Are We Becoming Brain Dead?

This is quite ironic because I won a nintendo gaming station which I use to play Brain Games on to improve my brain power! It takes technology to help you increase and improve your brain and thinking skills! I think we are as a nation becoming lazier as technology improves. I other wonder whether that film Terminator Rise Of The Machines will actually come true. One day we will create computers and machines which are more powerful than man and who knows, but hey I'm getting too nerdy here.

when i got married we had gas light no electicity had to do all my wash by hand so I find todays ways a lot easier pal , a lot mere time not spent doing housework , but still no time to myself lol xxx

Although I like having gadgets I rarely know how to use them properly or bother to find out. My mobile is a good example of that - it does everything you could ever want a mobile to do (apparently) but apart from taking 2 photos with it the only other thing I've done is make calls and send texts. I've had a fancy microwave for over a year now which is also supposed to do lots of different things but remains a mystery to me and I've yet to own a video/dvd recorder that I can actually programme. So I have all the gadgets and they're very impressive but I have no clue what to do with them. The one thing I haven't got is an electronic diary type thingy (whatever they're called). I don't use any kind of electronic organiser - I've tried them and don't like them. I much prefer to write things down so I still carry a paper diary and notebook and actually use a pen!!

Well, I'm really not much of a gadget person. I have borrowed a car that had a compass built into it once, but I hardly used it. Tom Tom works ONLY if you know how to use it, because I have heard about someone who used it & ended up in the "middle of nowhere" as they put it. Also, I am sure that Tom Tom would be nice enough to warn you when a telephone pole, lamp post, tree, human being, or an animal decides to step out in front of your driving path. Anyway, I do have a demented mind, & I do constantly end up using my brain, whether or not I want to. Some of the gadgets would only make me foul things up, but by myself, I only make a minor error.

I am a technology addict and I admit it. Although I do still have a record player which i use regularly, the rest of my life is Dumbed down by advanced technology. THe only thing that I refuse to give up is letter writing. I love letters. I like sending them and recieving them. You can actually tell a lot about a person by their handwriting. Mine is awful. But I still write. I have pen pals that I have had since I was a kid and although I have their email addresses, I still write them letters. They write back. I like to think that I am helping to keep an ancient artform alive.

If you want to see a scarey view of where we might be headed...check out the movie Idiocracy...it is a parady but has some chilling overtones of how we might be 'dumbing ouselves down,' Personally I am doing my best to keep my mind sharp. I periodically learn a new computer game...and sometime within the next year I plan to learn Spanish. I am committed to keeping my brain and body active as long as possible because it is increasingly easier to underfunction with all the gadgets that make us less inclined to figure things out for ourselves.

Well I have to be honest here I am not to keen on some of the new Gadgets like the Tom Tom I prefer to do it the old fashioned way and get lost and have Gissi sneeze on me because he has to spend longer in the car lol Some gadgets are good but I do prefer to still use the little Brain I have left on a lot of things lol

I am amazed at how many people rely on a calculator for the simplest of things which can easily be solved mentally. We learnt short cut mental arithmetic, but no one has a clue what you are talking about these days. I have even known people to work out 10% on a calculator - and that is with decimal currency! I believe we do tend to become mentally lazy with all the technology at our disposal, but it is up to the individual how dependent they become on it. I rarely use a calculator, except for very long columns of figures, but even then I often just do it myself. I do not use stored telephone numbers in my phone, apart from those of my five sons. I prefer to read a map, and write myself a line map for anywhere "new" I am going. I also keep my mind active by doing at least one cryptic crossword a day. Don't get me wrong. I am very thankful for technology. I could not do the amount of voluntary work I do without email, netphone (theirs, not mine) and broadband. And of course it is technology that allows us to talk about this subject here.

Well with technology came easier use of items to make work more efficient. We have GPS devices, calculators, programs that edit our work, and so forth to help ease things. Yet we cannot rely on these programs completely. Some people do though.

I think the powers that be want us to be stupid and ignorant. Ignorance breeds laziness and blame. An ignorant people is divided, and easy to dupe. "Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people." --John Adams "Only the educated are free." --Epictetus

Well as a total technophobe, I think I woud say all this new technology is making my brain work more, not less!! I can just about operate this PC (providing nothing goes wrong!), - but anything else requires me to read through manuals while tearing my hair out - so life definately hasn't become easier for me! LOL!

In a sense, yes it seems that physcially we are becoming much much more soft and squishy but in terms of mental performance we are actually becoming more and more davnced and sophisticated on this Like our education nowadays. Grade schoolers are learning lots of newer stuff that if u went back to the 1960's it would be considered too advanced or unnecessary since students need to face the challenges of this ever changing world.So i would think mentally, wee are becoming advanced yet we are also becoming vegetative since as we use our minds too much, we are faced with lots of mental stress and yet we never have the opportunity to move ourselves physically which aint good either since we get too mentally stressed yet we become physically vegegtative

GPS device is good. But I like map more. When you are in an unfamiliar city for a trip, finding a destination on a map is a kind of fun. I like that feeling. I do think people getting lazier and lazier is caused by all kinds of new stuffs. We even take exercise by the help of some machine in door rather than step out. But nobody can avoid that. this is a inescapable trend.

I see the lazy part, but I just moved to a new city and think that TOM TOM would be nice, because it is very difficult to read the map and drive, I keep having to pull over or park in a lot to figure out which way to go.

I much prefer using maps, especially after reading so much about GPS directing cars through roads that are too narrow for them, or over cliffs which leads to a nasty drop. I don't have GPS, and probably won't although I can see them being very useful for the last part of a journey through unfamiliar streets.

Tom Toms are a nightmare in away, they are being used more dangerously by people who don't know how to use them! Yes they are making us lazier, my GPS sends me in all kinds of directions so tend to print off a map to refer back to! Yes technology is making us lazier but it's a fact of life I guess!

I don't really feel myself getting lazier and lazier. In fact, I have a new-found interest in getting more active... but I fear that's not what you were talking about in your post. As for your Tom Tom, I have a navigation system and it is my lifesaver... I am always getting lost. I mean, before I got it as a gift I probably got lost 85% of the time. Now it's probably around 25%... yes, I am that bad with directions, even when I have something telling me exactly where to go.

that's a great observation! well, did you hear the latest one? a Lexus that parks by itself. totally useful for me. apparently what it does is you just have to press a button when you're near the lot and there is some sensor and video camera that can help the car to self-park. other things that make life easier also makes us lazier. like computers. there's no one who really knows everything there is to know about one anymore. and most computer owners have no idea how to build one from scratch. we're all working with machines we don't understand. :)

What a good point you made there! Thats what we are having really. But I think technology is not the one to blame. It looks politics are getting more and more role in that kind of stuff. As I have experienced from the situation in my country, the current president and his parlements are doing everything to prevent our people from thinking correctly. They are providing some free stuff to them and making the people lazier and plus they are using religious sentences in order to take advantage of people. When you say "losing the skill of thinking" this is what I see in my mind. The bad side is they are getting more and more popular because they are giving people the "easy" one. The sources of that "easy" earnings are already from the taxes they collected from us. Technology is also another weapon for them. For example in my country, whenever we win a national match or whenever something really good happens they usually increase some prices of food and nobody realizes that on time. I just can't understand how we are losing our brain that fast!