Ultimately, awareness of emotions empowers an individual with the insight needed to measure perceptions and interactions against personal mores in order to define these dynamics as successes or failures, providing valuable information to use as the foundation for future behavior. Online, these relationships are most readily replicated in discussion forums and virtual reality. To be sure, virtual reality (VRGET: Virtual Reality Graded Exposure Therapy) is currently being used in this fashion to treat established cases of PTSD by desensitizing individuals to innocuous dynamics, thereby increasing innate resilience. The audience facing what may be the largest obstacle preventing participation in this particular forum for social evolution are the victims of torture (e.g. terrorism); arguably, the majority of people living on the planet today. Victims of terror lose the ability to identify emotions due to reduced blood flow to the left-frontal lobe. Consequently, these people struggle with the awareness needed to form healthy resilience. Fortunately, nearly half of the world's population uses the internet and many of us can benefit from online interactions designed to improve psychologically healthy growth.

The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found “abnormal white matter”—essentially extra nerve cells built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and executive function. A parallel study found similar changes in the brains of video game addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other Chinese results that link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of “atrophy.”
​
While brain scans don’t reveal which came first, the abuse or the brain changes, many clinicians feel their own observations confirmed. “There’s little doubt we’re becoming more impulsive,” says Stanford’s Aboujaoude, and one reason for this is technology use. He points to the rise in OCD and ADHD diagnosis, the latter of which has risen 66 percent in the last decade. “There is a cause and effect.”

And don’t kid yourself: the gap between an “Internet addict” and John Q. Public is thin to nonexistent. One of the early flags for addiction was spending more than 38 hours a week online. By that definition, we are all addicts now, many of us by Wednesday afternoon, Tuesday if it’s a busy week. 
​

• Dokoupil, T. (2012). Is the onslaught making us crazy? Newsweek. 26

Socialize. 
Regular social contact, with positive people encourages the growth of new brain cells and releases healthy brain chemicals.

https://universityhealthnews.com/daily/memory/brain-atrophy/

​The podcast script, some commentary for my classmates, and an additional tie-in for alpha waves. 
https://nannymaroon.wordpress.com/2018/09/21/affliction-to-alpha-waves-retrain-the-brain/

Even after that, I found another piece to the puzzle:
Alpha Brain Waves Boost Creativity and Reduce Depression https://t.co/98t1w7HpqA

I believe this is the connection that turns my brain-building process into a self-perpetuating loop.
Once I have used pleasurable music to generate alpha waves, I have the biochemicals needed to do it again...

*Disclaimer: This is personal experience, not medical advice.

​"This research makes it clear that while humans spend so much time in search of hyper-focus, it’s likely an unachievable goal. Thousands of years of the struggle for survival have wired us to be distracted. Maybe it’s time to embrace it as a fundamental part of life."

Betuel, E. (2018). Scientists reveal the number of times you're actually conscious each minute. Spoiler: It's not very often (and that's a good thing). https://www.inverse.com/article/48300-why-is-it-hard-to-focus-research-humans

RESEARCH REVEALS
Four times every second, explains Princeton Neuroscience Institute Ian Fiebelkorn, Ph.D., to Inverse, the brain stops focusing on the task at hand. That’s about 240 times a minute.

“The brain is wired to be somewhat distractible,” he says. “We focus in bursts, and between those bursts we have these periods of distractibility, that’s when the brain seems to check in on the rest of the environment outside to see if there’s something important going on elsewhere. These rhythms are affecting our behavior all the time” (i.e. rhythms of attention).

PERSONAL OBSERVATION
During "rhythm of attention" cycles when my "brain stops taking snapshots of individual points of focus (whatever is in front of me at the moment)," I am giving my brain brackground reggae music as an alternative focal point upon which my mind stitches together a narrative of the complete experience, be it Storytelling for Social Media promotion or analysis' and interpretations of academic information. This is why my most productive times are in the very early hours of the day when people are asleep and there is virtually no other sound and movement.

When someone brings any topic, including sex, into the discussion,
​it becomes part of the narrative, changing the tone of the experience.