"As John Ratey, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who specializes in the
science of attention, told The Times’s Matt Richtel for his chilling series,
“Driven to Distraction,” using digital devices gives you “a dopamine squirt.”
That explains the Pavlovian impulse of people who are out with friends
or dates to ignore them and check their BlackBerrys and cellphones, even if 99
out of 100 messages are uninteresting. They’re truffle-hunting for that
scintillating one.
Americans woke up one day to find that they were
don’t-miss-a-moment addicts who feel compelled to respond to all messages
immediately.
It also explains why Christopher Hill, a 21-year-old from
Oklahoma who killed a woman last September when he ran a red light while on his
cellphone and rammed into her S.U.V., tried to keep dialing and driving with a
headset his mother gave him two months after the accident."
I hate, absolutely hate being around people that cannot seem to put down their smart phones long enough to have a conversation with you. They are so busy "keeping up with the news" that they do not truly live in the present. Their friends, families, colleagues are right there ready to share life with them, but they are too busy reading their Twitter feeds on the situation in Honduras.
One of my biggest fears in life is that I, or someone I love will be killed by a drunk driver, but it seems like I should be more worried about being killed by that person that thinks they are so important that they cannot put down their phone, iPod or other devices long to focus on driving.
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