Dr.Joe Dispenza.com
Technology changes brain physiology -I would say Adults more than kids....just my 2 cent opinion
With the advent of technology, it should be obvious by now that environmental factors like video games, cell phones, text messaging, television, MP3 players, and Internet sites such as MySpace.com play an unseen hand in further affecting our children’s brain physiology. Technology is influencing our mind states to escalate in the direction of increasing emotional entropy by hijacking the brain’s natural reward centers. Therefore, if you want to add more insult to injury in a teenage household, just add more technology to a developing brain, and rest assured you will feel totally left out of your children’s lives.
The latest research has proven that a healthy diet decreases violence and aggression while improving brain activity. It also has been observed that the long-term use of video games alters the way the normal brain functions. When a child plays a computer game, each time they blow something or someone to bits, shoot down or destroy a plane, ship, UFO or any vehicle, break through a wall or barrier in order to move to the next level, or beat a character to severe injury, the brain responds chemically. In fact, it is proven that the pleasure center begins to release high amounts of dopamine, the brain’s natural pleasure chemical.
The bottom line is that dopamine makes us feel good, especially when we’re winning at such a high pace. In addition, when accomplishment is coupled with excitement, the brain produces the adrenalines norepinephrine and epinephrine in order to wake itself up with a boost of heightened awareness. This chemical cocktail is the perfect mix for problems in normal brain function.
To reiterate, this type of computer game stimulation is not so bad for a short run, but begins to cause problems in the long term. As the brain’s reward center is repeatedly activated and the strong chemicals are released during the gaming, pleasure zones become overstimulated. As a result, the reward system becomes desensitized and then recalibrates itself to a higher threshold. In other words, it will need more of a chemical rush to produce the same feelings. A side-effect of this mechanism is addiction … and when it is tied to attention and learning, serious effects manifest.
As the brain’s physiology responds to a mind exposed to these abnormal virtual activities (no child blows up people or things in real life), the brain is fooled into thinking it is almost real. Additionally, the continuous release of chemicals on the nerve cells’ receptor sites (the cells’ docking points for chemical information) finally causes the receptors to become desensitized to the same level of the chemical rush. Therefore, the next time a youth engages in the game, it’s a guarantee they will need more of a thrill to excite their brain. It’s like living with a spouse who always yells at you — eventually they need to yell a little louder to get your attention, because over time that intense stimulation is considered normal.
Receptor sites are the same way. If you keep over-activating them, they become numb and require more and more substantial hits. The side-effect: the brain needs unrealistic highs to feel happy and satiated. In the absence of such high-level stimulation, the mind turns off, and your offspring do too.
Dr. Joe Dispenza-Coast to Coast Radio 2/21/12-Everything about your mind 39:24 Mark of Video
So when your kid’s computer activity ends, count on your child looking like a drone because you’re probably not all that interesting compared to what he’s just been experiencing. In truth, everything in life will seem boring. Simple things like watching a sunset, playing with the dog or even visiting with a grandparent will seem like trivial nonsense. Why? Because nothing in the normal, mundane world can match the ecstasy of the virtual world or the super high it produces. Sounds like an addiction. And without proper restraint, future choices may be married to things that produce more heightened stimulation: drugs, pornography, gambling, excess shopping, over-eating … all because the brain’s satiation center may never be fulfilled.
The gamer in the classroom
Let’s take this scenario one step further. What about when a child, between Gameboy mania and a MySpace chat room, goes to school to develop his mind? Shouldn’t learning be a reward in itself? Attention spans inevitably will shorten for the gamer who sits in the classroom trying to pay attention to a topic that doesn’t turn his brain on or make his body feel alive. As the young brain goes through withdrawal in the classroom, the perfect stimulation might be to cause trouble by acting out.
Getting in trouble causes high adrenal activity and, unconsciously, the child is making the brain turn on again to provoke similar chemical releases as gaming provides. Fidgeting, falling asleep, interruptions, emotional outbursts, provocative and disrespectful comments are all side-effects of attention problems. It isn’t too difficult to reason the etiology in a child with no genetic history of ADD and ADHD, no head injury and no exposure to toxicity.
How do we make necessary changes in the best interest of the young developing mind? It is the parent’s job to think this complexity through to its end. If we propagate the use of technology without an emphasis on developing personal values, providing an environment for skillful learning, practicing reverence for all cultures and beliefs, performing daily rituals, participating in family and social activities, exposing our kids to nature, motivating them to exercise, debating philosophy or providing an environment for interpersonal evolution, we can surely predict how well — or how poorly — future generations will thrive on a planet with so much opportunity.
Technology changes brain physiology -I would say Adults more than kids....just my 2 cent opinion
With the advent of technology, it should be obvious by now that environmental factors like video games, cell phones, text messaging, television, MP3 players, and Internet sites such as MySpace.com play an unseen hand in further affecting our children’s brain physiology. Technology is influencing our mind states to escalate in the direction of increasing emotional entropy by hijacking the brain’s natural reward centers. Therefore, if you want to add more insult to injury in a teenage household, just add more technology to a developing brain, and rest assured you will feel totally left out of your children’s lives.
The latest research has proven that a healthy diet decreases violence and aggression while improving brain activity. It also has been observed that the long-term use of video games alters the way the normal brain functions. When a child plays a computer game, each time they blow something or someone to bits, shoot down or destroy a plane, ship, UFO or any vehicle, break through a wall or barrier in order to move to the next level, or beat a character to severe injury, the brain responds chemically. In fact, it is proven that the pleasure center begins to release high amounts of dopamine, the brain’s natural pleasure chemical.
The bottom line is that dopamine makes us feel good, especially when we’re winning at such a high pace. In addition, when accomplishment is coupled with excitement, the brain produces the adrenalines norepinephrine and epinephrine in order to wake itself up with a boost of heightened awareness. This chemical cocktail is the perfect mix for problems in normal brain function.
To reiterate, this type of computer game stimulation is not so bad for a short run, but begins to cause problems in the long term. As the brain’s reward center is repeatedly activated and the strong chemicals are released during the gaming, pleasure zones become overstimulated. As a result, the reward system becomes desensitized and then recalibrates itself to a higher threshold. In other words, it will need more of a chemical rush to produce the same feelings. A side-effect of this mechanism is addiction … and when it is tied to attention and learning, serious effects manifest.
As the brain’s physiology responds to a mind exposed to these abnormal virtual activities (no child blows up people or things in real life), the brain is fooled into thinking it is almost real. Additionally, the continuous release of chemicals on the nerve cells’ receptor sites (the cells’ docking points for chemical information) finally causes the receptors to become desensitized to the same level of the chemical rush. Therefore, the next time a youth engages in the game, it’s a guarantee they will need more of a thrill to excite their brain. It’s like living with a spouse who always yells at you — eventually they need to yell a little louder to get your attention, because over time that intense stimulation is considered normal.
Receptor sites are the same way. If you keep over-activating them, they become numb and require more and more substantial hits. The side-effect: the brain needs unrealistic highs to feel happy and satiated. In the absence of such high-level stimulation, the mind turns off, and your offspring do too.
Dr. Joe Dispenza-Coast to Coast Radio 2/21/12-Everything about your mind 39:24 Mark of Video
So when your kid’s computer activity ends, count on your child looking like a drone because you’re probably not all that interesting compared to what he’s just been experiencing. In truth, everything in life will seem boring. Simple things like watching a sunset, playing with the dog or even visiting with a grandparent will seem like trivial nonsense. Why? Because nothing in the normal, mundane world can match the ecstasy of the virtual world or the super high it produces. Sounds like an addiction. And without proper restraint, future choices may be married to things that produce more heightened stimulation: drugs, pornography, gambling, excess shopping, over-eating … all because the brain’s satiation center may never be fulfilled.
The gamer in the classroom
Let’s take this scenario one step further. What about when a child, between Gameboy mania and a MySpace chat room, goes to school to develop his mind? Shouldn’t learning be a reward in itself? Attention spans inevitably will shorten for the gamer who sits in the classroom trying to pay attention to a topic that doesn’t turn his brain on or make his body feel alive. As the young brain goes through withdrawal in the classroom, the perfect stimulation might be to cause trouble by acting out.
Getting in trouble causes high adrenal activity and, unconsciously, the child is making the brain turn on again to provoke similar chemical releases as gaming provides. Fidgeting, falling asleep, interruptions, emotional outbursts, provocative and disrespectful comments are all side-effects of attention problems. It isn’t too difficult to reason the etiology in a child with no genetic history of ADD and ADHD, no head injury and no exposure to toxicity.
How do we make necessary changes in the best interest of the young developing mind? It is the parent’s job to think this complexity through to its end. If we propagate the use of technology without an emphasis on developing personal values, providing an environment for skillful learning, practicing reverence for all cultures and beliefs, performing daily rituals, participating in family and social activities, exposing our kids to nature, motivating them to exercise, debating philosophy or providing an environment for interpersonal evolution, we can surely predict how well — or how poorly — future generations will thrive on a planet with so much opportunity.
Source-The Economist
The Effects of the Internet
Fast forward
Fear of a fried future
Jun 24th 2010 | from the print edition
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. By Nicholas Carr. Norton; 276 pages; $26.95. Published in Britain by Atlantic in September as “The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember”; £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com
IN 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Benedictine abbot named Trithemius, living in western Germany, wrote a spirited defence of scribes who tried to impress God’s word most firmly on their minds by copying out texts by hand. To disseminate his own books, though, Trithemius used the revolutionary technology of the day, the printing press. Nicholas Carr, an American commentator on the digital revolution, faces a similar dichotomy. A blogger and card-carrying member of the “digerati”, he is worried enough about the internet to raise the alarm about its dangers to human thought and creativity.
The recent uproar over privacy on Facebook is only the latest backlash against man’s newly wired existence. Mr Carr did his bit to encourage the anxiety in 2008 with an essay in the Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” His new book is an expanded survey of the science and history of human cognition. Worry of this kind is not new: a decade ago, the first evidence suggested that PowerPoint changed not just how executives presented information, but also how they thought. Mr Carr’s contribution is to offer the most readable overview of the science to date. It is clearly not intended as a jeremiad. Yet halfway through, he can’t quite help but blurt out that the impact of this browsing on our brains is “even more disturbing” than he thought.
Humans like to believe they control the tools they use, even if Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich are among those who have argued that often they do not. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think. The digital gadgets on which we now depend, Mr Carr explains, have already begun rewiring our brains.
Neurological research has demolished the myth of the static brain. Neural networks can be rapidly reorganised in response to new experiences such as going on the web. Mr Carr surveys current knowledge about the effects on thinking of “hypermedia”—in particular clicking, skipping, skimming—and especially on working and deep memory. He draws some chilling inferences. There is evidence, he says, that digital technology is already damaging the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence.
Only by combining data stored deep within our brains can we forge new ideas. No amount of magpie assemblage can compensate for this slow, synthetic creativity. Hyperlinks and overstimulation mean the brain must give most of its attention to short-term decisions. Little makes it through the fragile transfer into deeper processing. Clearly, argues Mr Carr, this is a radical upending of the “literate mind” that has been the hallmark of civilisation for more than 1,000 years. From a society that valued the creation of a unique storehouse of ideas in each individual, man is moving to a socially constructed mind that values speed and group approval over originality and creativity.
True, there are compensations: better hand-eye co-ordination, pattern recognition and the very multitasking skills the machines themselves require. Sceptics will rightly point out that similar concerns have accompanied each new technology. Something is always lost, and something gained. Some evolutionary biologists claim that the scholarly mind is an historical anomaly: that humans, like other primates, are designed to scan rapidly for danger and opportunity. If so, the net delivers this shallow, scattered mindset with a vengeance.
Mr Carr offers few prescriptions. The author himself retreated to an (unplugged) mountain hideout to write his book, but he thinks most people depend too much on the net for work and fun to do the same. And he fails to address the ways in which the internet acts like a drug. Other critics have probed this issue more deeply, notably Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer, in a recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget”. Yet surely online bingeing is no different from eating too many sweets: its remedy is a matter of old-fashioned self-restraint.
Fast forward
Fear of a fried future
Jun 24th 2010 | from the print edition
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. By Nicholas Carr. Norton; 276 pages; $26.95. Published in Britain by Atlantic in September as “The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember”; £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com
IN 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Benedictine abbot named Trithemius, living in western Germany, wrote a spirited defence of scribes who tried to impress God’s word most firmly on their minds by copying out texts by hand. To disseminate his own books, though, Trithemius used the revolutionary technology of the day, the printing press. Nicholas Carr, an American commentator on the digital revolution, faces a similar dichotomy. A blogger and card-carrying member of the “digerati”, he is worried enough about the internet to raise the alarm about its dangers to human thought and creativity.
The recent uproar over privacy on Facebook is only the latest backlash against man’s newly wired existence. Mr Carr did his bit to encourage the anxiety in 2008 with an essay in the Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” His new book is an expanded survey of the science and history of human cognition. Worry of this kind is not new: a decade ago, the first evidence suggested that PowerPoint changed not just how executives presented information, but also how they thought. Mr Carr’s contribution is to offer the most readable overview of the science to date. It is clearly not intended as a jeremiad. Yet halfway through, he can’t quite help but blurt out that the impact of this browsing on our brains is “even more disturbing” than he thought.
Humans like to believe they control the tools they use, even if Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich are among those who have argued that often they do not. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think. The digital gadgets on which we now depend, Mr Carr explains, have already begun rewiring our brains.
Neurological research has demolished the myth of the static brain. Neural networks can be rapidly reorganised in response to new experiences such as going on the web. Mr Carr surveys current knowledge about the effects on thinking of “hypermedia”—in particular clicking, skipping, skimming—and especially on working and deep memory. He draws some chilling inferences. There is evidence, he says, that digital technology is already damaging the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence.
Only by combining data stored deep within our brains can we forge new ideas. No amount of magpie assemblage can compensate for this slow, synthetic creativity. Hyperlinks and overstimulation mean the brain must give most of its attention to short-term decisions. Little makes it through the fragile transfer into deeper processing. Clearly, argues Mr Carr, this is a radical upending of the “literate mind” that has been the hallmark of civilisation for more than 1,000 years. From a society that valued the creation of a unique storehouse of ideas in each individual, man is moving to a socially constructed mind that values speed and group approval over originality and creativity.
True, there are compensations: better hand-eye co-ordination, pattern recognition and the very multitasking skills the machines themselves require. Sceptics will rightly point out that similar concerns have accompanied each new technology. Something is always lost, and something gained. Some evolutionary biologists claim that the scholarly mind is an historical anomaly: that humans, like other primates, are designed to scan rapidly for danger and opportunity. If so, the net delivers this shallow, scattered mindset with a vengeance.
Mr Carr offers few prescriptions. The author himself retreated to an (unplugged) mountain hideout to write his book, but he thinks most people depend too much on the net for work and fun to do the same. And he fails to address the ways in which the internet acts like a drug. Other critics have probed this issue more deeply, notably Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer, in a recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget”. Yet surely online bingeing is no different from eating too many sweets: its remedy is a matter of old-fashioned self-restraint.
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