Your Brain on Computers

The New York Times ran this article on Sunday, “Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price.”  If you work with children, youth or the undefinable “young adult” you may have experienced what feels like an epidemic of  ADD/ ADHD.  This article has some interesting science as it begins explaining how current technology is rewiring the human brain.  Click the article title to read more.  Here is a hint: borrow from the airline industry and require the youth to turn off anything with an on/off switch.  You will be doing the youth group a favor as well as the helicopter parents.

“Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price”
by Matt Richtel | June 6, 2010

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

, 06/07/2010. Category: Culture.

Lost Paragraph

Memorial Day and 4 July are always difficult days for me when it comes to worship and the community of faith.  It is a balance act to worship on these national holidays that are meaningful without bringing civic religion into the sanctuary or wrapping God in the flag or a providential nationalism.  I’ve only preached on Memorial Sunday (Trinity Sunday for some) twice.  My words were borrowed, a major rewrite and organization, from a previous sermon that I gave on the Sunday following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.   Here is the last paragraphs of my sermon that I titled then as well as yesterday, “Universal Sounds.”

I believe those who claim faith in God, by whatever name, need to encourage the whole world to pause, unwrap the sound proofing flags from our hearts, remove the ear muffs of politics from our ears, and sit in silent, prayerful, memorial respect.  Maybe if we can hear the universal sounds we can learn the melody of peace in our language and, in our ordinary time, they will know we are children of God by our justice, our mercy, our hospitality . . . our love.

Would that be an appropriate memorial for the men and women that have served or gave their last full measure of devotion so we might hear the universal sounds?  Let it begin with us.

, 05/31/2010. Category: Preaching Notes.
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