an organisation, only ever seem to offer ill-fitting options. The title The Brain is Wider than the Sky borrows from the Emily Dickinson poem, which celebrates the infinite capaciousness of the brain. In the tradition of limitlessness, Appleyard allows his train of thought to wander from scientific studies to the arts to popular culture, picking out examples that demonstrate our unrelenting complexity. His skill lies in his ability to present each topic as equally accessible, while driving the point home that we are bigger than our Facebook status.