[LINK] Is technology eating our brains?

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

<brd>
Talking about tech not being the answer. Maybe tech is actually a 
problem waiting to happen: like climate change.

There's a thought - climate change AND a population that can't concentrate.
</brd>

Is technology eating our brains?
Peter Munro
February 7, 2009
http://www.watoday.com.au/national/is-technology-eating-our-brains-20090207-80gj.html?page=-1

There was a time when technology sought to save us from daily drudgery. 
Labour-saving devices such as automatic washing machines, dishwashers, 
the drive-through carwash and electric drill made lives easier by saving 
us from sweating out mundane tasks. Machines made us free to waste as 
much time as we pleased, and we did.

A classic advertisement in the early 1900s for a hand-operated washer 
boasted that it could "transform Blue Monday into a bright and happy 
day" — saving women (and it was always women) time, labour, nerves and 
strength. Today's technologies, though, seem dedicated to a pursuit 
higher than happiness, even. Google can connect us to a source — any 
source — within a fraction of a second, while mobile phones mean the 
world is more portable, accessible and simultaneously more demanding. 
But in the course of making our lives more convenient, have these 
technologies also made us more stupid?

Modern marvels are less labour-savers than brain-savers. Mobile phones 
remember your partner's number, your parents' and even your own — so you 
don't have to. Technology is equally adept at recalling birthdays and 
anniversaries of relatives and close friends. You don't need to think 
about the path to their homes, because Google or GPS does it for you. 
Take a taxi in Melbourne and you soon discover that navigation, that 
most adventurous of learned human skills, has been outsourced to a 
console on the dashboard.

Arguably, these are piddling concerns. Why bother the brain with dross 
when technology can pick up the slack? But deeper thought, too, seems to 
be skipping away in a ready stream of information. Some argue our unique 
capacity for original thought, innovation and imagination is being 
stultified by the spread of new technology.

Author Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic last year, worried 
someone, or something, had tinkered with his brain, remapping the 
circuits and reprogramming his memory. The influence of the internet 
meant he was not thinking the way he used to. Once he could immerse 
himself in a book and spend hours strolling through prose. "Now my 
concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get 
fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel 
as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text."

"Is Google making us stupid?" he asked. But the answer was already 
staring at him through the computer screen. "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 skim, therefore I am. Robert Fitzgerald, associate dean in the faculty 
of education at the University of Canberra, says there is indeed a "dumb 
side" to technology. "My children are immensely good at jumping on 
Google and finding things, but I wonder to what extent these are 
productive searches and to what extent they are hit-and-miss," he says.

American media critic Neil Postman once asked if we had known the impact 
the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so 
thoroughly. Fitzgerald says it's time we asked the same question of 
computers. "If you look at very early computer applications, 
particularly in the area of education, they were about simple cognitive 
skills such as addition, subtraction and memory devices. There was a 
sense of relieving us from some of the more simple but tedious tasks of 
intellectual function.

"But now we need to recognise some of those routine, tedious tasks are 
quite fundamental to higher-level tasks. Having calculators in schools 
certainly allows children to calculate more quickly, but if they don't 
have an understanding of the equation, if they don't have the capacity 
to establish the answer, then they're at the mercy of technology. If it 
is faulty, they will never know the answer is wrong."

Indeed, Google was proved fallible only last weekend, when a system 
error meant links to all search results were flagged with the warning: 
"This site may harm your computer." Tellingly, the internet behemoth 
initially tried to blame the mishap on human error — but not its own.

If not making us stupid, as such, Google seems to be making us 
intellectually lazy. Its search engine attracts several hundred million 
queries a day, but relatively few users venture beyond the first page of 
results. It is enough to take what comes first and fastest, scan through 
an article and move on. If you slow down while skimming across the 
water, you sink.

American psychologist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The 
Story and Science of the Reading Brain, argues we are becoming "mere 
decoders of information" obtained online, rather than interpreters. 
Technology might lead us two ways, she says. Children might become so 
accustomed to immediate, on-screen information they fail to probe for 
deeper levels of insight, imagination and knowledge. Or the need to 
multitask and prioritise vast pools of information could see them 
develop equally, if not more valuable, skills.

Stephanie Trigg, professor of English literature at the University of 
Melbourne, says technology has helped her students become more adept at 
finding and extracting information for study. "I think technology is 
making us more savvy at working out what we need from various websites, 
but the downside is it's starting to affect students' capacity to read 
long works of fiction. You have to train yourself to read at different 
speeds for different purposes," she says. "But I don't think their 
mental faculties are affected by the constant temptation to check their 
mobile phones. I don't think technology is making us stupid; maybe it's 
producing a different form of attention and concentration where you 
become more clever at working out what you need and reading between the 
lines. You get better and faster at processing information."

A study by Dublin's Trinity College in 2007 found a quarter of Britons 
don't know their home phone number, while only a third can recall more 
than three birthdays of their immediate family. Six out of 10 claimed 
they suffered "information overload", but more than half admitted they 
used the same password across different bank accounts. Recall was worse 
among the younger set. Only 40 per cent of those aged under 30 could 
remember the birthdays of close relatives, against 87 per cent of those 
aged over 50.

Of course, this doesn't denote stupidity. We now need to have these 
numbers and dates committed to memory as much as we need to know, in the 
developed world at least, how to use a hand-operated washer. We have 
outsourced parts of our memory, letting the machines do the thinking for 
us. And some argue releasing our brains of such small fry might free us 
to ponder weightier matters.

Professor Sue Trinidad, dean of teaching and learning at Curtin 
University of Technology, says technologies such as computer games are 
preparing children for success in the 21st century. "Digital natives" 
are developing special skills to sift through information quickly and 
use scanning to effectively pick out what's important to them, she 
writes by email. "These digital natives are in a 3D, multifunctional, 
fast, instant, mobile world where you want it now and get it now."

In this world, spending time or grey matter memorising phone numbers and 
birthdates might be more hindrance than help. But Nicholas Carr, for 
one, argues something much more significant is being lost in the rush of 
technology. "I argue that what the net might be doing is rewiring the 
neural circuitry of our brains in a way that diminishes our capacity for 
concentration, reflection and contemplation," he writes on his blog, 
Rough Type. "The net is sapping us of a form of thinking — concentrated, 
linear, relaxed, reflective, deep — that I see as central to human 
identity."

What is technology doing to our minds? Professor Christos Pantelis, 
scientific director of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre at the 
University of Melbourne, says the brain is forever changing and being 
moulded, "but whether it's rewiring itself based on technological 
advances, we don't know".

He studies changes in the structure and function of the adolescent 
brain, which is particularly malleable in those areas involved in 
problem-solving, planning and flexible thinking. "The brain is changing 
during adolescence and early adulthood in very specific ways, up to 
about the age of 25. That means there is the potential to modify the way 
the brain is maturing during this critical phase of development, and you 
might hypothesise that what we do, and how we interact with the world, 
will have a direct effect on that," he says.

"From my perspective, I would have thought technology helps to extend 
our abilities. It helps us to look at things in different ways, and in 
that regard I would have considered technological advances are actually 
a plus and assist us in all our endeavours. But you could also argue the 
other way; that training our mind to remember things is also a good 
thing and if we're not doing that so much maybe we're missing out 
somewhere. It's a good hypothesis to test: in what ways will the next 
generation exposed to these technologies see their brain changed by them?"

What little study exists in this area is inconclusive. Scientists at 
University College London have found people demonstrate "a form of 
skimming activity" when using the internet for research. More than half 
of e-journal users in the study, published last year, viewed no more 
than three pages of an article or book before "bouncing" to another 
site. Almost two-thirds of users never returned to a source they had 
visited. Little time was spent evaluating information for relevance, 
accuracy or authority. The researchers warned of the emergence of a 
whole new form of reading behaviour, whereby users "power browsed" 
through titles, content pages and abstracts.

But a separate study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric 
Psychiatry last year, instead suggested internet searches enhance brain 
power. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, scanned 
the brains of 24 volunteers aged 55-76, half of whom had no prior 
internet search experience, while they were online or reading a book. 
During online searches, the brains of those who reported using the 
internet regularly showed increased stimulation, particularly in those 
regions associated with complex reasoning and decision-making. Within 
five days, the internet novices showed the same increase in activity in 
their frontal lobes.

The study was led by neuroscientist Gary Small, a professor at UCLA's 
Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour, and author of 
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. He 
argues that as the brain shifts towards, and is energised by, new 
technological skills, it simultaneously drifts away from fundamental 
social skills. The cognitive gains made by younger generations in 
adapting to and processing new technologies come at the cost of such 
age-old social skills as reading facial expressions and body language.

"Our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to 
misinterpret, and even miss, subtle, non-verbal messages," he writes. 
"The dramatic conclusion would be we're drifting into an autistic 
society, but that would be overshooting."

To where, then, might we be drifting? The dark imaginings of science 
fiction may offer some guide. Nicholas Carr cites Stanley Kubrick's film 
2001: A Space Odyssey, and that scene where astronaut Dave Bowman coolly 
disconnects the memory circuits that control the artificial "brain" of 
malfunctioning supercomputer HAL. The humans act with almost "robot-like 
efficiency", while it is the machine that expresses anguish and loss. 
"That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on 
computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own 
intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence," Carr argues.

Robert Fitzgerald, from the University of Canberra, instead alludes to 
Ridley Scott's Alien trilogy. In a scene in the sequel, Lieutenant Ellen 
Ripley dons a mechanical "exosuit" to fight her alien foe — spitting out 
that memorable line, "Get away from her, you bitch!"

"For me, that exosuit is sort of symbolic for the way technology can 
expand our human capacities," Fitzgerald says.

"But I suspect what we've got at the moment are very small fragments of 
that exosuit, with nothing really fully functioning or connected yet. 
We're really in the very early days in terms of the development of new 
internet technologies. While we have seen quite remarkable developments 
in the rates of blog use or wikis, I suspect five years down the track 
we will not recognise those technologies we're currently using — they'll 
be more intuitive, more integrated, more intelligent."

But will we be more intelligent as well?

Our intelligence ultimately might reveal itself in the smarts of those 
same technologies, which have the capacity either to increase the sum of 
deep intelligence or leave us skating on the surface. But here's a 
sobering thought: if the key to human intelligence lies beyond the first 
page of a Google search, or in the last paragraph of a lengthy newspaper 
article, will we ever find it?

The Age

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Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au