Heroin brought euphoria reading Wikipedia has made me knowledgeable on many diverse subjects and those video games might have increased my focus and problem solving skills. Video games and to a lesser extent television are stimulating, while most drugs are not.
Video games and to a lesser extent television are stimulating, while most drugs are not.
What about 'stimulants' then, mmm? Oh wait, you were only talking about mental stimulation? Many actually do sharpen the mind. Nootropics? What about psychadelics or lesser psychoactives then? Oh wait, you don't consider those experiences 'stimulating'?
You put television above drugs? Psychoactives and similar experiences (eg. sensory deprivation) really are critical to the history of human cultures... in particular the emergence and development of visual art[1] and other forms of communication (glyphs, writing, dance...). Television and radio, for all their wonders, historically speaking do represent a johnny-come-lately, distributed programming channel for an (a)pathetic population of pliant, endebted, time-poor, couch-dwelling wageslaves subsisting on artifice and an everpresent supply of tangential mental wankery.
I agree fully with 'all things in moderation, including moderation' as suggested by your first sentence, but I disagree strongly with your conclusion.
>Heroin brought euphoria reading Wikipedia has made me knowledgeable on many diverse subjects
Or rather gave a lot of people a shallow understanding of some topic and a false sense of entitlement to be equal to an expert that actually studied the field in question.
>and those video games might have increased my focus and problem solving skills.
Judging by teaching young people very adept at video games, no it really hasn't. If anything it has destroyed their focus for anything that's not a constant blaze of motion and sound. As for problem solving skills, the only ones that wee boosted was those most alike solving video game problems.
