Here’s reason number ten thousand and one for why you really ought to shut down your browser/tablet/smartphone and reenter the existential immediacy of your actual surrounding environment with its network of in-person social relationships just as soon as you finish reading this and then clicking through to read the full, brief article from which it’s excerpted:
Most of us are well aware of the convenience that instant electronic access provides. Less has been said about the costs. Research that my colleagues and I have just completed, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, suggests that one measurable toll may be on our biological capacity to connect with other people.
. . . Your brain is tied to your heart by your vagus nerve. . . [In addition to the fact that the relative strength of this brain-heart connection is related to overall physical health], the behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges has shown that vagal tone is central to things like facial expressivity and the ability to tune in to the frequency of the human voice. By increasing people’s vagal tone, we increase their capacity for connection, friendship and empathy. In short, the more attuned to others you become, the healthier you become, and vice versa. This mutual influence also explains how a lack of positive social contact diminishes people. Your heart’s capacity for friendship also obeys the biological law of “use it or lose it.” If you don’t regularly exercise your ability to connect face to face, you’ll eventually find yourself lacking some of the basic biological capacity to do so.
. . . When you share a smile or laugh with someone face to face, a discernible synchrony emerges between you, as your gestures and biochemistries, even your respective neural firings, come to mirror each other. It’s micro-moments like these, in which a wave of good feeling rolls through two brains and bodies at once, that build your capacity to empathize as well as to improve your health. If you don’t regularly exercise this capacity, it withers. Lucky for us, connecting with others does good and feels good, and opportunities to do so abound.
So the next time you see a friend, or a child, spending too much of their day facing a screen, extend a hand and invite him back to the world of real social encounters. You’ll not only build up his health and empathic skills, but yours as well. Friends don’t let friends lose their capacity for humanity.
More at The New York Times: “Your Phone vs. Your Heart“
There are those of us who don’t wish for authentic social interaction, because we feel debauched by psychological wounds and loathe the self-hatred that wells up from being with others. For a guy such as myself, who suffers from intense emotional sickness, yet feels a rebellious anger when it is suggested that I seek “professional help,” messaging on Facebook or communicating via YouTube vlogs is perfect. The finest moment comes, of course, when I lower the laptop screen, return to my silent living room, and pick up a book. But that’s just me, I realise.
Yes, Matt, I’m beginning to doubt the wisdom of my e-ways. And I fear for our culture and I worry for Generation X squared (or whatever they call the current one) for all this e-nonsense that sucks up so much of our lives. I foresee an e-backlash-rebellion. As an author of books published traditionally and as ebooks, I am discovering less engagement with the world as an e-author.
VALIBATION, a short film about an iPhone addict…