A Technological Assault on the Human Brain

By Dr. Ely Lazar & Dr. Adele Thomas

[Republished here by permission of the authors from their “Lifestyle Tips for Over 50s,” affiliated with their website “Passionate Retirees,” January 2, 2019.]

Five decades ago I read a book with the title As A Man Thinketh. The phrase that stood out for me was, “As a man (woman) thinketh in his (her) heart so is he (she)”. The concept in the statement is that your dominant thoughts tend to reveal where your life is going. What you focus on will demonstrate your purpose in life. There is a lot of truth to this principle. Today our focus is so inextricably linked to technology that there are disturbing new developments in what is happening to our brains.

Give me a tweet

I'm trying to decide whether or not to join Twitter, and I could use some testimonials from people who use it or have tried tweeting.
    All I really know so far is what Motomynd told me:

The bright point about twitter is that if someone has nothing important to say you spend less time figuring that out.

    I'm not sure whether that's a full-fledged endorsement or not.
    Of course, I am aware that "tweets" are limited to 140 characters. The Twitter website claims that

You can discover a lot in a little space. You can see photos, videos and conversations directly in Tweets to get the whole story at a glance, and all in one place.

    Well, if the 140 characters can accommodate a photo, that's an extra 1,000 whole words right there.
    I don't know how many words a video is reputed to be worth—but probably not as many as 1,000 times the number of still images comprising it...I suppose, though, that it could actually be worth more than that many words, on the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
    Plus, videos can include voice and music....It's actually starting to sound as though a tweet might be like what Elton John said about sad songs.



What do you think about Twitter? Especially if you actually use it or have tried it.
    You may, as usual, record your tweets in a comment below.
    Or your sad songs (especially if you sing them yourself and upload them to YouTube)^*.
    I appreciate it.
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* You can't include images or sounds in a Blogger comment, but you can include a link to them. The code for making a word or phrase a hyperlink is as follows:

<a href="url">word or phrase</a>