Is technology eating our brains?

If the key to human intelligence lies beyond the first page of a Google search, or in the last paragraph of a lengthy newspaper article, will we ever find it?


This is the last few words @ the end of this article I hope they inspire you to read it through

Is technology eating our brains?

* Peter Munro
* February 7, 2009


THERE was a time when technology sought to save us from daily drudgery. Labour-saving devices such as automatic washing machines, dishwashers, the drive-through carwash and electric drill made lives easier by saving us from sweating out mundane tasks. Machines made us free to waste as much time as we pleased, and we did.

A classic advertisement in the early 1900s for a hand-operated washer boasted that it could "transform Blue Monday into a bright and happy day" — saving women (and it was always women) time, labour, nerves and strength. Today's technologies, though, seem dedicated to a pursuit higher than happiness, even. Google can connect us to a source — any source — within a fraction of a second, while mobile phones mean the world is more portable, accessible and simultaneously more demanding. But in the course of making our lives more convenient, have these technologies also made us more stupid?

Modern marvels are less labour-savers than brain-savers. Mobile phones remember your partner's number, your parents' and even your own — so you don't have to. Technology is equally adept at recalling birthdays and anniversaries of relatives and close friends. You don't need to think about the path to their homes, because Google or GPS does it for you. Take a taxi in Melbourne and you soon discover that navigation, that most adventurous of learned human skills, has been outsourced to a console on the dashboard.

Arguably, these are piddling concerns. Why bother the brain with dross when technology can pick up the slack? But deeper thought, too, seems to be skipping away in a ready stream of information. Some argue our unique capacity for original thought, innovation and imagination is being stultified by the spread of new technology.

Author Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic last year, worried someone, or something, had tinkered with his brain, remapping the circuits and reprogramming his memory. The influence of the internet meant he was not thinking the way he used to. Once he could immerse himself in a book and spend hours strolling through prose. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text."

"Is Google making us stupid?" he asked. But the answer was already staring at him through the computer screen. "What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he wrote. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet-ski."

I skim, therefore I am. Robert Fitzgerald, associate dean in the faculty of education at the University of Canberra, says there is indeed a "dumb side" to technology. "My children are immensely good at jumping on Google and finding things, but I wonder to what extent these are productive searches and to what extent they are hit-and-miss," he says.

American media critic Neil Postman once asked if we had known the impact the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so thoroughly. Fitzgerald says it's time we asked the same question of computers. "If you look at very early computer applications, particularly in the area of education, they were about simple cognitive skills such as addition, subtraction and memory devices. There was a sense of relieving us from some of the more simple but tedious tasks of intellectual function.

"But now we need to recognise some of those routine, tedious tasks are quite fundamental to higher-level tasks. Having calculators in schools certainly allows children to calculate more quickly, but if they don't have an understanding of the equation, if they don't have the capacity to establish the answer, then they're at the mercy of technology. If it is faulty, they will never know the answer is wrong."

Indeed, Google was proved fallible only last weekend, when a system error meant links to all search results were flagged with the warning: "This site may harm your computer." Tellingly, the internet behemoth initially tried to blame the mishap on human error — but not its own.

If not making us stupid, as such, Google seems to be making us intellectually lazy. Its search engine attracts several hundred million queries a day, but relatively few users venture beyond the first page of results. It is enough to take what comes first and fastest, scan through an article and move on. If you slow down while skimming across the water, you sink.

American psychologist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, argues we are becoming "mere decoders of information" obtained online, rather than interpreters. Technology might lead us two ways, she says. Children might become so accustomed to immediate, on-screen information they fail to probe for deeper levels of insight, imagination and knowledge. Or the need to multitask and prioritise vast pools of information could see them develop equally, if not more valuable, skills.

Stephanie Trigg, professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne, says technology has helped her students become more adept at finding and extracting information for study. "I think technology is making us more savvy at working out what we need from various websites, but the downside is it's starting to affect students' capacity to read long works of fiction. You have to train yourself to read at different speeds for different purposes," she says. "But I don't think their mental faculties are affected by the constant temptation to check their mobile phones. I don't think technology is making us stupid; maybe it's producing a different form of attention and concentration where you become more clever at working out what you need and reading between the lines. You get better and faster at processing information."

A study by Dublin's Trinity College in 2007 found a quarter of Britons don't know their home phone number, while only a third can recall more than three birthdays of their immediate family. Six out of 10 claimed they suffered "information overload", but more than half admitted they used the same password across different bank accounts. Recall was worse among the younger set. Only 40 per cent of those aged under 30 could remember the birthdays of close relatives, against 87 per cent of those aged over 50.

Of course, this doesn't denote stupidity. We now need to have these numbers and dates committed to memory as much as we need to know, in the developed world at least, how to use a hand-operated washer. We have outsourced parts of our memory, letting the machines do the thinking for us. And some argue releasing our brains of such small fry might free us to ponder weightier matters.

Professor Sue Trinidad, dean of teaching and learning at Curtin University of Technology, says technologies such as computer games are preparing children for success in the 21st century. "Digital natives" are developing special skills to sift through information quickly and use scanning to effectively pick out what's important to them, she writes by email. "These digital natives are in a 3D, multifunctional, fast, instant, mobile world where you want it now and get it now."

In this world, spending time or grey matter memorising phone numbers and birthdates might be more hindrance than help. But Nicholas Carr, for one, argues something much more significant is being lost in the rush of technology. "I argue that what the net might be doing is rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains in a way that diminishes our capacity for concentration, reflection and contemplation," he writes on his blog, Rough Type. "The net is sapping us of a form of thinking — concentrated, linear, relaxed, reflective, deep — that I see as central to human identity."

WHAT is technology doing to our minds? Professor Christos Pantelis, scientific director of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre at the University of Melbourne, says the brain is forever changing and being moulded, "but whether it's rewiring itself based on technological advances, we don't know".

He studies changes in the structure and function of the adolescent brain, which is particularly malleable in those areas involved in problem-solving, planning and flexible thinking. "The brain is changing during adolescence and early adulthood in very specific ways, up to about the age of 25. That means there is the potential to modify the way the brain is maturing during this critical phase of development, and you might hypothesise that what we do, and how we interact with the world, will have a direct effect on that," he says.

"From my perspective, I would have thought technology helps to extend our abilities. It helps us to look at things in different ways, and in that regard I would have considered technological advances are actually a plus and assist us in all our endeavours. But you could also argue the other way; that training our mind to remember things is also a good thing and if we're not doing that so much maybe we're missing out somewhere. It's a good hypothesis to test: in what ways will the next generation exposed to these technologies see their brain changed by them?"

What little study exists in this area is inconclusive. Scientists at University College London have found people demonstrate "a form of skimming activity" when using the internet for research. More than half of e-journal users in the study, published last year, viewed no more than three pages of an article or book before "bouncing" to another site. Almost two-thirds of users never returned to a source they had visited. Little time was spent evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority. The researchers warned of the emergence of a whole new form of reading behaviour, whereby users "power browsed" through titles, content pages and abstracts.

But a separate study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry last year, instead suggested internet searches enhance brain power. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, scanned the brains of 24 volunteers aged 55-76, half of whom had no prior internet search experience, while they were online or reading a book. During online searches, the brains of those who reported using the internet regularly showed increased stimulation, particularly in those regions associated with complex reasoning and decision-making. Within five days, the internet novices showed the same increase in activity in their frontal lobes.

The study was led by neuroscientist Gary Small, a professor at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour, and author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. He argues that as the brain shifts towards, and is energised by, new technological skills, it simultaneously drifts away from fundamental social skills. The cognitive gains made by younger generations in adapting to and processing new technologies come at the cost of such age-old social skills as reading facial expressions and body language.

"Our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss, subtle, non-verbal messages," he writes. "The dramatic conclusion would be we're drifting into an autistic society, but that would be overshooting."

To where, then, might we be drifting? The dark imaginings of science fiction may offer some guide. Nicholas Carr cites Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that scene where astronaut Dave Bowman coolly disconnects the memory circuits that control the artificial "brain" of malfunctioning supercomputer HAL. The humans act with almost "robot-like efficiency", while it is the machine that expresses anguish and loss. "That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence," Carr argues.

Robert Fitzgerald, from the University of Canberra, instead alludes to Ridley Scott's Alien trilogy. In a scene in the sequel, Lieutenant Ellen Ripley dons a mechanical "exosuit" to fight her alien foe — spitting out that memorable line, "Get away from her, you bitch!"

"For me, that exosuit is sort of symbolic for the way technology can expand our human capacities," Fitzgerald says.

"But I suspect what we've got at the moment are very small fragments of that exosuit, with nothing really fully functioning or connected yet. We're really in the very early days in terms of the development of new internet technologies. While we have seen quite remarkable developments in the rates of blog use or wikis, I suspect five years down the track we will not recognise those technologies we're currently using — they'll be more intuitive, more integrated, more intelligent."

But will we be more intelligent as well?

Our intelligence ultimately might reveal itself in the smarts of those same technologies, which have the capacity either to increase the sum of deep intelligence or leave us skating on the surface. But here's a sobering thought: if the key to human intelligence lies beyond the first page of a Google search, or in the last paragraph of a lengthy newspaper article, will we ever find it?

The Age