[ur brain on compUtrs]

In the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend there was a feature by John Cornwell: "It's a No Brainer." The article gave an overview of Professor Susan Greenfield's latest research findings detailing the effects of extended computer use on young people's brains.

According to Cornwell, Greenfield is predicting a "nobody scenario" in which teens of tomorrow won't have a secure/stable sense of personal identity (which means lack of morality and inability to think about effect of actions).

"By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen...the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alterations. It's as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Organge, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences."

Greenfield draws parallels between the degeneration of an Alzheimer's brain and "the implications of these newer threats." For Greenfield (via Cornwell) too much IT (from 6-9 hours a day...ah! sounds like me!) means brains develop differently: "The brain has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences."

Thanks to the "substitution of virtual experience for real encounters, the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry, a decline in linguistic and visual imagination, and atrophy of creativity, ccontracted, brutalised text-messagine, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complext thinking" ..."the more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other." the result: "a failure to build highly personalise individual conceptual freamworks..."

I'm not sure about the seemingly sweeping negativity. Sure computers have changed/added to the ways we communicate but young people especially are still in school all day - there *must* be at least some real-life contact during those hours. A decline in linguistic imagination? I think text messaging is all about imagination rather than a "brutalised" form of language, this is a craft - a different kind of language for a specific purpose (only 140 characters to say what you mean). Sounds like the creation of a kind of code. But more research needs to be conducted before anyone can say exactly what changes are occuring and how parents/educators/society should (or should not) accommodate them. (See Charles Leadbeater: "But the reality is that most young people seem to see it as a way to participate and collaborate, socialise and express themselves.")

Interestingly, the print version of the Times' article has various brain photos but the accompanying online version does not. The images included in the print article are from the Science Photo Library which also has these amazing views of the brain speaking, hearing words and reading words:





As an aside to the article content (science, brain research, teens) the writing style of Cornwell suggests his own kind of ludditism...an inappropriate gendered kind. Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Fullerian Professor of Physiology, Senior Research Fellow Lincoln College, Honorary Fellow, St. Hilda's College) is described as "the motormouth publicist of science" whose "lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry." She is also a "glamourpuss" (though at least an "academic" one). We are told about her "bust up with her Oxford-don husband" and then treated to Cornwell's interpretation of her accoutrements: "she, in laboratory mode, is dressed down in a beautifully cut Russian-red jacket; a sleeveless, artificial-fur-lined silvery waistcoat; charcoal Armani trousers; a fetching beret (hint of Rasta-chic); and patent platform lace-up ankle boots." Further in the article, Cornwell describes Greenfield's "tight-fitting grey-blue trouser suit" she wears to a Birmingham lecture. Just one question: had the scientist been male, would Cornwell similarly draw focus to his "pouting" lips, eyes and clothes?