Good day to all of you. In today’s Friday Dose we look into the latest research on how healthy your phone is for your brain and your relationships, we’ll see where all languages began, evolved and spread, and we’ll end on a video that introduces you to a super-inspiring guy who is quite literally saving the world by building the coolest jobs ever for scientists and engineers.
Let’s start with the phone and your brain and your life. Because this is seriously getting to be one of the biggest psychological experiences of your life and yet most people are trying to ignore it because they sense what they’ll find if they look. I wrote about it previously in Smart Phone Disconnections, but here’s a streamable/downloadable radio interview on what the research demonstrates you are doing versus the hidden prices you pay.
Sherry Turkle on Smartphones and Relationships
I used to date a linguist and a job like that breeds intelligence. If your brain can read and write 10 or so languages (including those in considerably different groups, like Chinese, Arabic and Hungarian), then you end up with a pretty good grip on how these other languages organize the world. The Spanish don’t assign blame, the Japanese don’t have the concept of an individual identity, and a bunch of languages can’t decide if bridges and boats are male or female. This cool map that quickly animates the slow evolution of these languages and the subtle ideas that underpin them:
And we’ll end on this wonderful video from the organization Billions in Change that features the inspiring work of Manoj Bhargava. If you don’t think the world is getting a lot better you’re paying too much attention to the news and not enough to what’s going on in the world (and no, they’re not synonymous):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se_fYZRbyJs
The world is a cool place. Get out into it and meet it. If you’re serious you’ll see things that will amaze and inspire you. We all look forward to your contributions. Much love.
peace, s
Scott McPherson is a writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and nonprofit organizations around the world.
