Rebecca Barry: Digital tsunami drowns life as we know it

When your stomach grumbles and you reach automatically for your phone to check a nonexistent text message, is it a sign of techno-cranial misfiring?

When you're stuck in a traffic jam and find yourself thinking, "control-alt-delete", should you step away from the vehicle?

When your long black fails to kick in and you attempt to "restart", is it time to pull the plug?

No. These rising afflictions, brought on by our all-consuming digital age, are actually evolutionary traits.

Famous British scientist Professor Susan Greenfield reckons that unless we wake up to the damage our gadget-filled 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be heading towards a future in which technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, between our bodies and the outside world.

This is great news. We'll finally be able to talk like robots, an aspiration we've harboured since Star Wars and have come close to with txt speak lol. If we're lucky, we might dance like them, too.

The professor goes on: it would be a world where such devices could enhance our muscle power (great) our senses (what?) - a place where we'd take a daily cocktail of drugs to control our moods and performance (haven't Kiwis been doing this every Friday for years?).

What she doesn't report is that there are many reasons to celebrate our re-wired grey matter, care of gadgets and the fragmented bits of knowledge that come through them. It's beneficial for wallflowers, for instance.

As our brain circuits that involve face-to-face contact become weaker and the more time we spend online, the awkward kids won't feel so left out. We won't waste so much time enjoying food or commiserating over the price of milk.

With less need for taste and smell, senses will gradually be superseded by our online addictions. We'll get just as much satisfaction out of a big bowl of oaty sloop than we would tucking into a three-hour degustation with matching wines.

We'll communicate better. As the time we spend on face-to-face contact with others decreases, losing us the ability to interpret non-verbal messages, we'll have to rely more on the verbal kind. "Oh hail no," a pretty young thing might spell out to an eager suitor proposing to buy her a drink.

"I find you as attractive as a Motorola Retrobrick. Please back away immediately."

We'll become more self-aware.

Isolation leads to introspection, which leads to greater self-interest.

I'm sure the Dalai Lama would agree that the more interest we pay ourselves, the better off we'll all be.

We won't have to hang out with nerds.

Given that now equates to 94 per cent of the population (anyone who spends inordinate amounts of time staring at a screen), there's a huge number of people you can cross off your Christmas card list.

We can let ourselves go. No one's looking up, anyway. No one's noticed that the pictures we put on Facebook are Photoshopped.

We won't have to think. Scientists have found that GPS and Google Maps give us directions to follow but no context to put them in. So we're less able to think abstractly and more likely to forget something, like why we were going to visit that person we barely know in the first place.

We'll save the environment. One e-book at a time. We'll be easy to find. Thanks to 3G phones, Big Brother will be able to look out for us at all times.

We'll never get bored. With such a deluge of information coming at us 24/7, we'll be more prone to panic and irrational reactions to emails, blogs and websites we can't look at on the iPad because they use Flash.

Laptop-hurling will become an Olympic sport.

We'll process information faster. Those who spend more time reading webpages and playing video or computer games are able to process visual information and translate symbols at a much faster rate than those who don't.

So we'll quickly spot when that huge arm comes grabbing at us from out of the screen, and that'll leave plenty of time to find a nice spot on the floor at which to rock in the fetal position and wait for the robots.