Two major investors have approached Apple regarding smartphone addiction in children.

“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” asked Dr Jean Twenge, whose research prompted these concerns and which you mention in passing above. She has been tracking generational behaviour for 25 years, and she says around 2012, her indicators for teen behaviour all went off a cliff. “In all my analyses of generational data — some reaching back to the 1930s — I had never seen anything like it,” she says.

What happened to cause such a drastic shift? “It was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.”

The figures show that every kind of dysfunction goes up with smartphone use, up to and including suicide. Something very bad is going wrong here. I trained as a physics teacher in London in 1978/79, this is 40 years ago now, I have also watched the generations change. I did some primary school music teaching recently, and in a Third World African country, I can report that the ADD rate in kids is now precisely 100.0%, and no one agrees more on this than the parents. We’re talking about kids across the board, from the brightest to kids with special needs that I have never seen before in my life and cannot even begin to diagnose, not even the widest “autism spectrum” fits. But they all stick their hand up, and then when I say “Yes?” they can’t remember what they were going to ask me. I remember very well doing my primary school training period in a working-class school in London 1978, and those kids were never in doubt what they wanted to say. And I mean never.

In case you think this is anecdotal, I did a master’s degree in science classroom language in South Africa back in the 1980s, when I guarantee you I never saw a single case of anything even remotely approaching ADD in an African student, in 20 years working in black education in South Africa. Now it is pandemic, ask any teacher in that country.

In my research, I found that no one had developed a proper instrument to measure “attention” in the classroom, so I created, tested and validated my own. I had a look around the literature recently, I don’t see anyone who’s even tried to do this properly since then, so I may still be the world expert on measuring “attention” in the classroom. So my observations are those of a trained researcher who spent thousands of hours listening to recordings of actual classroom discourse and preparing verbatim transcripts — a gruelling exercise, but worth every moment.

Until, of course, you enter public discourse, when the very fact that you studied education immediately classes you as a complete idiot. I thought this was only in South Africa, but it seems to be general. Everyone thinks they know better than teachers how to teach. And everyone knows education researchers are the very dumbest people on the planet.

Here, then, are some facts from the scientific literature. A WHO review paper notes 26 studies that report brainwave changes for hours after a few minutes’ exposure to normal cellphone radiation. Nearly all these studies report enhanced components in the low alpha brainwave spectrum, around 8Hz, which corresponds with the main pulsed frequency of GSM phones and others.

The low alpha range is a semi-zombie state, between sleeping and waking, as the mind switches from external to internal attention. Take a look around you, you’ll spot these living zombies everywhere.

WHO and other bodies say there is “no known mechanism” other than simple heating whereby cellphone radiation could affect the body. However, a landmark paper, Friedman et al. (2007), showed that just two minutes of normal cellphone radiation activates a biochemical cascade that sees living human cells flooded with free radicals, a known cause of all kinds of ills including neurological damage, genetic damage and cancer, and metabolic problems. Friedman’s team tracked the mechanism back to one single enzyme, NADH oxidase, which is triggered by the radiation.

This work has been cited by 275 other papers. I have checked with Dr Friedman of the Weizmann Institute’s Science Park — all of these studies confirm and amplify his team’s findings. This is now established biochemistry.

Now, the biochemical reaction that is precipitated by cellphone radiation is called the ERK cascade. ERK stands for Extracellular signal-Regulated Kinase reaction. The “signal” is very important here. These are actually brainwave signals, and the hardware of the brain is actually changing in response to the “software”, the pulsing of the brainwaves.

What is really interesting is to see where the ERK cascade occurs in the human body. It occurs specifically in the glial cells, the brain cells, where it is closely associated with a very mysterious phenomenon called long-term potentiation of the brain or LTP. This is where brain synapse connections are strengthened by repeated brainwave patterns. These are literal changes to the hard wiring of the brain in response to repeated brainwave activity.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks said the one profession he could tell from looking at a person’s brain, was musician: their cortexes are much better developed, as is the corpus callosum joining the left and right brain. Musicians aren’t born that way; these brain structures develop after lengthy practising. These changes in brain structure are a result of LTP, which is held to be a very important part of memory and learning.

Anyone alert here? We see the hard-wiring of the brain being pathologically activated by two minutes of cellphone radiation. Handsets that we hold directly against our heads to radiate the brain, which absorbs 40% of the emissions. Insane in itself: but Nokia and other companies that developed patents to radiate brains less, kept these patents secret, so as not to “alarm” anyone.

Now, we know that cellphone induce brainwave changes that correspond to a kind of zombie state. We can now see a proven mechanism in the literature saying that this radiation will also hard-wire these changes into the brain in pathological ways.

I put this issue of LTP to Dr Joseph Friedman; he researched the literature and says no one has studied the effects of microwave radiation on LTP in the brain, and this is what his team is now investigating. He has insisted that I be credited as one of the authors when the study is published; I know little about biochemistry, but I am a scientific editor specialising in statistical texts, so I have agreed to help edit the paper when it appears.

If this paper shows — and I will place a large bet that it does — that cellphone radiation is literally hard-wiring the brains of an entire generation of humans in a zombie state, I think we will have a scenario for something beyond the wildest science fiction. Stay tuned, or as I prefer to say these days, stay wired.

There was a man who predicted this exactly. His name was Dr Robert Becker, he was an orthopaedic surgeon who was twice nominated for the Nobel prize in medicine. He showed that broken bones and wounds emitted particular electromagnetic signatures, and that if you enhanced these signals, healing processes were dramatically promoted.

However, in the process, he found all kinds of negative effects of EM radiation on the body, and he campaigned for decades to get power lines recognised as dangerous. This lost him all his government contracting (he was even one of the people called in to investigate the microwave irradiation of the US Embassy in Moscow, until he lost favour) and certainly lost him his Nobel prize.

In Robert Becker’s last interview in 2000, he was asked: “What do you think it would take to have the political and money powers change their priorities?”

He replied: (Long laugh) “I don’t know. Maybe at the end of the line when the occurrence of malignancy is two in every person during their lifetime and we have rioting in the streets for no cause and obvious problems with the psychology of the human race — maybe some people will still be OK enough to say, ‘Geez, we made a terrible mistake.’ But I don’t see anything happening between now and then.”

I have always agreed with this. Nothing will happen between now and then. The point is: now that we have reached “then”: will some people still be OK enough to say: “Geez, we made a terrible mistake”?

I look at a zombified world around me, and I really wonder. Articles like this are very important, if even Apple addicts are beginning to wake up. You can look on this technology with real terror, pal. It marks the end of our species and the rise of the creature I call Homo Mobilus Non Sapiens. A couple of informed sources insist that the algorithm for this is based on a kind of universal hive mind. Feel the buzz.