Spanning time...

Well, to answer one critiquer (male), of my first blog, no. This is not my version of modern journalism. It’s my space to wax poetic or not so poetic, as the spirit moves me.

And no. It wasn’t meant to be a radical or angry rant. Just thinking with fingertips, talking to women, mostly… It was a call to arms, of sorts, yeah. But, more along the lines of start with yourself, inside out. Sorry for sounding not rad enough for you, though.

To answer the two writer’s little helpers, (both male), yes. I know today’s average human attention span does not have the time nor interest to focus on my three page spiel.

The second friend said he scrolled down and simply read my last line. But, said he loved that line and was glad to see my writing out there, again. Gotta love ‘im. We were writing partners once upon a time. I still rely on his humor.

During the years around the founding of our country, our attention span, I read, was far longer, enabling people to read, comprehend, and retain multiple pages of complex material. Today with the electronic invasion of our senses, our brains are far more limited.

And with our hyper, multi-task driven lives, we only have seconds to scan and respond to all about us. We are living on the freeways of our minds, driving defensively like crazy, caffeine fueled.

But, we should, also, be aware that multi-tasking actually decreases the brain’s ability to focus and learn.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060726083302.htm

Look what it did for the guy and his passengers a few months ago when he was texting his kids and engineering a train at the same time.

But, who can stop multi-tasking? Info is coming at us from everywhere all the time. And we have too much to do and too many places to be at the same time. Who’s theory stated that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time? Guess we’ve proven him wrong. Digitally enhanced living.

So,we keep our communications in sit-com format. One liners. And emailed jokes. We are dumbing down ourselves one 10-second sound bite at a time. Texting, twittering and the wall quips in facebook, seem to force us into a fast, self-conscious, superficial consciousness, trying to out quip the next guy. And all at the expense of being aware of where we are and what’s going on around us.

We are so anti-zen today. Zen Buddhism told us, when eating, eat. When eating, we are TVing, talking, texting, twittering, et al.

And that reminds me I now have 40 things to get accomplished in the next 45 minutes. I’ll have fewer brain cells by the time I accomplish them all, according to that UCLA study I linked you to above. But, maybe that’s not all bad.

Maybe we lose some memories we didn’t like or some brain bits that kept us doing some of our more stupid learned behaviors. Must get something positive out of it. Maybe with all our life in the fast lane we are simply paring the brain down to lean and mean…

I’ll be back soon. Keep thinking…