Brain Shaping Devices

Owning a mobile phone/smartphone these days is like having all of your limbs or like existing in the world and not be incarcerated somewhere far away from society or anything similar. Well, I might have exaggerated a bit with my analogies but you get the point. Now imagine living without your phone for five months or half a year, how would that be?

In my case it would be very hard, I admit that, because I am a "smartphone compulsive user". Yes, I turne that screen on and off every five-ten minutes or so and it's happening kind of automatic. It's like I don't have to do that so often and I don't control it either but I do so and I have not once felt that I am very often thinking and living through my smartphone. Such an example being the almost involuntarily gesture of turning the camera on multiple times a day and snapping all sort of pics and then share them via whatsapp, just to stay in touch kind of. Some get on Steem also but too few...

I am that hyped now about this situation because I just watched a five minutes long video of David Icke on the topic "the danger of smartphones" and when he narrated his experience with a mobile phone and how often he uses it, not particularly a smartphone, I kind of saw myself from an objective point of view as a smartphone addict and him as a weirdo to tell you the truth. It's like none of us uses it the right way. Now I wouldn't turn on a phone once at five or six months as he does but I surely need to limit my time spent with this device asap.

I am perfectly aware that it is useful and you can't live without it, I am 100% that I wouldn't choose to live that long without a smartphone but I know that my high usage comes at a cost and he points a bit also about such costs as well and one of them would be the fact that phones and particularly smartphones are "shaping our brains" nowadays and if you look closer at the situation and put it under the question mark there's a lot of power in such devices to shape our brains. Probably not literally but...

It can trigger high amounts of dopamine released in the brain through excessive use of social media, games and pornography, it can take us easily away from reality and emerge us like potato chips in the fried oil of some virtual reality and it can even cause attention problems when excessively used. Have I used "excessively" too much in the last phrase? Probably because this is a post about excess.

Now imagine,as he mentioned at the end of the video, what will happen to a child's brain if you hand him a phone/smartphone at an early age of lets say 7-8 years? Some get them even earlier and I know that the three years old daughter of a friend from Germany would only "stay still" when she had a smartphone or a tablet in her hand and cases as such are way more popular. It's not like they ask for them but we hand them to be quiet and sooner than later they can't live without a screen to burn their eyes everyday.

Now I won't advise anyone at this time(it's the year 2019 after all) to simply lock his/her smartphone in a desk and use it once every few months or only when on vacation because I wouldn't do that either. I would advise anyone and myself as well to limit the usage of it as much as possible and quit social media as well. It's like smartphones were created for social media. It's also amazing how much your eyes can see and your brain can think of when you put your smartphone away, you have its battery drained or you forgot it at home. A whole different world, isn't it, or should I say the complete picture around.

You'll probably be the weird dude in the subway that's not scrolling through anything if you make the decision to keep it more in the pocket than in your hand but you'll be the only one actually living for that moment in a train full of zombies. Smartphones are definitely an addiction and one that I am struggling with for a long period of time and I sure wish to overcome it. I would like to talk even more about 5G as well and what we could expect from it from the negative point of view but I say that's enough for this Sunday evening post. Hope you had a great Sunday and stay away from your smartphone...for a while!

Thanks for attention,
Adrian