Google Glass, for those of you who have been living under a rock the past week, is a new technology product that resembles a funky pair of modern glasses… without the glass. Over one eye, instead, is a cube of glass that displays information in front of your eyeball. Instead of looking at a handheld device’s screen, you’re kind of looking at this “heads-up” display of info. It takes voice commands to navigate, just like the latest generation of smartphones can.

Some people are really excited by this new technology device. It is one step closer to interacting with a computer inside your brain rather than through our organic input devices (in this case, our eyeballs and voice).

But it begs the question — who is having difficulty using existing devices where wearing your computer on your head is less obtrusive (or obnoxious) than wearing it in your pocket or purse?

“For most teens, the Internet is a fundamental part of life,” according to Dana Udall-Weiner, Ph.D, a psychologist who specializes in media literacy. It’s how they communicate and interact. Teens use social media sites like Facebook for everything from casual talks to breakups, she said.

With social media a major part of teens’ lives, it’s important they have a healthy relationship with the Internet. What does this look like?

According to Udall-Weiner, it resembles any healthy relationship: It has boundaries.

It also shouldn’t have to meet all their needs, including emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual, she said. For instance, sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest should never replace face-to-face interactions, she said. Instead, they should supplement them. That’s because online interactions lack the emotional depth and support of real-time relationships. “…[I]t’s hard to know whether someone is trustworthy, loyal, and invested in your well-being.”

One day, after hours of sliding my cursor from Twitter to Facebook to stats for my blogs and back to Twitter — when I should have been writing instead — I emailed Dr. M., a cognitive therapist.

Dr. M. had previously helped me understand that worry is an addiction — it hits the same pleasure center of the brain that other addictions, such as alcohol, do.

The more I worry, the more it reinforces me to worry. Ever the pleasure-seeker, I worry more and perpetuate the cycle. Yet, once I understood the worry addiction, I worried less.

While I am inclined toward overindulging in pleasurable activities (In my mother’s words. “Susan, you’re an extremist!”), I am also driven to avoid the consequences in the quest for maximum pleasure.

Why do people play video games?

While researchers and psychologists have found many answers — to socialize with others (e.g., form relationships, provide and receive social support, and build collaborations), to gain a sense of achievement (e.g., acquire status, power, or domination over others), or to immerse themselves into a world outside the ordinary — there’s not a lot of consistency in how motives are measured in gaming research.

This means it’s really hard for researchers to compare their data with other scientists’ data in the same field, making broad generalizations about video games and gaming difficult to come by.

Enter a new exploratory study by Graham & Gosling (2013) to help shed some light on the problem.

Did you know that simply watching TV causes harm to children? Well, that’s what the American Academy of Pediatrics would have you believe. And yet, here we are in the sixth decade since TV became popular, and we have not yet seen the end of the world based upon multiple generations that grew up with television as a mainstay.

The latest issue of Pediatrics has two studies — and a bonus editorial! — that suggests television viewing by children is associated with greater criminality and antisocial personality, and that a child’s behavior can be modified by simply changing what they’re watching.

Pediatrics is the mouthpiece for the American Academy of Pediatrics. And while it’s ostensibly an objective, scientific journal, it continually publishes weak research — especially on the effects of TV and children.

Let’s check out the latest…

Everyday, when we open our electronic mailbox, we get our fair share of unsolicited email. Of course, the unsolicited offers have gotten a lot more subtle and duplicitous. A few years ago, dozens of marketeers tried to get us to post badly sourced and designed infographics.

Now they’ve moved on to something that, in my opinion, looks a lot like deception.

In today’s email box, we found an email from “Jeffrey Redd, Project Outreach Director” with an email address of jeff@va.gov.samhsa.net sharing with us “a guide about finding treatment, free of cost.” Wow, really? A new fantastic resource from the folks over at SAMHSA?

But wait, hold on a minute. That email address doesn’t look quite right…

“… To get in shape” is one of the most common New Year’s resolutions, and arguably the one most often broken.

For some, the solution may lie in the new wave of exercise trackers. Wristbands and other gadgets rely on operant conditioning — the potential for feedback from the environment to affect desired (or undesired) behavior.

Depending on the gadget, trackers provide can provide personalized information about information including: the number of steps taken per day (which is then converted into miles traversed or calories burned); total calories consumed; and the length and depth of nightly sleep. Some of these trackers also will provide daily, weekly, or monthly trends.

The idea is that making people aware of their daily activity and caloric intake will motivate them to make better choices and achieve health-related goals.

As a writer for the web, I’m well acquainted with information overload. One bit of information leads to five facts, which leads to three articles, which leads to an interesting interview you must listen to right now, which leads to 10 pages in your browser.

I’ve always loved the scavenger hunt research requires. Every clue leads to another. Every clue uncovered is a prize in itself: learning something new and interesting and getting one step closer to the carrot (such as the answer to your original question).

But there’s always one more thing to look up, learn and digest.

Whether your livelihood lives online — like mine — or not, you probably use the Web quite a bit. The Internet makes research a breeze. Want to know what triggered the World Wars or how the states got their shapes? Want to know how to bake a tasty tilapia or buy a reliable used car?

Information is merely a click — or, more accurately, a Google search — away. Depending on your query, there’s likely at least a dozen, if not hundreds, of blogs on the topic, a similar number of books and many more articles.

This is a good thing, but it also can overburden our brains.

Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association (RSDSA) is an advocacy organization that promotes public and professional awareness of CRPS and to “educate those afflicted with the syndrome, their families, friends, insurance and healthcare providers on the disabling pain it causes.

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) — also known as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy — is a chronic neurological syndrome characterized by: severe burning pain, pathological changes in bone and skin, excessive sweating, tissue swelling, and extreme sensitivity to touch.

Recently the RSDSA featured one of our NeuroTalk communities in its quarterly newsletter, the RSDSA Review, “NeuroTalk’s RSD and CRPS Forum: An Online Community with Valuable Resources” by Franklin Michaels, Jr.

Here’s what they had to say about the NeuroTalk community…

The cultivation of mindfulness requires periods of focused attention. Many proponents of mindfulness maintain that this is best developed through seated, silent meditation. So before considering how to focus attention, we must first consider our relationship with silence.

Whether in the center of a city or deep in a forest, the cacophony of sounds around us makes it apparent that true silence is impossible. Composer John Cage wrote music that included long periods of silence. When the musicians stopped playing, concertgoers were quickly confronted with the shuffling, shifting, and coughing sounds in the concert hall.

So what is silence?

With so many apps on the market, it’s hard to know which are useful.

Many are designed by software developers instead of psychologists, without scientific testing. They range from beneficial, to harmless but useless, to bordering on fraudulent.

The apps selected for this list make no hucksterish claims and are based on established treatments. Progressive Muscle Relaxation, for example, has been used for a century and is likely just as effective in this new medium. Knowledge from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy enrich two apps on this list. Others mix solid information with ingenuity.

Do you turn to the Internet to look up symptoms of a disease or condition? How about to diagnose yourself or someone you know?

You’re not alone, according to the Health Online 2013 report out from Pew Internet & American Life Project today. According to their most recent survey of Americans, 35 percent of us have gone online to figure out a medical or health condition.

And, perhaps surprising to no one, 72 percent of Internet users have looking for health information online and most people — 77 percent — start their inquiry at a search engine, like Google or Bing.