Most everyone adores newness. Over the centuries, new ideas and fashions have possessed limitless appeal, constantly edging out yesterday’s tired fads. For instance, “spick and span-new” entered English in 1579 in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s “Lives.” The TakeOurWord.com website says “a ‘span’ was a wood chip … Something that was ‘span-new’ was a freshly cut chip or, metaphorically, anything as new as a freshly cut chip.” Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, one of my favorite time-murderers, enlarges on this, saying “A ‘spick’ is a spike or nail, and a ‘span’ is a chip. A spick and span new ship is one in which every nail and chip is new.” But www.Phrases.org.uk says it may come from “spikspeldernieuw,” an Old Dutch word for newly made ships.

There’s nothing new about having two nostrils, but we’ve recently learned they compete with their twins for primacy, according to research recently reported in the journal Current Biology. The article by Wen Zhou and Denise Chen focused on “binaural rivalry,” by having volunteers smell a rose with one nostril and a marker pen with the other. They found that the smellers sensed first one and then the other, back and forth, but never a blended smell.

The researchers could only let the subjects smell the aromas for a few seconds, because humans are wired for “adaptation, which is the tendency for brain cells to gradually reduce their response to a continuous stimulus … the participants’ sensory experience fluctuated between rose and marker pen, presumably because of adaptation in the brain: as central neurons tired of one odor, their response to the other became more dominant and back again.”

Our eyes are rivals, too, switching dominance to meet the brain’s constant craving for fresh images. In an online NY Times debate last month, several experts were asked “Does the Brain Like E-books?” E-books readers are devices that hold digital versions of printed books, and they’ve been unable to adequately mimic the printed page until the advent of Amazon.com’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, and their competitors.

These new e-book readers are small, thin contraptions that can contain hundreds of books, and their grey-and-black “pages” aren’t as physically demanding as most computer screens. They’re also one wave in a veritable Jacuzzi of communications innovations. For example, smartphones, like Apple’s iPhone, can contain e-books, as well as act as a computer, cell phone and video camera.

Alan Liu, one of the aforementioned NY Times experts, is a department head and researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara specializing in online reading practices and technologies. He writes, “Any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing.” Another expert, Sandra Aamodt, the former editor-in-chief of the journal “Nature Neuroscience,” notes that people read computer screens 20-30 percent slower than paper but are comprehending information on computer screens better than they did several decades ago, although still not as well as printed paper, partly due to the distractions that accompany computer reading, like tweets and “you’ve got mail” messages. She writes “To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character. Distractions abound on most people’s computer screens.”

Good library applications are emerging for e-book readers. However, David Galernter, a Yale computer professor and a third expert, points out that “All reading is not migrating to computer screens. So long as books are cheap, tough, easy to read from outside … easy to mark up, rated safe for operation from beaches to polar wastes, and – above all – beautiful, they will remain the best of all word-delivery vehicles … onscreen text will change and improve. But the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens, but on the brilliance of the traditional book – sheets bound on end, the ‘codex’ – which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years.”

But as anthropologist Jared Diamond noted, “All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.”