The Full Human Experience

I've got a challenge for you this week. You might not like it, but promise me you'll try:

Go outside and strike up a conversation with a stranger.

A conversation I had reminded me about how different the social skills of different generations might be depending on their level of face-to-face interaction.

Early studies are even linking the skyrocketing reports of online abuse to the fact kids aren't learning the nuances of social interaction outdoors. You can say what you like when you're talking to an avatar. It's not real, is it?

Even if Mark Zuckerberg has you sold on the Metaverse, so much of the magic in human interaction happens face to face.

Humans have evolved to interact. Our bodies don't rewire themselves based on the shareholder reports of tech companies.

When we spend time together, our heartbeats and even the frequency of our brainwaves can synchronise. We intuit tiny sub-surface signals that tell us who to trust and who to fall in love with.

There's no NFT for that. It's baked into our physiology.

Connected by neuroscience

The brain is an expensive machine - I've said this plenty of times before. But we lose many of its functions as we age. That's why there's a strong link, for example, between decreased social contact and the onset of alzheimer's.