I am trying to think about when, exactly, I realized that my brain was wretchedly ill suited to the modern world. Was it when Twitter began? With the internet itself?

Certainly by this current presidency. I know that much.

I think, for instance, of Fridays, often slow days in the news business, when journalists catch up on email and sneak out for haircuts and therapist appointments. Hard to do these days.

Three Fridays ago, Roger Stone was hauled off by guys in blue windbreakers by sunrise and Donald Trump decided by 3 to reopen the government, ending the longest shutdown in history; two Fridays ago, the president suspended one of the last remaining arms control treaties, potentially reigniting the nuclear race.

I am closing this piece on Friday morning. Not yet knowing what will happen, and how much will happen, fills me with an inexpressible relief.

It should be noted that this problem of split-screen consciousness is likely to get worse in the era of divided government, not better. It won’t just be the president laying claim to our attention, but also those who are holding him to account. Even if our government were a paradigm of functionality, we’d surely be fighting for custody of our brains. In 2016, before Trump was elected, Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, examined the daily habits of 40 information workers. She discovered they checked their email 77 times per day, on average, and slalomed between screens every 47 seconds.

Many evolutionary biologists are fond of pointing out that the human body is not adapted to modern life, which often involves sitting for hours at a time and toiling in artificial light and consuming mounds of processed sugar (“There’s no food in your food,” as the Joan Cusack character says in “Say Anything”). But the same design problem, it could be argued, is true of the human brain: It was not engineered to process the volume of information we’re getting, and at the rate we’re getting it.

“Our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time when we might encounter no more than a thousand people across the entire span of our lifetime,” writes the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.”

Recently, I phoned Levitin. He told me he suspects that humans during the Trump era are unwittingly re-enacting the rat experiments that James Olds and Peter Milner did in the 1950s, wherein the creatures repeatedly pressed a lever to feel an electric jolt to their reward centers. The poor subjects became such hostages to gratification that they stopped eating, drinking, even having sex. Eventually, they died of exhaustion.

The business I’m in self-selects for those with a pretty high threshold for those jolts. I stare at my colleagues sometimes and marvel at what a different breed they are, the true exotics of the species: They’re like bugs with eyes all over their heads, evolved to take in several streams of information simultaneously. Walk by their desks, and it looks something like Norad. They’re staring at multiple screens fringed with multiple tabs, while Twitter, email and texts cascade down their phones.

Whereas me? I’m a Cyclops. I tend to see one thing at a time. Before Trump, I could go days without looking at the newspaper. I’m partial to 19th-century novels, and I envy their heroines, who spend their days reading and needlepointing and playing piano. I find it far easier to tolerate the whistling emptiness of boredom than the casino rattle of too much stimulation.

But to opt out of this clanging multiverse is to live in mild estrangement. It’s to feel one’s self become a permanent spectator; to live with the persistent sense that something is always happening elsewhere; to feel old, outlasted, outmatched by the bizarre physics of your own lifetime: The great spinning world has toppled off its axis and rolled away.

It cannot be an accident that the lions of Silicon Valley, who live and die by the information whorl, are bullish on meditation. Bill Gates wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about it, praising the practice for focusing his busy mind. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey meditates, as we all learned from a string of insensitive tweets he recently unleashed from Myanmar. (It’s a fine line between mindfulness and mindlessness, apparently.) When the world’s coming at you in great clouds of 280-character Frisbees, naturally it’s tempting to vanish into the forest dark of your own mind.

Of course, complaints about the unmanageable velocity of the world have been with us since industrialization, if not before. I once joked to my husband that I feared napping because I might miss an indictment. Turns out Henry David Thoreau made a similar complaint in the age of the telegraph. “Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner,” he wrote, “but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”

I’m not convinced, as some people are, that the Twitter fusillades from the White House are part of a larger strategy of distraction, specifically intended to divert us from this particular administration’s malfeasance and failures. I think our president’s attention span is genuinely scattershot. (“Post-literate,” Michael Wolff called him in “Fire and Fury.” Seems about right.) When I imagine his brain, I imagine a bug zapper in a drizzle. 

Bzzzzzzzzzzt. Fzzzz. Bzzz fzzz bzzzzzzzzzzt.