Impact of digital technology on the brain

[6charlong]

An interesting article in today's NY Times reports speculation by a group of scientists about the effect of the frequent use of digital devices on the human brain and the possible impact on mental health.

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/te...rain.html?_r=1

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Couldn't read the article because I would have to register and I would rather not give them my personal info.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Couldn't read the article because I would have to register and I would rather not give them my personal info.

This link works for me:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/te...n.html?_r=3&hp

If that one doesn't work for you, you can try for another one the same way I did-- paste a few words from the story into Google news and look for a link via that.

A summary of the article-- a group of neuroscientists take a nice vacation and manage to spin it to sound like they are doing research. They make vague speculations on what "might, kind of, possibly, if we look close enough" be true and trust the appeal to authority fallacy to hook a story with a print journalist, most of whom can't grasp science (not to paint with a broad brush, but from a lifetime of reading "mainstream" reports of science, the journalists almost always don't understand what they are writing about and almost always get fundamental details wrong.)

[Ben Thornton]

There is a Guardian article on a similar topic here.

[GeoffC]

*deleted post*

[6charlong]

@Ardeegee. I agree that the article is speculative and anacdotal, but questions are where research begins and I've always thought the speculations of experts in a field are useful in the absence of hard science.

As I'm sure you know, the social sciences are usually considered "soft science." The subject of speculation by the scientists in the article--going into the wilderness for a few days and leaving all digital technology behind--would be unusually hard to develop into a research project placed in the field, but the issue is important. Lately I've heard a number of people speculating about whether to take a vacation. Their puritan consciences kept telling them "goofing off is fun and fun is being bad." If anecdotes are all we have maybe anecdotes can do until the science is done.

(It might be fun to research though. )

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Couldn't read the article because I would have to register and I would rather not give them my personal info.

I didn't have to register to read it, but just because you have to register doesn't mean you have to give them personal info. I have a yahoo email address set up just for these kinds of things, my name is No One and I live on 123 Main Street in a town and zip I don't live in (sometimes they validate these so they have to be real). If there are drop down boxes I usually choose one of the first in the list - for occupation I've been an an accountant, I was born on Jan 1, etc.