This article is a bit long but I remained interested to the very end. This lady appears to have a handle on life as it now is IMHO.

The BIg Idea


SUSAN GREENFIELD needs little prompting to recall when she first held a human brain in her hand. It was more than 30 years ago, when she was in her late 20s. Back then, she says, she hadn't realised you could study the brain in any meaningful way; it was just there, "a constant presence behind your eyes and between your ears, encased and inaccessible in your skull". How, she pondered, would cutting up a dead brain reveal how it works?
Three decades on she knows a lot more but the brain is still as mysterious as ever, the one part of our bodies that defies explanation. Brains, says Greenfield, as if she were discussing cuts of meat with her local butcher, have the consistency of eggs. Poached? Scrambled? Fried? More like soft-boiled, she says. "It has a form. It doesn't just fall apart like an egg yolk."
She wore surgical gloves because the brain she was about to touch was bathed in formalin. "I don't know if you've ever smelt formalin?" she asks. I confess I have not.

http://www.sundayherald.com/arts/art...262588.0.0.php

paula

Makes so much sense. Our kids' brains are being hard wired differently than ours, due to technology. As a kid, I didn't watch much tv, because little was available.

We played creative games indoors, and did lots of sports like bike riding and roller skating and ice skating. Softball in the street, stick ball in the street. Swimming. Played with Tweety, my parakeet.

I climbed trees and did art work. Learned ballet and tap dance and jazz dancing, and sang songs, and played the piano and wrote music. Ping pong.... Gosh, we were busy!

No play dates. We were free to roam on our own, from an early age.

I read books like crazy.

And no technology needed. No instant gratification. The process was important, not the result.

Sometimes, I wish I'd had the internet all my life. But now that I really think about it, I was lucky not to have it.

I was outdoors all the time - could walk as far into the woods as we wanted. We especially liked going far, up and down hills to see where we would come out...then walk the road back home. We had recess and gym class.


paula

Woods are nice. There were woods behind my grandmother's home and I found an old Indian arrow head there.

When I was 5, we moved into a development that was surrounded by undeveloped areas. There was a stable nearby with horses, a haunted house with bats, lots of land that just grew as it wanted to. Also an estate where we played. Especially inside an empty pool. I often ran around with my older brother and his friends. I was a tom boy. Walked on a dirt road to school.

We walked a long way to school. Great exercise. We really did trudge in the snow! I spoke French with my girlfriend on the way to school. Because we wanted to!

A friend and I walked a long way to the park on the weekends where there was an ice skating rink in winter. She took figure skating lessons, and she taught me tricks. It was so much fun. No schedule to follow. We just did whatever we wanted to do!

We had no snow days, except maybe in the worst blizzard when you couldn't even open the door the snow was so high. Very few vacations, too.

I don't know how working parents handle it with all the snow days and vacations for their young kids. Their vacation days must revolve around those days off school. One coworkier with kids says it's awful.