Touchscreens change the human brain

Beijing time March 02 news, China touch screen network news, digital age, smart phones and the Internet have completely penetrated into everyone's daily life. "Digital natives" who grew up in the information age use their thumbs to control smartphones and surf the Internet for a long time, changing the way the brain forms neural pathways, making them more adaptable to fragmented information, and better at using network resources, but the ability to make offline friends , but getting weaker.         

Touching your phone with your thumb is equivalent to playing the violin? Ghosh, a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, compared the movement of the human thumb and the brain in the digital age with that of violin players, and came to this interesting conclusion. They invited 37 heavy mobile phone users, of whom 26 used smart touch-screen phones and 11 used ordinary button phones. They attached 62 electrodes to the participants' heads and tested how the cerebral cortex responded when their thumb, index and middle fingers moved. The results showed that those who used touch-screen phones had higher activity in areas of the cerebral cortex associated with thumb control, while those who used button phones showed no significant change. The more cell phone use, the stronger the signal in the cerebral cortex. It's a "use it or lose it" for the brain -- as violinists progress at the instrument, their brains change accordingly.  

More and more studies have shown that with the powerful search function of smart terminals, many processes that originally required the brain to think can now be completed by simply moving a finger. American scholar Nicholas Carr once wrote an article called "Does Google Make Us Stupid?" As a columnist, he admitted that his reading habits have also changed a lot with the penetration of Google's "everywhere". “Once I liked to read long articles, but now with search, I start looking at the essentials, and sometimes it ends with just two or three lines. The way we think has changed, and we’re going to be lazy, even stupid. Because our brains have less time to think and more time to search.” This change could even change writing habits, writes Nicholas Carr: “In the past, I would usually write a rough outline on paper. This is a habit that I have developed since the days of journalism school. But now there are very few. In the long run, the thinking mode will definitely change.” The survey shows that the younger generation Much more time is spent on smart devices than on real human interactions in real life. Their dependence on online social networks is as natural as eating and sleeping.   

Professor Ghosh believes that from the Stone Age to farming civilization, from the Industrial Revolution to radio, television and the Internet, the human brain is constantly undergoing subtle changes as it adapts to the environment. The changes brought about by smartphones are very obvious. But whether this change is "good or bad", it may be too early to draw conclusions. Since the popularity of smart phones has been less than 10 years old, it would be too rash to observe certain functional changes in human beings and draw conclusions in 10 years. However, Professor Ghosh is quite sure about the deterioration of his ability to remember phone numbers after using a smartphone. "Now I definitely can't tell my wife's phone calls, emails, etc., all stored on my phone; 20 years ago, anyone could say a bunch of phone numbers proficiently. The human brain function that originally stored phone numbers is being replaced by replace."