Use your Brain.

The other night, I was reading Broadsheet magazine and also sifting on my smart phone when my housemate came home. She showed me this book about the Chinese New Year and what my year had in store for me, so, interested,  I flipped it open and started having a read. Between each sentence about my future prosperity, health and romance, my eyes kept darting back to my phone, pressing refresh, looking back at Broadsheet and back to the book again. I couldn't stay focused on more than one paragraph of what was in front of me......

Sound familiar?

I'm not the first one to point out that more and more research and evidence has been found to illustrate that our generation's brains are changing thanks to the way technology is so snugly nestled in our lives. From 2001-2011, our attention spans dropped from 12 seconds to 5 seconds.

The Daily Mail reported the average person switches between devices as many as 21 times an hour. Advertising researchers tracked the online behaviour of 200 British people to discover how much time they spent on one device before picking up another and found our attention span is smaller than ever thanks to the growing presence of these multiple devices.

Have you done anything else since the start of this post?

I could go on and on with facts and figures, but I'm going to talk about a feeling.
Fear.

I'm afraid at how quickly we forget things.
I've been invited to several birthday dinners this weekend, but even though I've accepted the invitation, I can't tell you the name of the place we are going to. I know it's a new place in the city, but that's it.

Simple things like directions, phone numbers, place names and dates, we don't even have to try to remember anymore as we know we can find it in a few taps of our fingers.

How many times have you been out to dinner with friends and heard something like this-
"I watched this really good movie the other night"
"Oh yeah, who was in it?"
"Ahhh it was that guy from, you know, that musical movie with Anne Hathaway"
"Hugh Jackman"
"Na, not him, ahh that other one...(quickly does google search) ah yeah, Eddie Redmayne"
"Oh yeah, what was that movie called again"
"(looks at phone again, has also checked Facebook whilst still looking up Eddie Redmayne) The Theory of Everything"
"Oh yeah"

I'm afraid of how we don't try to figure things out, afraid of how we don't worry about actually knowing how to spell words correctly, or even remember simple pages to look up.
Even when I tell people about this blog, I post it on their wall rather than ask them to remember "thejoanasimmo.blogspot.com.au" 

Yes, I'm probably making generalisations based on myself and my peers, and maybe you have the attention span of a sparrow (which is long) 

The thing that sparked me to write about this, was not only the short length of my attention span the other day, but the questions some of my students (aged 10-20) have been asking me lately.
"Joana, my shoes are slipping- what do I do?"
"Take them off."

Google is the bomb. I use it for lots of stuff and I'm sure you are pretty aquatinted with it too. Google is smarter than me.
But that doesn't mean I have to just accept that I'm meant to be dumb and use the internet as a spoon to feed me things I can't be bothered spooning up or thinking up myself.

When I see someone get out their phone when they have forgotten the name of something, I push it out of their hands and ask them to use their brains. I used to write everything down so I didn't have to remember it, now I prefer to train my memory, thanks to the Mega Memory tapes my mother made me listen to in the 90s.

We know exercising our bodies keeps us healthy. We need to exercise out brains and our focus, as just as your biceps deteriorate with age if you don't flex 'em, so will your brain. Your hair will be grey, but your memories will hopefully be bright in decades to come!

Jj