Streaming Thought

My son has been talking lately about a science fair project he's thinking of pursuing. He wants us to buy him an EEG machine so that he can play around with it and figure out what he can do with it. He thinks that we can pick up waves from the brain that a computer could translate into musical notes or words. He thinks we won't need keyboards anymore, but that we could think our music right into the air. It's almost unbelievable to me, until I think how far we've come.

My kids are tired of hearing about the computer that took up a couple of rooms the size of the whole main floor of our house. In my first years of college I was trying to learn to program on that computer. Then I went on a mission. When I came back to school two years later, I signed up for another computer programming class and they sat me down in front of an Apple II. A desktop computer. It was amazing. I'm afraid I was less amazing. I never did learn much about computer programming.

For my birthday last week, my husband gave me a Kindle. Now I can carry around a whole shelf full of books (library? I'm not sure yet exactly what it's capacity it is, but I know I can browse the internet.) I also have a little tiny mp3 player that can hold eight or more complete audio books as well as six sessions of General Conference. We have pretty much given up on television, but through our WII we can get Netflix and have thousands of movies available any time we want. Some of the television series that we missed because we didn't get cable are available to us now. There is always information and entertainment available everywhere I turn.

I think maybe I have ADD. Everywhere I look, there is something demanding my attention. Current events, politics, the news, legislative causes all seem worthy of my attention; they even seem important enough that I should feel guilty if I'm not informed. Health and nutrition information for myself and my family is more readily available than ever before and surely, that's my responsibility to know all of those things. Anything that has to do with education opportunities for my children who are still in school, vocational and career opportunities for my children who are out of school; any loving mother would research those things for her children. Cute projects I could make for them, fun FHE ideas, home decorating ideas, the list of project ideas is endless. And while I'm learning about important things, I'm easily distracted by the constant flow of truly random things; random because they fall into no explainable pattern. What were they thinking?! How did they think of that?! Or Wow!! that's amazing!! Truly random and infinitely available things that people are saying or doing or filming and putting on Youtube. What a distracting world this is.

I'm finding, too, that the more I read and listen to all of these various input, the less I think. It seems my mind is becoming numb from the constant overload. I need to spend more time pondering my own thoughts and thinking for myself about what life really is and what it's all about. Otherwise I run the risk of not being anybody at all, but only a leaky vessel that information is being constantly poured into and drained out of.

And then I think about William's science fair idea. The idea that brainwaves or thoughts can be translated directly by the computer. And I think about the eternities. I wonder if, when we are not limited by the mortal nature of our bodies, communication consists of thinking to each other. I wonder if out there in that eternal world there is a constant stream of thoughts and communication from an infinitude of sources. If that were the case, we would have to constantly choose whose voice to listen to, whose thoughts to participate in. It could be very overwhelming. I can get a pretty good idea of what my own choices are when I think about how many hours I spend with novels playing in my ears compared to how often I choose to listen to the Conference talks, or how often I am reading novels or email or playing games on my Kindle compared to the amount of time I spend studying the Scriptures that are also installed there. I imagine my choices throughout the eternities will be very like the choices I make now.