I had an old guy in one of my churches who told me his first marriage was an unhappy one.  And then one day his wife ran off with another lover.  My parishioner said he was distraught, but noticed that as soon as his wife left, so did his hemorrhoids.  Each body part can think on its own.

I used to struggle constantly with neck pain and sore throats.  But then on a spiritual retreat one year, after doing some journaling, I realized that there were several conflicts occurring in my life where my head was telling me to do one thing and my heart another.  The throat (or the neck) is exactly where we would expect a battle between the heart and mind to play out.  I needed to get my heart and mind on the same page. Since that insight, neither my neck or my throat give me many problems.

We’ve long known about psycho-somatic illnesses-- the body is ailing because the mind is burdened with stress or sadness.  Cardio-vascular disease, cancer, digestive problems, and afflictions in the reproductive organs are all effected by our thoughts and emotions.  Sometimes the body detects trouble before the brain. And it’s a two-way street:  an aching body can bring down the mind and spirit.  

But the body-mind interface isn’t all negative; it’s often positive and beneficial.  John Best, professor of cognitive psychology at EIU, introduced me this week to the theory of “embodied cognition,” all for the price of his lunch on Wednesday. Embodied cognition: the more our physical bodies are involved in an experience, the richer the experience for us.  A trip up a mountain is richer than seeing a photo of one.  Wading into the ocean is more vivid than hearing about it.  

Here's my point: technology is impoverishing our lives. Think about it: most of our technological gains have steadily eroded the body’s role in processing information.  For example, it takes more body parts to work a map than a GPS.  I can read the New York Times on my computer using just my middle finger, but I have to move at least 25 muscles to flip through and read a real newspaper.  A face-to-face sit-down with a friend is infinitely more somatic than a conversation by texting.  Being in a classroom with people engages far more of my sensor and motor systems than checking in on Zoom.

Why is body involvement important?  The more of my body is engaged in an experience, the more neuro-transmitters get fired up in my brain.  The less I am physically engaged, the fewer brain cells I use. Technological assistance literally disengages my brain.  And the more my neurotransmitters sit idly by, the more my imagination, empathy, and curiosity, is diminished. 

The things we value most about being human depend on humongous amounts of bustling about in our brains.  When there is insufficient traffic among our neurotransmitters, we get depressed, and we lose our taste for adventure and awe.  Our capacities for sacrifice, joy, patience, humor, flexibility, and persistence wither away.  

In my lifetime, technological advancements have trigged a seismic shift in how humans process information:  how we perceive it, retrieve it, and control it.  In short, technology does more and more of the work for us.  We’ve even been using chatbots (artificial intelligence) in the last few months that can do all our work for us:  write papers, compose songs, discover cures, and supply a robotic friend when we feel lonely. Technology is making our cognitive work increasingly disembodied.  

We’ve gone from change jingling in our pockets-- to checkbooks-- to credit cards. And the consequence is that a whole company of our neurotransmitters has been “retired.”  

We look things up on Wikipedia—avoiding all the physical work of thumbing through an encyclopedia, and more neurotransmitters are idled.  

Our social life is less in person and more played out on social media, and millions more neurotransmitters bite the dust.  

We learn to fix the toilet on You Tube and don’t interact with the old geezer down the street who could also show us how get our plumbing working.  

The doctor and nurse spend more time getting to know us through the data on the computer than by actually looking at us and touching us.  More neurotransmitters shut down.  

Board games and physical contests yield to online gaming, and brain activity retards a bit more. Porn replaces awkward body positions and unusual smells-- and another billion brain cells wilt into oblivion.

A recent survey of teenaged girls indicated that 30%  seriously contemplated suicide since the start of the pandemic, six times what it was.  Some think there is evidence that social media is to blame.  But perhaps it’s more than that.  Perhaps we need to look at everything that has changed in our kids’ lives due to technology.

My generation (the baby-boomers) is the last one that truly straddles two technological worlds:  one in which it took physical effort and involvement to process information, the other world that requires less and less of our bodies to get by.  My daughters still know a little about an age when embodied cognition was a valued thing.  My grandchildren will be the first generation in history to suffer the consequences of embodied cognition being usurped so thoroughly. 

Unless we learn to discipline our dependency on technology, depression will be our next pandemic.  

There is still time to reintroduce the small things that will fire up our brains. We can still reverse our growing resignation toward mass shootings, environmental catastrophe, racial and gender violence, etc.            

Because I’m an evangelist for the abundant life that Jesus promised, I’m starting to become sort of an evangelists for things like cash, paper maps, real books, in-person classrooms, real newspapers, potluck dinners, walks in nature, friends getting together, snail mail, and my fat dictionary.  I’m not abandoning technology, but I’m growing a little more wary of my calculator, zoom meetings, the GPS, social media, texting, emails, and smartphone.  

There seems to be a profound connection between our national malaise (racism, gender violence, loss of religion, instability of educational institutions, eating disorders, increasing mental illness, gun violence, etc.); our loss of spiritual vitality (imagination, empathy, sense of adventure, hope, willingness to make sacrifices, joy, patience, laughter, humor, curiosity, flexibility, and persistence); our growth in technological aids (electronic money, GPS, online search engines, calculators, virtual meetings, texting, social media, electronic data files, robots, AI, porn, online gaming, etc.); and the reduced neurotransmitter activity in our brains.

All this makes me hopeful.  We need not be victims of a runaway world.  After all, we're not brain dead quite yet. We can still laugh and be curious.  And we can still discipline ourselves to be good stewards of both our brains and our world.