This is your brain on technology   |  January 26, 2009  

Are digital technologies actually changing the way your brain works? Some neuroscientists say yes

By Lisa Manfield

Last spring, as Howard Rheingold gazed upon his Virtual Community and Social Media class at the University of California, Berkeley, he was dismayed to see that few of his students were looking back at him. Most had their eyes glued to their laptops, and many, he deduced, were engaged in activities such as e-mail, instant messaging and other exploits that had nothing to do with his class. What was happening to their ability to pay attention, he wondered.

“Many teachers have a problem with laptops in the classroom,” he said. “It’s a seductive distraction.”

But students aren’t the only ones who appear to be a little ADD when it comes to paying attention to a task. Almost anyone who works on a computer every day is subject to such “seductive distractions.” Who hasn’t interrupted their regular workflow to read a favourite blog, check lottery numbers online, chat with a friend on MSN about dinner plans or print out Google Maps’ driving directions for their weekend ski trip? The Internet makes it all possible at work or anywhere else, and that can create difficulties in maintaining focus on any one thing for very long.

“Technology has made me way more erratic,” said Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic, who admits his life revolves around his laptop, his mobile phone and his Amazon Kindle e-book device, which contains more than 200 titles. “There is more I can focus on, and this can be both thrilling and tiring. You are always just a click away from what you need.”

The dark side of multitasking
For years, workplace experts have touted the value of multitasking. But today, it’s common to hear people complain about the inability to stay on track long enough to read a simple news story. Brody has seen this pattern in his readers at NowPublic, a Vancouver-based citizen journalism site. “People’s ability to focus on long detailed content has shrunk. The Internet is a snacking medium; people only consume bits and pieces.”

Rheingold, also, has seen this phenomenon in his students, who jump around virtually while he attempts to hold their attention. “Many students look things up and take notes, so it can be productive multitasking. But my question is: do we really know how their attention is best deployed in the classroom? So little is known by educators about the neurology of students.”

How are our brains evolving?
In their new book entitled iBrain, UCLA-based neuroscientist Gary Small and his wife Gigi Vorgan say exposure to technology is actually changing the human brain—especially in “digital natives,” young people who have grown up with computers.

In one study, Small used functional MRI scanning to monitor brain activity while subjects performed a common Internet activity: a Google search. He divided his subjects into two groups—those who had lots of experience using the Internet, and those who had little to no experience with computers. What he found was that the two groups showed “distinctly different patterns of neural activation when searching on Google.” Those with lots of computer experience demonstrated activity in the front-left part of the brain (called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), while the computer-naïve group showed no activity in that region at all.

Small asked both groups to practice Google searching one hour a day for five days. When they came back, he scanned them again. This time, both groups showed activity in the front-left part of their brains. According to Small, this shows that after “five hours on the Internet, the naïve subjects had already rewired their brains.”

And for people who use computers all day, every day? Small and Vorgan believe brain changes can be even more extensive, causing some neural connections to be gained, while others may be lost. “While the brains of today’s digital natives are wiring up for rapid-fire cyber searches, the neural circuits that control the more traditional learning methods are neglected and gradually diminished,” they write. “The pathways for human interaction and communication weaken as customary one-on-one people skills atrophy.”

In other words, brain changes that result from extensive use of technology may be a zero-sum game. But Vancouver-based neuroscientist and journalist Jeffrey Helm isn’t so sure. “It’s not a matter of loss or gain,” he said. “It’s just a matter of adaptation. Our brain wiring is adapting to our technology. Every change in how we interact is a hard-wired change in the brain.”

The malleable brain
Marc Prensky, a New York-based designer of learning games and author of Digital Game-Based Learning, has been writing about the differences in the behaviours of digital natives and digital immigrants—those who adopted technology later in life—for almost a decade. In a 2001 article entitled “Do They Really Think Differently,” he stated that “stimulation of various kinds actually changes brain structures and affects the way people think, and that these transformations go on throughout life. The brain constantly reorganizes itself all our child and adult lives, a phenomenon technically known as neuroplasticity.”

But, he said, there is a lot scientists still don’t know about the brain. “The brain is massively plastic, but I’m [reluctant] to make massive generalizations about whether the brains of digital natives are different. There are a lot of good hypotheses, but whether this will pass on to another generation, we don’t know.”

Judy Illes, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia’s Division of Neurology and Brain Research Centre in Vancouver, is also skeptical. “Why would significant exposure to technology be different than anything else in our environment?” she said. “Cells in the brain connect in different ways in response to the way the brain reacts to the environment.”

Illes doesn’t believe the act of reading online changes the brain. “Using the Internet to get news rather than reading the Vancouver Sun won’t create fundamentally different brain changes in terms of reading and writing.”

She also questions the idea that computers can give people ADD-like symptoms. “Is it the computer giving us ADD or is it access to fast and multiple information inputs at once? It’s more about the speed and multiple lines of access. It looks like ADD because there is so much more to do to stay on top of the game.

“What’s new, however, is in kids who play computer games repetitively. There we see changes in cortical and subcortical structures—structures like relay systems, motor output, etc.”

Small and Vorgan concur, quoting studies conducted at Tokyo’s Nihon University that have shown video game play actually shuts down activity in the brain’s frontal lobe—both during game play and afterward. So although games have been known to increase motor and visual skills, they can actually impair development in the area of the brain involved in abstract thinking and planning, particularly in young people whose brains haven’t yet finished maturing.

Paying attention to our attention
In iBrain, Small and Vorgan discuss an increase in what is referred to as “continuous partial attention,” the ability to monitor various things at once—like incoming e-mail, TV news and a conversation with your spouse—without devoting full attention to any one thing at a time. “Rather than simply catching ‘digital ADD,’ many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed concentration.”

In the classroom, however, teachers need their digital native students to absorb what they’re supposed to be learning, and in the workplace, employers need employees who can stay on task long enough to get their jobs done.

“As talented as we all may be at multitasking, we only have so much continuous partial attention to make use of for any given task,” said Melanie McBride, a new media content developer and consultant, and faculty member at the Centre for Creative Communications at Centennial College in Toronto.

A self-described “voracious user of social and participatory media,” McBride has welcomed technology in her classroom, encouraging students to use it in a constructive and respectful way. “One really interesting thing I did was to open up a group chat using a new online tool called Chatterous. I told the students they could create an anonymous handle and use it to pass virtual notes. I figured, since they’re already using chat and e-mail to communicate during class, they might as well do this as a directed activity.”

Rheingold took a different tack. He decided to undertake attention training activities to draw his students’ attention to their behaviour in class. “I wanted to make them mindful of the issue. Most teachers just say ‘close your laptops’ or ‘shut off the Wi-Fi’, but what about paying attention to the issue?”

Rheingold created teaching teams so students could help him teach the class. “They were able to see the problem,” Rheingold said. “They (realized they) didn’t know whether people were drifting.”

Your brain in the workplace
Prensky, who has developed training games for the likes of IBM, Nokia and Cisco, believes employers need to change their workplace culture in order to take advantage of the skills today’s techno-savvy employees bring to the table. “Higher-end people are coming into companies and they are anxious to do something meaningful from day one. And they have the tools to transform business,” Prensky said. “Norms are changing. The next generation of employees doesn’t understand why their boss would walk over to talk to them. If a business is smart, they’ll use this transformation smartly.” He offers the example of Google, which regularly gives its staff time to work on personal projects that have the potential to solve problems. “It’s very effective,” he said. “Young people today don’t like to take orders from someone communicating at them.”

McBride concurs. “This generation, more than any other, wants to be able to participate in knowledge—not just be an audience to it.” She thinks emerging professionals should spend as much time using online tools for professional knowledge and development as they do developing their social life and personal interests. “This is the difference between today’s world and the past.

“If we’re all to survive this radical transformation of our always-on communications, we need to learn some basic social and community skills and spend as much time thinking about other people’s needs before defaulting to our own,” McBride added. “I think a lot of the narcissistic and impulsive behaviour we see in the workplace and in schools is not a result of the Internet but a consumer ideology of intensely self-interested behaviours and attitudes. Technology isn’t to blame for bad socialization. I think the solution to the attention problem has to be addressed in a much more holistic way.”

But for NowPublic’s Brody, the effects of technology’s impact on the brain are simple. “Gen Y is smarter, faster and more aware of the world around them,” he said. “They’re a better breed of human.”


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