Friends: Real and Imagined

Researchers from the National Opinion Research Center have found that people who watch a lot of television seem to be as psychologically content as people who have many friends. These disappointing findings stem from the fact that "the human brain evolved long before television came along, so subconsciously it recognises any face it sees regularly as a friend, even if it is on the screen," says Satoshi Kanazawa, Ph.D., author of the study. Does this explain why society remains in a stupor of overfed, undernourished, overweight, socially inept citizens? After all they are, indeed, getting their social and psychological strokes by tuning in to see their favorite "friends" each week.

As someone recently noted technology can certainly be an aid to human kind but if we are not careful it can greatly diminish of the quality of our lives. Technology distracts us from our own thought, daydreams, even our own imagination. When we fill in the time from the car to the elevator and the elevator to the office, or from lunch back to the office, with a beeper or cell phone, we interrupt the opportunity for people to marinate in their own imaginations.