It's a little shocking to see experts turn aganst modern society, but it happens:
Regarding smartphones, a NYTimes op-ed — Your Phone vs. Your Heart — argued that smartphones can alter our lives on a genetic level, for cryin' out loud.
The human body — and thereby our human potential — is far more plastic or amenable to change than most of us realize. The new field of social genomics, made possible by the sequencing of the human genome, tells us that the ways our and our children’s genes are expressed at the cellular level is plastic, too, responsive to habitual experiences and actions.
Work in social genomics reveals that our personal histories of social connection or loneliness, for instance, alter how our genes are expressed within the cells of our immune system. New parents may need to worry less about genetic testing and more about how their own actions — like texting while breast-feeding or otherwise paying more attention to their phone than their child — leave life-limiting fingerprints on their and their children’s gene expression.
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.
That's the good news. But the writer hints at the bad news: that we are being manipulated by corporations exploiting our desire to connect. Blunter is an op-ed in the Washington Post about how food giants such as Kellog's and Oscar Mayer manipulated our pleasure centes for their profits — ruthlessly.
In one of the most egregious examples of company misbehavior, Moss
describes a 2008 Kellogg’s commercial for Frosted Mini-Wheats in which a
voice-over claimed, “A clinical study showed kids who had a filling
breakfast of Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved their attentiveness by
nearly 20 percent.” In fact, half the children who ate the cereal showed
no improvement in attentiveness. But by the time the Federal Trade
Commission got around to barring Kellogg’s from making this claim, the
commercial had already run for six months.
Full of what, is the question.
Kit Stolz 