Changing Minds
How digital technologies are transforming our brains
Adapting to the environment is our evolutionary mandate as human beings. Whether you’re born in 5th century Athens, the Brazilian rainforest, or downtown Aspen, you will become a person that is equipped to navigate and thrive in that time and place. This is thanks to something called brain plasticity. Even if you’re a clone, you’re going to have a unique pattern of brain cell connections, because these connections are incessantly upgraded, strengthened, and shaped by your interactions with the environment. When the environment changes, our brains change with it.
So, how is the 21st century, with its uniquely stimulating digital environment, affecting our brains?
Those of us who grew up in the last century had to learn eye contact, voice turn, and body language — this is how we built empathy. For kids born in this century, these tools are no longer a given. A study released last year found that millennials were spending up to 18 hours a day using technology (allowing for multitasking). They spend more time communicating with a screen than with each other. In potentially related news, a 2010 study conducted by the University of Michigan showed that college students’ self-reported empathy had declined in the past thirty years, with a particularly steep decline in the past ten, which, of course, coincided with the rise of digital media. Are we degrading the very tools that allow for human empathy?
Screenlife is predisposing our kids to the kind of behaviors we’ve only witnessed before in people with autistic spectrum disorders — difficulty understanding how other people are feeling. A recent study suggests that, like people suffering from autism, heavy Internet users exhibit impaired face recognition. On the flip side, people who tend toward autistic traits are prone to compulsive internet use. For them, the playing field is now level.
We are all on our screens now, not using body language, eye contact, or physical contact.
The British government commissioned a report from their Science Advisor John Beddington in 2013, who arrived at the conclusion that human identity was becoming more volatile because of social networking sites and video games. And indeed, studies have shown a decline in self-esteem in heavy Facebook users. This fragility is a logical result of our identity being at the mercy of a perpetual audience, who need to be entertained and impressed all the time. It has all the bearings of an existential crisis.
Growing up in the last century, we rehearsed having identities and narratives in our games with friends. This required imagination. A tree doesn’t ask you to climb it; a drawing pad doesn’t ask you to draw in it. No, you drive the narrative, you decide, you make up the story. You are rehearsing a long attention span. The disappearance of that has surely been a factor in the drastic rise of ADHD in younger people. Sure enough, it has been shown that video game exposure can at least compound attentional deficits in children, in the same way that search engines have degraded our working memories.
Where is the room for imagination when you are being flooded with second-hand images? Do you care about the princess at the center of your video game? I doubt it. When you read a book, you care about the princess. That’s the difference. In a book, the princess is like you; she has relationships; she has meaning. That’s why you want to see what happens to her.
Video games may have benefits, too. Daphne Bavelier, a great psychologist, has found that they improve plasticity and learning, attention and vision. I mention this because I don’t want it to seem like a total Luddite. Video games also have drawbacks, particularly the ever more popular, violent ones. Certainly, these games are not going to persuade anyone to go out and kill, but we do know that they make people more adversarial. A meta review of 136 papers with 130,000 participants concluded that they lead to desensitization, increased arousal, aggressive cognition, and aggressive behavior.
Studies have shown that kids who play a lot of video games have enhanced dopamine levels. Dopamine is a very hard-working transmitter; when it fires, it inhibits the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is a very sophisticated part of the brain in evolutionary terms: it’s 33% of the human brain, but only 17% of the chimp brain. An under-performing frontal cortex produces a particular mindset, which you may be familiar with: strong feelings, as opposed to thought; living in a constant present; a mind dominated by the external environment, as opposed to internal perceptions; and a reduced sense of self. I would like to suggest that video games tilt people in that direction.
Indeed, this may just be the mindset of the future, if we don’t address this issue. Incidentally, that is how science fiction author Isaac Asimov envisioned us in 1964. Predicting what life would be like fifty years in the future, he wrote: “Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional, and sociological consequences.” He added something that may give us a little hope: “The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.”
We respond to our environments, but if we are creative, we can cultivate those environments to our advantage. Further, we can find creative ways to help those who serve the machine, as in one recent study. Researchers took a group of preteens, who were performing very poorly in basic empathy skills, sent half of them to summer camp, confiscating their mobile devices, and found a significant improvement in their non-verbal emotional cues after only five days.
