Marriott compares the rise of the smartphone to the impact that highly processed food had to our diets during the 20th century. Suddenly, staying healthy became a conscious decision. “The same thing is happening now with information,” he says. “It’s no longer the case that you can move through a society that is still basically literate and absorb information through text and give your brain a workout.”

This reframing of reading as exercise is important for our “cognitive diets”, Marriott says. Before, reading was “just another kind of form of entertainment. That’s not the case anymore. I think we’re going to become more intentional about it.” Time to get your daily pages in.

We take reading for granted today, but it’s a skill most human beings never got to experience. “There has never been a human community in the history of the world that has not had spoken language,” Marriott says. Reading, however, has only appeared a handful of times in the history of our species and has been abandoned more than once.

“The idea of absorbing textual or verbal information through our eyes by scanning backwards and forwards over rows of tiny little black letters written out in the page is incredibly weird,” Marriott admits. What it does offer is clarity. Once something is written down, you can go back over it, revise it. And where oral societies tend to be conservative in outlook, written records allow progression as you build on ideas. The act of reading makes you part of this process.

“If you read people like the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, the labour that goes into reading – especially the kind of deep reading associated with a long novel or a history book – is really quite remarkable,” Marriott says. “And unlike watching videos or looking at even images on the page, this is a much more active process. When you’re reading a book, your mind is at work. You’re imagining what’s happening. Your brain is a participant in the creation of the experience. You’re not just absorbing the information – you’re yourself creating it.”

“A writer only begins a book,” as Samuel Johnson, the “informal mascot” of readers, put it. “A reader finishes it.”

The film critic Roger Ebert famously called cinema the “empathy machine”. But when it comes to understanding someone else’s point of view, nothing rivals a book.

“We have this technology that allows you to meld your mind with somebody else’s,” Marriott says of the novel. “You can do this extraordinary neurological act and literally inhabit someone’s mind. Really see the world through someone else’s eyes.” This is something that “no other art form can achieve and is completely unique to literature”.

A good book can transport you into someone’s life. So much so, in fact, that studies using medical imagining technology have shown the impact fiction can have on our neural systems. “When we read a novel, our brain is literally recreating the actions of the characters in the appropriate sphere of our brains.” Marriott reports. “When you read about someone running in the book, the parts of your brain associated with movement to your legs will light up.”

It’s now widely acknowledged that much of social media is built to drive a wedge between all of us. Films and TV are not completely off the hook here, either. “In those visual media, I think we’re constantly confronted by the difference between ourselves and the people on screen,” Marriott says. “We can see the kind of exterior differences between us. In a novel, you’re not confronted with the exterior world like that at all.

“You read Jane Austen, you read about Lizzie Bennet, and you’re not continually confronted by your difference to the character. What will always strike you when you read a novel, which is much more involved in the inner mental processes, is similarity.” You’re on the same page as the protagonist.

Back in middle of the 20th century, when television was replacing reading as the dominant medium of communication, the worry was that TV was too much fun for books to compete. Marriott cites the American sociologist Neil Postman’s influential 1985 book on the subject, Amusing Ourselves To Death. But social media doesn’t work in the same way. “If you look at any of the statistics about teenage mental health that have been coming out in the past 10 years, [we] are not really amusing ourselves to death,” Marriott says.

He references the British writer Mark Fisher. “He calls it ‘depressive hedonia’. You’re compulsively seeking the next dose of pleasure, but it’s never fulfilling and the ultimate experience is just an incredibly depressing one.”

Listening to an audiobook can be a good way to digest a story, but Marriott argues it’s not a direct replacement for physically reading a book.

“The immersion that comes from trying to interpret language with your eyes is in itself just a richer cognitive experience,” he says. “There is also the fact that you can flip back and forwards to reread bits you don’t understand. You’ll read it again and you’ll rethink about the argument and whether it makes sense.”

It’s this process that is crucial to critical thinking.

“Don’t read fewer than 50 pages in a sitting,” was one of the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh’s rules for reading. Broadly, Marriott agrees with this. “That probably is necessary if you want to really read and properly immerse yourself in the book,” he says.

Others have suggested 10 minutes a day. “That’s not enough,” he says. “I just don’t think that supplies you with enough time to properly get your head into a book and to properly engage with it. It’s a pretty good thing to aim for at least half an hour, I’d say. I don’t think it’s particularly hard to find half an hour before you go to bed in the evening.”

Not that you have to read exclusively in the evening. “I quite like reading when I wake up,” Marriott says. “It’s quite a nice way to start the day. Instead of dragging my laptop to my bed and freak out about work emails, if I can sit with a cup of tea and just read for a bit, that feels like a much saner way to begin living every day.”