Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist
By David Derbyshire
Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered.
The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favorite websites each day. But they will strike a chord with parents and teachers who complain that many youngsters lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their screens.
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I have always been a change agent, at least in this lifetime. From a fairly early age, I began rebelling against the life philosophy I was to be conditioned into within my early family: get them before they get you; there’s a sucker born every minute; if someone is stupid enough to be duped, then they deserve what they get; life is a bowl of shit at its very best; education is for people who have no snap, and are too stupid to figure it out on their own, etc etc. At first, my rebellion against this way of seeing was silent, internal, and produced only high levels of shame and anger. Eventually, I faced the fact that I would have to teach myself a better set of values than what I had been offered if I wanted to thrive, rather than just survive. Talk about feeling overwhelmed! It took a long time and the help of some loving mentors in my life, but I finally began to model many of the values I had long aspired to.
After reaching this goal, I began teaching myself how to take a stand for these values out in the world. This was much harder, and I kept running into an invisible roadblock that I couldn’t define clearly. Great inner frustration ensued once again (and where there’s frustration, there’s anger) but my intent to discover the nature of this inner roadblock never wavered, even though it took years to get to the source.
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Today, I would like to introduce you to a free Email Series called The Soul Journey, offered by Andrew Schneider. This post contains an entire message from that series–a message focused on change. If you are interested in subscribing, I will include a link to his site at the bottom of the post, as well as in my Favorite Links section on the right. Enjoy!
“What is Consciousness?”
How long does it take to shift in consciousness?
This is a personality-based question that really has no answer in terms of length of time. It takes as long as one lives. Change is a fundamental reality of life in time and space. Change is occurring constantly, but often we don’t recognize it as it may be quite subtle.
The personality is also always trying to keep things the same. Often changes are occurring but we are unconsciously living as if they were not. When this happens, we tend to be out of step with what is happening in our life and in our psyche. As a result something does not work, things go awry and we are not content.
Sometimes the changes that are going on within us and around us are not the changes we want or like. This is because we do not understand them. And this is why they exist.
There are basically two causes for the changes we experience.
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Posted in Articles
Tagged Awareness, change, denial, fear, intelligence, love, perspective, power, psyche, repression, shift, soul, subconscious, the shift, unconscious
By Melissa Shawn
Your human brain is a magnificent and mind-boggling piece of creation. When you stop to think about it, this piece of complex tissue alone insists that something infinitely greater than us is going on here. And yet, the brain has its limits and was never designed to be the vehicle of its own evolution.
To explore the brain’s limits in terms of its own evolution, I will refer to it as a P-brain. Even as I say this, your own P-brain has probably interjected to offer some information about what I may mean by P-brain. Perhaps your brain offered this information: “P-brain must mean pea brain, a common way of saying that someone doesn’t have a very high level of intelligence. I think I may be about to feel insulted.”
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