What New Technologies are doing with Our Brain?

Many-years-question "Does 'being' determine 'consciousness' or 'consciousness' determine 'being'?

Today I would like to touch aspect of 'being'.

I believe you agree, that before having maps  we used our vision, smell, touch and other senses. After we draw the first map, our thinking became abstract.

After we  invented watches, people (most of) agreed on having 7 days in a week, 24 hours in a day, 60 seconds in a minute. This made our world discreet and measurable. 

After we made the 'first book' and invented 'reading', we started to concentrate our attention  and ignore the distraction.

Every new 'technology' is changing our perspective and our way of thinking.

Every new 'technology' changes also connection between our neurons in our brains, changed synapses (some constant connections between neurons). And may be new 'technology' even caused a birth of new neurons?

Our brain always tries to be effective. Using some synapses more, brain (as Personal SuperComputer) uses some other less (connected with old behavioral models).

Internet as new technology changed our brains. In Internet we always deal with a huge amount of information, distraction, several parallel activities at the same time (reading, making tweets, replying mails, watching pics and videos, listening to the music, commenting, etc.) We develop our visual senses a lot, we notice graphical location of objects, we digest huge amount of information. Sometimes it is called clip-consciousness.

We jump from one hyperlink to another. And together with this we can not concentrate our attention for a lot of time anymore.

The problem is that concentration is fundamental in our memory process. It helps us transmit information from short memory to long memory. Our mental capacity develops only when we are able to connect new information with old facts and experience which we had lived.

I am writing this to point that the way we started to live is something revolutionary and evolutionally important. This is something we are going through, and probably we can not access final influence, final outcome.

But what is important, to develop in a 'right way' (I understand, that there is no 'right' or 'wrong'), we need to continue reading, concentrating our attention from distraction factors. 

Moreover, only by reading we are able to develop our abstract thinking, our right part of the brain. Cause only while reading we are drawing our personal picture of the book, our individual matrix, images and colors, heroes and relations.

Of course we can not reject using social media tools, cause it will cost us social isolation, but we can be smart.

With this post I just reflect on things we are doing everyday  while we make  preferences to social media friendship rather than physical meeting, while we agree on something with your colleagues via skype of gmail rather than saying a word in office or at home. 

More links around these topics:

• One of my first posts about books - In the world where the only constant is change http://iamannaskryabina.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html
• The Swallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains, Nicolas Carr, http://roughtype.com  
• Some facts about brain http://www.factroom.ru/facts/tag/мозг

Thanks to F5 weekly free newspaper for inspiration, motivation and good material, http://f5.ru