Are we being rewired?
The digital world is changing our behaviour — for better and worse
The digital age has already changed the way we shop, work and play. But what effect is it having on us as a species?
It’s becoming harder to concentrate. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr quotes a research project at Stanford University in which cognitive tests were given to a group of “heavy media multitaskers” and a group of “relatively light” multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted by “irrelevant environmental stimuli” and less able to maintain their concentration on a particular task. On the plus side, young people today have skills their predecessors lacked. They are adept at finding and filtering information, responding to stimuli and doing fast, incisive analysis. As “digital natives” who have grown up with the Internet, they are used to technological change, while “digital immigrants” who grew up before the Internet, find it hard to keep up.
An experiment led by UCLA’s Gary Small showed how the web can change our brains in a matter of hours. Twelve experienced web users and 12 novices used Google while their brains were scanned. In the area called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which deals with short- term memory and decisionmaking, the newcomers showed hardly any activity, whereas the web veterans lit up the screen. Six days later, after the novices had been told to spend an hour a day online, the two groups’ brain scans were virtually identical.
A Stanford study found that the digital generation is learning to socialize differently. Researchers discovered students prefer to text a classmate down the hall in their dormitory rather than talk in person because it is “less risky” and “less awkward.” So they don’t learn how to read facial expressions or navigate “real world” social situations.
A survey published earlier this year found that four out of five 18- to 30- yearolds are unable to navigate without the aid of a satellite navigation device. Other basic practical skills are vanishing, too. A U. S. study in 2006 of 1.5 million 16and 17- year- olds found that only 15 per cent used joined- up writing. Most used block capitals, like a child.
Thanks to the digitization of our contact books, we can no longer remember phone numbers. And it is now so easy to find information via Google that we’re getting worse at remembering any facts at all. Four experiments published in the journal Science in 2011 found that people struggle more than ever before to retain information.
The Internet encourages procrastination. According to research collated by Piers Steel, professor of psychology
At the flip of your wrist, there’s YouTube, chat rooms, jokes, humour — whatever’s your poison, it’s all out there.
PIERS STEEL
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
at the University of Calgary, the number of people admitting to procrastination has risen from 15 per cent in 1978 to 60 per cent today. It can’t be blamed entirely on the Internet, he says, but we work in “motivationally toxic” environments. “At the flip of your wrist, there’s YouTube, chat rooms, jokes, humour — whatever’s your poison, it’s all out there.”
Thanks to the superficial way we consume information, we’re becoming less empathetic. MRI scans have shown that when we read something closely, the areas of the brain that light up are not just those associated with attention, but also those involved in movement and touch. This suggests that when we immerse ourselves in a piece of writing like a novel, we put ourselves in other people’s shoes. When we read something superficially, we don’t.
Many studies have shown the Internet is addictive.
And the types of friends we make is changing. Smartphone apps now send you an alert when they detect people nearby with whom you share interests. As this phenomenon intensifies, our circle of friends will increase, but those friends will come from a narrower cross- section of society. We’ll become more tribal and less exposed to people with interests or beliefs different from our own.
Talking in 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that privacy is no longer a “social norm.” In the future, data on our habits and movements will be available to anyone who wants to know. Thanks to image- recognition software, we’ll be able to identify anyone who we point a phone at. When we go to the airport, aviation authorities will know so much about the minutiae of our lives it will no longer be necessary for us to queue for security. In fact, there is so much personal data on the web that Eric Schmidt, the co- founder of Google, has warned that teenagers might be forced to change their names one day in order to escape their cyber past.
The skills required for video games are being harnessed to useful ends.
The U. S. navy has already used its Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet ( MMOWGLI) to crowd- source strategies for combating Somali pirates. And a recent study of Italian medical students found that an hour of Nintendo Wii a day made them much better surgeons.
The Internet is in danger of turning us into a nation of “cyberchondriacs.” Before Google, researchers at London’s Maudsley Hospital estimated that up to 13 per cent of patients in doctors’ surgeries were hypochondriacs. Now general practitioners estimate a day a week is spent dealing with patients who have diagnosed themselves online.
Within 10 years, thanks to “wearable” smartphones, we will be operating screens of all kinds far less. Instead, everything we presently see on computers, games consoles, tablets or smartphones will be projected in front of our eyes and we will use hand gestures and voice commands instead of keyboards, mouse clicks or iPhone “swipes.”
Even the way we die is changing: “digital estate handling” is a boom industry. Companies such as LegacyLocker store clients’ passwords to their email, eBay or social media accounts and give these to a designated loved one after the client dies.