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Greenwald Hypes 'Spectacular Multicolored Fireworks' for a Finale, Will Reveal Names of NSA 'Victims'

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Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)5/27/2014 4:40:51 am PDT

re: #305 Justanotherhuman

If we’re not less focused as a society, then why are so many kids being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and autism (yes, there are links between the two)?

Because we have better diagnostic abilities, would be the easy counter-claim, and/or because there is some physical or genetic cause to autism or ADD that’s increased. For example, there is a weakly-supported theory that age of the father is one of the main contributing factors to autism.

Why do “stress” (in its various forms) and depression seem to be the #1 complaints?

#1 complaints from whom? Where are you getting this? And do you think there’s more stress now than there was back when people subsistence farmed and a bad harvest might mean mass starvation?

How does the “rise of the machines” affect how our brains function? The constantly flickering images of video and early training to prefer visual stimulation of that type does, I think, have a great effect on how our brains develop from childhood.

In what way does it have a great effect?

I look at the kiddie books that are being written today, and they are entirely different from those of my childhood (I don’t remember any “picture” books, for instance). For one thing, I never had “books”, per se, before I went to school, but I did have newspapers and magazines and could read before I entered first grade (there was no kindergarten back then). Also, we had no TV at the time, just listened to radio and we had to concentrate on what was being said.

Picture books are definitely not a new thing. I’m not sure what you’re actually saying has changed here. People are starting to read earlier, not later.

One of the radio programs I listened to was “Let’s Pretend”, fairy tales and stories re-enacted. en.wikipedia.org Do you think a child would sit still for that now without being in a structured classroom situation and being “forced” to participate?

Yes. Kids still love being read to, for example.

Look, I’m not just an old person talking about the “good old days”, which weren’t in so many ways. But we already know that “listening” is a trait that is being lost as we wander through the constant bombardment of ideas and thought. I even notice it in myself, too often than I’d like.

We don’t know this. You’re asserting it. In order to actually test this hypothesis you’d have to come up with some way to operationalize ‘listening’ and show that it really has declined; you could compare its presence in US children vs. children in some country that doesn’t have widespread TV.