No, the perils of technology is not a new debate. The old drama about TV destroying young, innocent minds has raged on for many years, mutating, growing and lodging itself at the forefront of our parents’ minds. Now it’s not just TV anymore, it’s everything. If it has a screen or a key board, hell if it has a power cord, than it’s making you lazier, stupider and for those in the more extreme camp, brainwashed. Generally, I’d say we’re over-reacting. I don’t doubt the modern omnipresence of technology is doing something, but ‘destroy’ isn’t a word to throw around lightly.
As a professor, neuroscientist, author and general overachiever, Baroness Susan Greenfield knows what she’s talking about. She’s about as down as you can be with the inner workings of the brain and when it comes to our minds, she says online networking has got more pull than we realize.
Get to know your brain
As you might expect, talking about the brain tends to get a little science-y. So I’ll do for you now what Susan Greenfield did for me – a quick course in neuroscience that you can hold in higher esteem than Wikipedia.
Your intelligence isn’t based on how many brain cells you have, but how connected they are. The more active your brain, the more connections between brain cells you’ll sprout, and all the better you’ll be for it. What’s connected to what determines your understanding of the world.
The good news is you’re not necessarily stuck with what you’ve got – ‘nurture can trump nature.’ Our brains are malleable, evolving things that will continue to grow and deteriorate all throughout our lives.
So how do you bump up your sprout count? Try something new, and you’ll learn something new, and a teeny weeny little brain connection will be born. A stimulating and diverse environment is your number one brain improvement device, so surround yourself with diverse people, places, experiences and ideas.
In this way, your environment will make or break your brain. It will mean you use it, or lose it. Spending all your time in a limited environment will mean you’ll do a great job of maintaining certain connections. Meanwhile, the neglected, unused connections will die and your brainpower will (metaphorically) shrink.
Burying your brain cells
The question now, is which kind of environment has the electronic age created?
‘My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children’ Greenfield told the UK’s Daily Mail. For her, screen cultures are definitely limiting environments. They’re encouraging normally childish tendencies, like short attention spans, and a sensory focus. They’re leaving us with poor understanding of anything that isn’t literal – metaphors, the idea of something being able to mean something else, will soon become unfamiliar.
Evidence that is strictly scientific is lacking, but this hasn’t deterred Greenfield. She points to behavioral indications, that we’re beginning to see more and more of the behavior that technology generally encourages. There’s a lot of talk about a rise in diagnoses of ADHD and autism, which may indicate a rise in shorter attention spans and reduced empathy respectively.
The mere existence of TVs, computers and video games haven’t set the fate of our brains in stone. It’s our overexposure to them, and particularly the overexposure of more impressionable minds – the young. As Greenfield put it in the Daily Mail, ‘It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations.'
Down with technology?
Undecided? Well, so is the science world. Luckily, amongst all the confusion, the science community has managed to come up with some good TV. For a succinct summary of the counter arguments and to see some good old science sledging, have a look at this BBC clip. Careful it doesn’t rewire your brain.
