By Diane Ackerman - Despite all the seeming connectedness, we’re not the most socially connected we’ve ever been. Generation by generation, our brains have been evolving new networks, new ways of wiring and firing, favoring some behaviors and discarding others, as we train ourselves to meet the challenges of a world we keep amplifying, editing, deconstructing, and recreating.

Between new developments in science, technology, and medicine, we live in exciting times. But according to poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman, these advancements also come at the expense of our environment's health, and our mental health. In this video clip from her Networker Symposium keynote, she describes the unprecedented changes we're encountering, and explains what therapists can do to help us meet the new demands of a chaotic world.

Poet, essayist, naturalist, teacher, polymath, and all-around creative genius, Diane Ackerman has for decades been writing extraordinarily rich, scientifically informed, and compulsively readable books of astonishing variety. In the following video clip, she describes the advancements, challenges, and insights for therapists in the new "Human Age."

For the first time in history, we’re mainly experiencing nature through intermediary technology that paradoxically provides more detail while flattening our sensory experience. Can becoming entranced by electronic media alter our brains?