The Brain vs The Buzz

Are you also among those who check their phone as soon as a notification beeps? In today's era where everything depends on a click, keeping quiet has become a luxury. This dependence has increased so much that we wake up in the morning with its alarm and fall asleep at night with the soothing music playing on this phone.

- ■NANCY SHARMA

While on one hand these technological devices promise to keep us comfortable, productive and connected, on the other hand they are snatching away a very precious thing from us and that is our comfort and our peace. Just like our phone stays awake, our mind is also not able to rest. So now the time has come for us to think and understand what price we are really paying for staying connected with people through the internet.

Social media, apps, websites and emails are some of the means with the help of which we can talk to our loved ones sitting miles away. There was a time when we had to resort to letters even for very important things, earlier those letters used to take time to reach and then we had to wait for the reply. But in today's digital age, not only can we hear the voice of our friends, relatives and close ones sitting far away, but we can also see them through video call. And. If we want, we can explain humor and sad events without speaking by sending new emoji's using messages.

One evening I was sitting with my friendSonika, drinking tea and finally ready to read some literature books. Just five pages in - ping! A WhatsApp message. She replied quickly. Baek to reading. Ding! Instagram like. She smiled. Then another buzz email from work. Her tea went cold, the book was forgotten, and she didn't even notice.

This isn't just Sonika's story. It's all of us. We are living in the age of constant notifications, and whether we realize it or not, our brains are struggling to keep up. This incident gave me an idea to write about it.

The passage takes us back to a time thousands of years ago. The forest and eave environments served as home for our aneient human predecessors. The human brain evolved to detect abrupt environmental modifications such as moving bushes and unusual sounds or wind changes. These signals served as essential survival tools for our ancestors.