Newsweek reports on research by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small, and his research on the impact of information technologies on our brains. (He must have a good literary agent, since the article is triggered by his new book, iBRAIN.) Small is director of the UCLA Center on Aging, author of three previous books (two with the word "bible" in them-- he has a really good agent).
Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."...
To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.
Of course, we already know about neurological plasticity. The argument that information technologies and our brains mold each other is also not new. Reading, Maryann Wolf argues, turns us into reader-cyborgs (my term, not hers): over time, neural plasticity and technology work to create a human-textual (or human-alphabetic) symbiosis. Kristof Nyiri writes about the how "thinking with a word processor" differs from thinking with pen and paper. (Andy Clark's work, particularly his Natural Born Cyborgs, is also a good tool for getting at these issues.)
The interesting new thing is the question of how this will affect humans over the longer run, and whether we can talk about it as evolution.
Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap. On one side, what he calls digital natives—those who have never known a world without e-mail and text messaging—use their superior cognitive abilities to make snap decisions and juggle multiple sources of sensory input. On the other side, digital immigrants—those who witnessed the advent of modern technology long after their brains had been hardwired—are better at reading facial expressions than they are at navigating cyberspace. "The typical immigrant's brain was trained in completely different ways of socializing and learning, taking things step-by-step and addressing one task at a time," he says. "Immigrants learn more methodically and tend to execute tasks more precisely."
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