How Is Technology Changing the Brain?

An anonymous reader writes "An article at silicon.com explores how the use of technology might be changing the brain — including interviews with Nicholas Carr and Susan Greenfield. 'The research suggests the brain acts almost like a muscle - bulking up in regions required to perform oft-repeated mental tasks but diminishing in regions used for less common types of thinking. Or to put it another way, for example: do a lot of mental arithmetic, and your brain will get better at doing mental arithmetic. ... [Carr] goes on to suggest there is now a body of evidence that indicates the human brain adapts to suit how we use it. The question that follows is whether our technologies are making the best use of our grey matter.' The article makes an interesting point about how skill-loss is only part of the picture: 'When we look at technology we can't just look at loss, we also have to look at gain, and we also have to look at skillsets in the context of the modern world — our grandparents' skillset is not the skillset that will serve us the best.'"

Susan Greenfield - seriously?

[Gorshkov]

I was going to read TFA - believe it or not, I usually do. But after seeing Susan Greenfield's name in the summary, I decided to skip it. Anybody here who's familiar with Ben Goldachre's [badscience.net] site, badscience.net, is certainly familiar enough with her antics that they'd know anything that comes out of her mouth is, at best, fiction.

Re:Derp

[clive_p]

Susan Greenfield has a history of making these claims, without a scrap of evidence to back them up. For a more sceptical treatment of the subject, see Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column of a couple of weeks ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/bad-science-publishing-claims [guardian.co.uk]

Re:it has changed it indeed

[pburghdoom]

This is related to the study done a little while ago out of Columbia University [columbia.edu] . The basic idea is we tend to forget things we know we can find quickly through a search.