This is Your Brain on Technology
A mother was asking me the other day for resources on how to talk to her six year-old son about death. It wasn’t that a family member had died—or the family dog had. The boy was playing violent video games on play dates (“I don’t allow them in our home” she said), and he came home asking, “Mom, what’s ‘kill’? What’s ‘death’?”
Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” says technology amplifies everything—the exalted and the base. The trouble is, it makes it so much easier to engage our baser instincts. And Carr is saying what legions of brain researchers are telling us: what we habitually focus on actually re-wires our brain. It changes our brain!
We used to think of the brain as a kind of computer that “processes” everything. It was technology that was standard issue at birth. Now we’re discovering that the way we live creates a certain kind of brain. If, for example you live in fear, grab what you need before someone else can take it, harbor deep suspicion of those who don’t belong to your “tribe,” you will live mostly in the amygdala—part of your old, reptilian brain. All those neurons and synapses will fire brilliantly, and your brain will develop a pattern. That will become its default setting. But if you try to cultivate compassion, an awareness of others and their inherent beauty and dignity, if you intentionally set aside time to worship and pray, you will live more and more in the anterior cingulate. The neurons and synapses in that little sliver of your brain will grow stronger, will respond more quickly. That will become the default setting of your brain.
In other words, how we live literally re-wires our brains. Knowing this, let’s use this Lenten season to focus our hearts and minds on what is holy and life-giving so that if our brains are going to be re-wired, God will be the technician.
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