ARE YOU DEVELOPING A "POPCORN" BRAIN?
Meaning:  are you so used to multi-tasking on your techno-gadgets that you have a hard time living without them?  Read on:
"When Hilarie Cash arrives home from work in the evening, she has a choice: She can go outside and tend to her garden or she can hop on her laptop.
The lilacs really need weeding. The computer, on the other hand, can wait, as her work is done for the day.
Despite this, Cash feels drawn to the computer, as if it's a magnet pulling her in. Maybe there's an email from a friend awaiting her, or a funny tweet, or a new picture posted on Facebook.
"I find it extremely difficult to walk away," Cash says. "It's so hard to tell myself, 'Don't do it. Go do the gardening.'"
Does it really matter if Cash gardens or goes online? Increasing, experts say it does. The worry is that life online is giving us what researcher, David Levy, calls "popcorn brain" -- a brain so accustomed to the constant stimulation of electronic multitasking that we're unfit for life offline, where things pop at a much slower pace.
Levy, a professor with the Information School at the University of Washington, tells the story of giving a speech at a high-tech company. Afterwards at lunch, an employee sheepishly told him how the night before his wife had asked him to give their young daughter a bath. Instead of enjoying the time with his child, he spent the time on his phone, texting and returning emails. He didn't have to work -- it was just that the urge to use the phone was more irresistible than the child in the tub.
"It's really ubiquitous," says Cash, a counselor who treats people who have trouble giving up their gadgets. "We can't just sit quietly and wait for a bus, and that's too bad, because our brains need that down time to rest, to process things."
Clifford Nass, a social psychologist at Stanford, says studies show multitasking on the Internet can make you forget how to read human emotions. When he showed online multi-taskers pictures of faces, they had a hard time identifying the emotions they were showing.
When he read stories to the multi-taskers, they had difficulty identifying the emotions of the people in the stories, and saying what they would do to make the person feel better.
"Human interaction is a learned skill, and they don't get to practice it enough," he says."

Read the whole thing.  I think on the whole the growth of computer technology and social media has been a godsend to the Moebius Syndrome community.  It's allowed us to build huge new networks of contact and support, and has allowed us to keep up with each other and exchange ideas and experiences.  As I was growing up with Moebius Syndrome in the 1970s, going through junior high and high school, I didn't even realize completely what I had; I certainly did not know there were others with it, going through some of the same experiences I was.  That people today with Moebius don't have to feel so alone is a wonderful thing.

But it is possible to overdo a good thing.  Let's remember to try and talk in person with members of our community, as well as doing so online...


The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting
for our wits to grow sharper." -Eden Phillpotts