We Corrupted Our Children’s Brains With Tech Overload
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For the love of God, I don’t want to be staring at this 3-inch piece of plastic anymore
I grew up with a calculator and a dime to make a phone call in an emergency.
It’s a brain change
I find today’s social media to be initially very enticing and attractive but ultimately anxiety-provoking, neurologically overloading, and addicting, in the same way, a slot machine hooks you into feeding it quarters — only on steroids.
You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to know that children born into this digital age, with a bottle in one hand and a smartphone in the other, are going to have brains that develop differently than ours.
It will be interesting to see if the brains of those born today will appear and function differently when tested empirically in terms of immediate and short-term memory, ability to focus and concentrate on tasks requiring discipline, and processing, analyzing, and transmitting language.
I know when I’m getting technologically overloaded
For millions of years, human beings have been receiving information through their eyes, ears, nose, hands, and tongues. And our brains — without any digital videos, memes, or search engines — used to take their sweet time savoring the smell of the ocean or writing a love letter…by hand.
It’s only in the past decade or so that billions of people around the globe have become pathologically addicted to these 3-in pieces of plastic we carry around as well as gaming systems and the emerging virtual reality devices.
When I started increasing my screen time to several hours a day, between Facebook, Tiktok, and Twitter there were afternoons and evenings where I was literally physically ill from it. Not curl up in the fetal position sick but uneasy, dizzy, nauseous, and anxious — for no reason.
Education
Let’s boil and reduce this down to the implications of us literally moving inside the internet, overexploiting social media, and ultimately creating an alternate reality.