Modern life is giving us brain fatigue. By Mary E. Williams

By Dilip -

Reading Dr. Mark Rego's provocative, intense Frontal Fatigue: The Impact of Modern Life and Technology on Mental Illness, I found myself thinking of David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water."  In it, the late author observes the need to be aware of "what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us." 

Today, we live in a culture that is often corrosive to our mental and physical health, but it's water in which we swim. The water of an incessant blare of notifications and breaking news; the water of, as Rego explains, that "something about modernity that acts as fertilizer for mental disorders."

Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young. BY MARIA POPOVA

There's already plenty of literature about our contemporary mental health crisis. But Rego, who has practiced psychiatry for three decades, takes the unique approach of examining with specificity the impact of 21st century life on our magnificent, misunderstood prefrontal cortexes. He offers no sweeping generalizations, or finger pointing. Instead he takes the reader deep into the science of how the region of our brains that controls executive function evolved, how it operates — and what the unbelievable demands we put on it every day are doing to it. It's a fascinating window into what makes us human, and an urgent call to "build our lives as best we can."…

https://www.salon.com/2021/12/12/the-dangers-of-overtaxing-your-prefrontal-cortex/


Tanya Gold - How materialism makes us sad


David Foster Wallace - This Is Water

 

Julia Kristava: Interpreting radical evil


Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ


STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis


Marina Hyde: The question every politician should be asking is, what does Mark Zuckerberg want with us?


Siva Vaidhyanathan: Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet / Jonathan Freedland: Is Facebook the tobacco industry of the 21st century?


Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)


Lauren Aratani: Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries


Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death. By George Monbiot


The Bleak Left - On Endnotes. By TIM BARKER


Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality


Defying capitalism and socialism, Kumarappa and Gandhi had imagined a decentralised Indian economy - Venu Madhav Govindu & Deepak Malghan


Beginnings and Endings


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