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Society may end up losing its mind

Janet Albrechtsen Blog | September 16, 2009 | 24 Comments

TYPING away on my laptop one night, I was startled by a bubble of words that appeared at the bottom right hand corner of my screen. “Hey, Janet, is that you?” Next bubble: “Wow, this is weird, I’ve never done this before,” my 50-something friend said.
“Me neither,” I replied, less than enthused about losing my social networking virginity. “Why wouldn’t we just pick up the phone and talk?” he asked. “Precisely. Too weird for me,” I answered curtly.
And there ended my cyber life.
You sure feel old when you try to figure out why young kids spend hours each day on social networking sites, not to mention playing computer games. No doubt, the fast developing world of information technology is a sign of progress. Information at our fingertips. Instant communication. Friendships forged online. Interactive games, full of noise and colour, that test our responses and build vivid imaginations.
And yet intuitively, parents wonder how healthy it is for their children to spend hours enthralled by a two-dimensional world of computer games and cyber relationships.
Enter Susan Greenfield, a baroness. Toss out twin-set and pearl visions of a crusty old toff who only reads Country Life. The baroness is a widely published neuroscientist, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, researching Alzheimer’s disease.
Now forget visions of a scruffy, absent-minded professor babbling about some esoteric science.
The 57-year-old baroness (she was appointed to the House of Lords under Tony Blair’s reforms in 1998 for her eminence in science) is a thin, attractive blonde who has a knack for making connections between the highfalutin world of brain cells and the home, the classroom and youth culture. Not content with heading up the Royal Institution of Great Britain, whose mandate is to “diffuse science for the common purposes of life”, Greenfield is one of the driving forces behind the new Royal Institution Australia, which will officially open its doors in Adelaide’s grand old stock exchange building on October 8.
With the same mission in mind - of making science more central to Australian society - Greenfield was in Australia last week with plenty to say. Her fear is that our children’s brains are being rewired in a way that has never happened before.
Over lunch at the Centre for Independent Studies last Thursday, she said that the capacity for the human brain to adapt to new environments has previously given us an edge over other species.
We are not particularly strong, we don’t see particularly well, or run particularly fast, she said, but what we do brilliantly is adapt.
Given the plasticity of the human brain, Greenfield - whose latest book, ID - The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century is a must-read for parents - says we should be asking questions about the effects of hours in front of a computer screen playing games and engaging in two-dimensional relationships.
First some science from the baroness, who was Honorary Australian of the Year in 2006 and Thinker In Residence at Adelaide University in 2004 and 2005.
Dopamine is a naturally occurring chemical in the brain linked to obesity, gambling and drug addiction. Excessive hits of the pleasurable dopamine can curb the brain cell activity in the prefrontal cortex related to our ability to balance risks and consider consequences. Now, step back from the molecules and cells. Computer games are full of Crash! Boom! Bang! sensations, a series of never-ending actions, reactions, actions and reactions. The games - often violent and without consequences - are full of sensory stimuli that deliver kids increased doses of dopamine. You kill someone, you play again. You get killed, you play again.
Greenfield says as a society we would be remiss not to ask whether a child’s brain is being altered by spending hours immersed in that kind of sensory stimuli.
She refers to research from Harvard Medical School where three groups of adults were taken into three rooms each with a piano. None played the piano. The first group were given piano lessons for five days. The second group went into an identical room but did nothing. The third group, again in an identical room, were asked to imagine they were having piano lessons. Brain scans of the first group showed structural changes in their brain associated with finger movement. No surprise. The second group showed no changes. No surprise there either. But the third group, who had not touched the piano - only imagined they had - showed changes similar to those in the first group.
Writing in the British press, Greenfield said: “What worries me is that if something as innocuous as imagining a piano lesson can bring about a visible physical change in brain structure ... what changes might long stints playing violent computer games bring about?”
She asks us to consider the dangerous decoupling of thrills and risk.
For the first time in human history, many children spend about six hours a day seeking short-term rewards from a computer screen, getting thrills and excitement without danger and consequences. There is nothing wrong with hedonistic sensual experiences, she hastens to add. People have always enjoyed this, whether from sex, food, parachuting or downhill skiing. But most of those activities had consequences weighed up by the human brain.
Her fear, as she told the House of Lords in February, is that the “mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short-term attention spans, sensationalism, inability to emphasise and a shaky sense of identity.”
Social networking is giving rise to a “look at me” generation who spend hours using Facebook (250 active million users) and Twitter (already six million people have signed on) seeking “constant reassurance; that you are listened to, recognised and important”. With only 24 hours in the day, the more time spent in the two-dimensional cyber-world means less time in face-to-face conversations in real time which “require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones, those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously”.
“It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result inbrains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world,” she says.
Greenfield, who as a teenager cut out the brain of a rabbit because she wanted to see what the brain looked like, has a curiosity that is infectious. She says we should also think about a possible link between how small minds are changing and the increased rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but hopes these questions will prompt more research and see educators, government and the science community working together to create technologies that enhance, rather than diminish the mind (H-Ref 1).

References:

H-Ref 1: The Australian
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/society_may_end_up_losing_its_mind/
Accessed: September 22, 2009.