PW: With all our contemporary distractions, is daydreaming en route to being defunct, a lost art?

JS: Daydreaming is definitely threatened, and many of us are our own worst enemies in this regard. Everywhere you go the sidewalks are littered with text-walkers, who I am starting to think are the first wave of the Zombie Apocalypse. We seem to hell-bent on ignoring both our physical surroundings and what might be going on inside our own heads. This leaves us at the mercy of those providing the distracting technologies and the content conveyed. Fighting off the distractions of the wider world has been a human concern since antiquity, and maybe before, but now our electronic distractions move a lot faster than our hunter-gatherer nervous systems can process. We spend a big chunk of our waking hours responding to one or another sensory onslaught.

Still, most of us have the option of reclaiming at least some of the head space lost we’ve given up. Taking a walk without a cellphone or earbuds seems like a start.