Brain wave: How technology changes our thinking
November 17th 2008 19:21
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From: theage.com.au
he wonders of our digital age are affecting us more than we know. By Gerard Wright in Los Angeles.
A month ago the secondary campus students and teachers at Wildwood School unshackled the electronic and virtual tethers that were part of everyday life at school and home. No mobile phones. No internet. No iPods.
Melinda Tsapatsaris, the director of the upper campus of the private school in West Los Angeles, felt it first. She arrived at school at 7am, her intentions pure and her accessories undigital. By 8am, she realised she had to send two emails.
The day without technology at Wildwood School was designed to remind students and staff of the impact on their lives of that technology, and its advantages and disadvantages.
What they found is that the embrace is not only a relationship of habit, or convenience - year 12 students found they were unable to complete their university application forms because they could only be submitted online - but that it has become part of their day, even part of them.
"I think we had to lock up the computers to make it work," Ms Tsapatsaris says.
Year 7 students debriefed themselves and, by extension, parents and teachers, in essays describing their tech-free day.
"It was pure torture!" one of them wrote. "I never thought I cared that much about technology until this day."
The student, a 13 year-old girl, continued: "I realised how much I needed and wanted it. It really opened my eyes how much I rely on technology. It was one wacky day."
Forget the lost art of cursive handwriting, this is what the internet hath wrought. Last year the school selected students to talk to parents about their online selves. One, aged 17, offered a revelatory instance of self-awareness.
"I'm reconciling that I'm a different person when I'm social networking, to when I'm talking to people face to face," she said, "and that kind of freaks me out."
So the internet - and mobile phones, and iPods and video games - is everywhere, all the time in the lives of children and teenagers. It's not as if this is the first time an emerging generation has been, in short order, exposed to, and then saturated by the emergence of a new technological medium - consider the emergence and dominance of television a mere two generations ago.
But the idiot box was a simple, even benign form of diversion compared with what is happening now, as neuroscientist Dr Gary Small explains in a new book iBrain. In its opening chapter he cites a now three-year-old study, which found that people aged eight to 18 were absorbing eight hours and 33 minutes of media content (TV and videos, music, video games, computers, movies, and print) daily, outside school hours, with a quarter of that time spent multi-tasking, or paying attention to two or more media at the same time.
For one thing, he notes, the internet provides not just the information and entertainment that television does, albeit in bite-sized pieces, but also constant and instant communication, especially through social networking and sites such as MySpace and Facebook. In mastering this new technology, the very function of the brain changes, so that what is gained in processing and responding to fast-moving digital stimuli is lost in the age-old development of social skills, such as reading and responding to facial gestures and body language.
Dr Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at the University of California, Los Angeles, cites a Stanford University study that for every hour a person spends on a computer, personal interaction with others drops by 30 minutes.
As with other, less complex parts of the body, lack of use leads to atrophy.
"With the weakening of the brain's neural circuitry controlling human contact," Dr Small writes, "our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss, subtle, non-verbal messages."
In other words, a form of autism.
"You can think of it along the scale of Asperger's syndrome, which is a mild form of it, where there's not social connectiveness and difficulties with eye contact," Dr Small says.
"There is this concern. The dramatic conclusion would be we're drifting into an autistic society, but that would be overshooting."
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