How Is Technology Changing the Brain? 108
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.'"
it has changed it indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
I can definitely see changes. (Score:4, Insightful)
At least from anecdotal experience, I'd say there's merit to the claim that different mental exercises cause brain changes. My evidence? I have reasonable command of most math concepts, but I'm a complete drooling idiot when it comes to mental arithmetic. As in, being the embarrassed guy who pulls out a piece of paper or calculator to multiply >2 digit numbers. I've worked over the years to try to get better at it, and have succeeded somewhat. I can now at least keep some figures in my head and work things out, albeit slower than most people -- my problem before was that the problem setup in my brain would disappear as I was trying to work out the interim sums/products; I just couldn't hold on to the running totals. The only way I'd be able to do this is by forcing myself to...if I were still relying on a calculator to figure out a tip in a restaurant, that part of my brain would stay in its atrophied state IMO.
Now, extend this example to the problem domain we have now -- Internet access is almost an auxiliary brain for most people. I know I don't keep as much stuff in my brain as I used to. I do systems work, and there are tons of esoteric facts that help me do my job (knowing the "secret" registry settings in Windows for key server parameters, or the names of the 5 million files in /etc and which I need to change to make something happen in Linux. Back when I started doing this in the dinosaur era of Win 3.1 and OS/2, the only references available were paper manuals, live tech support and "Resource Kits" for products. It made sense to have a million things in your head so you didn't have to go look them up. But just this morning, I needed to find where to change a parameter in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit's set of scripts. I didn't go to a manual, or the collection of facts in my head -- I typed it into the search box of the browser. And I got the answer in about 30 seconds of searching, picking the right search result and reading the online text.
Now, the question is, does this make humans dumber? I think that if you're measuring mental ability by the volume of trivia in your head, then yes. I do think we need to figure out exactly what we really should keep stored away and what we can look up so we're not completely helpless should Google choose to be extra-evil. I also think that humans need to work on their attention spans and be able to stick to a problem more -- the rise of texting/social media/always-on Internet access is to blame for this.
Technology can be used to help us develop other skills to replace a head full of trivia...even simple tasks can improve people's problem solving, critical thinking and reasoning skills. Again, taking an example from my systems admin work -- how many fellow sysadmins do you know who don't logically lay out the solution to a problem and troubleshoot the real root cause? Good ones do this -- bad ones change 90 things all at once and see if the problem goes away, even if a new problem pops up. But if my mental arithmetic example is to be believed, people can get better with practice.
Re:it has changed it indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
"Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he wrote. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
I think this article raises valid concerns. These ideas are preliminary, but they ring true with my experience and intuition. I think a good specific topic around which to discuss the impact of technology is the use of calculators by school age children. I have heard it argued that since calculators are so common, that children and adults won't need to perform numeric calculations, so they shouldn't need to learn how to do mental math. My own experience in physics leads me to think that I would not have been able to learn the principles I have learned if my mental math was poor. Mental math allows me to parse mathematical equations and derive meaning from them. I think that if a person lacks the ability to do for example times tables, this would be a serious barrier to comprehending basic algebra.
A funny story from a friend, who is a teacher: He once had a 15 year old student come up to him and say "the square root button on my calculator isn't working. My friend took the calculator and tried it. Square root of nine...three. Square root of twenty five...five. "Well it seems to work for me" he said. Then the teenager took back the calculator and typed in "one" on the calculator and then pressed square root. "See sir, I keep pressing the square root button and nothing changes."
Avoiding TFA, the concept is worthy to consider (Score:4, Insightful)
Avoiding the Susan Greenfield issue, the topic is definitely worthy to ponder for a moment. I'll speak about myself, and in doing so, suspect that I speak for many of us.
Already, my machine is performing a very important role for me: it's my memory. My e-mail archive is a living memory of all the conversations I've had, which means something rather profound: that I don't have to remember the literal data that were provided, e.g., the specific wording of a decision, but instead, that such a conversation happened at one point, and was tracked via e-mail.
Beyond this capacity, let's address the point of TFA.
It's well known that neural circuity develops as a human spends more time with something, e.g., a talented musician has larger areas of cortex devoted to the things that make a talented musician talented, e.g., hand movements, musicality, etc. Whether these areas are separate, e.g., modular, and/or if they're represented as an integrated system is a conversation for another day. Suffice to say that brain areas expand as a human practices things more.
So it's fair to say that using technological tools in the commonplace way that we do builds neural matter that support our expanding use of the same. Whether this is at the expense of other skills, neurally, we don't know.
On the other hand, how many of us take the time to bake our own bread, fix our own cars, and plow our fields? It's fair to say that we spend less time building the products for our basic needs, which means that we develop those skills - and the related neural matter - less
So, while the author of TFA may (or may not be) a lady with a funky background, clearly the idea has merit and its implications - tradeoff of neural representation in areas of skill - is important to consider as we expand our use of social and media devices, and decrease the time we spend developing our ability to perform other tasks (supplanted by technology, as it were).
The internet isn't a black box of blame (Score:3, Insightful)
For those of us with partners, friends and family and not in their teens, it's pretty obvious that while us nerds delve fully into the fringes technology which has been developing rapidly, everyone else is using technology the same way. From the invention of the telephone to the mobile, the main reason people are on the net is to talk to one another - which isn't a sea change at all, since people always do it face to face too. And now people are using it as their diary, and encyclopedia. Not game changers either, for the brain. Just quicker.
I think xkcd 973 is appropriate. Teens are badass because they're teens. Not because of MTV or the Tubes.
Re:it has changed it indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
But why would being poorer at mental calculation be a bad thing now that we do have calculators? As long as all that brain power gets used usefully, that is, allocated to a higher level function, I say it is all good.
I can just imagine someone back when the printing press was invented complaining that reading and reasonably priced books is going to ruin every ones memories as no one will be memorising epic poems when they can just read them.
Things change. Different skills become valuable. This is not something to worry about as long as new and useful skills are learned.
The Implications of Habits of Mind (Score:5, Insightful)
The article was about technology and its impact on the mind. I think it is useful to look back in history to other developments that fundamentally changed our ways of thinking. I have heard it argued that in a way, the Jesuit religious order was responsible for the Enlightenment. The Jesuits ran schools where they inculcated in children the habit of being logical. They trained their students from an early age in debate, argument, and logic. This was for a religious purpose, but there were unintended consequences of this training. Some students who received his training in logic went on to question religion itself. Rene Descartes for example came to believe that everything should be questioned, including the church. He is one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment, and his writings have influenced all of us, whether or not we are conscious of them.
I am quite sure that the logical training the Jesuits did had a significant impact on the brain development of the children who were trained. Similarly, I suspect that our technology is also having an impact on the way we think, on our brain development. The reason I feel it is useful to look at this comparison is that it shows that childhood training can have a profound impact on society. If we train our children to be logical, those habits of mind will follow them throughout their lives. What type of training are children getting when they spend most of their lives plugged into the web?
Re:We need to be careful in dismissing old skills. (Score:4, Insightful)
Any Starcraft players here?
Any of you ever take a couple of months off from playing and then go back?
Any of you NOT completely suck after being out of practice?
Some things are simple and unforgettable, like riding a bicycle, playing Starcraft (well) is not. Sounds like an excuse for another fMRI study of 6 people (3 players and 3 controls) to be published and covered in the media as if it is discovering some truth of the universe, based on one billionth of the population.