iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind
256
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind
256eBook
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Overview
Their insights are extraordinary, their behaviors unusual. Their brains—shaped by the era of microprocessors, access to limitless information, and 24-hour news and communication—are remapping, retooling, and evolving. They're not superhuman. They're your twenty-something coworkers, your children, and your competition. Are you keeping up?
In iBrain, Dr. Gary Small, one of America's leading neuroscientists and experts on brain function and behavior, explores how technology's unstoppable march forward has altered the way young minds develop, function, and interpret information. iBrain reveals a new evolution catalyzed by technological advancement and its future implications: Where do you fit in on the evolutionary chain? What are the professional, social, and political impacts of this new brain evolution? How must you adapt and at what price?
While high-tech immersion can accelerate learning and boost creativity, it also has its glitches, among them the meteoric rise in ADD diagnoses, increased social isolation, and Internet addiction. To compete and thrive in the age of brain evolution, and to avoid these potential drawbacks, we must adapt, and iBrain—with its Technology Toolkit—equips all of us with the tools and strategies needed to close the brain gap.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061981708 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2009 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 788,251 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Dr. Gary Small is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and director of the UCLA Longevity Center at the university’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior. He and Gigi Vorgan are the authors of iBrain, The Memory Prescription, The Longevity Bible, and The Memory Bible.
Read an Excerpt
iBrain
Chapter One
Your Brain is Evolving Right Now
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Steve Jobs, CEO of AppleYou're on a plane packed with other business people, reading your electronic version of the Wall Street Journal on your laptop while downloading files to your BlackBerry and organizing your PowerPoint presentation for your first meeting when you reach New York. You relish the perfect symmetry of your schedule, to-do lists, and phone book as you notice a woman in the next row entering little written notes into her leather-bound daily planner book. You remember having one of those?.?.?.?What? Like a zillion years ago? Hey lady! Wake up and smell the computer age.
You're outside the airport now, waiting impatiently for a cab along with a hundred other people. It's finally your turn, and as you reach for the taxi door a large man pushes in front of you, practically knocking you over. Your briefcase goes flying, and your laptop and BlackBerry splatter into pieces on the pavement. As you frantically gather up the remnants of your once perfectly scheduled life, the woman with the daily planner book gracefully steps into a cab and glides away.
The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains. Daily exposure to high technology...computers, smart phones, video games, search engines like Google and Yahoo...stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones.Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now...at a speed like never before.
Besides influencing how we think, digital technology is altering how we feel, how we behave, and the way in which our brains function. Although we are unaware of these changes in our neural circuitry or brain wiring, these alterations can become permanent with repetition. This evolutionary brain process has rapidly emerged over a single generation and may represent one of the most unexpected yet pivotal advances in human history. Perhaps not since Early Man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically.
Television had a fundamental impact on our lives in the past century, and today the average person's brain continues to have extensive daily exposure to TV. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, recently found that on average Americans spend nearly three hours each day watching television or movies, or much more time spent than on all leisure physical activities combined. But in the current digital environment, the Internet is replacing television as the prime source of brain stimulation. Seven out of ten American homes are wired for high-speed Internet. We rely on the Internet and digital technology for entertainment, political discussion, and even social reform as well as communication with friends and co-workers.
As the brain evolves and shifts its focus toward new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills, such as reading facial expressions during conversation or grasping the emotional context of a subtle gesture. A Stanford University study found that for every hour we spend on our computers, traditional face-to-face interaction time with other people drops by nearly thirty minutes. With the weakening of the brain's neural circuitry controlling human contact, our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss subtle, nonverbal messages. Imagine how the continued slipping of social skills might affect an international summit meeting ten years from now when a misread facial cue or a misunderstood gesture could make the difference between escalating military conflict or peace.
The high-tech revolution is redefining not only how we communicate but how we reach and influence people, exert political and social change, and even glimpse into the private lives of co-workers, neighbors, celebrities, and politicians. An unknown innovator can become an overnight media magnet as news of his discovery speeds across the Internet. A cell phone video camera can capture a momentary misstep of a public figure, and in minutes it becomes the most downloaded video on YouTube. Internet social networks like MySpace and Facebook have exceeded a hundred million users, emerging as the new marketing giants of the digital age and dwarfing traditional outlets such as newspapers and magazines.
Young minds tend to be the most exposed, as well as the most sensitive, to the impact of digital technology. Today's young people in their teens and twenties, who have been dubbed Digital Natives, have never known a world without computers, twenty-four-hour TV news, Internet, and cell phones...with their video, music, cameras, and text messaging. Many of these Natives rarely enter a library, let alone look something up in a traditional encyclopedia; they use Google, Yahoo, and other online search engines. The neural networks in the brains of these Digital Natives differ dramatically from those of Digital Immigrants: people...including all baby boomers...who came to the digital/computer age as adults but whose basic brain wiring was laid down during a time when direct social interaction was the norm. The extent of their early technological communication and entertainment involved the radio, telephone, and TV.
As a consequence of this overwhelming and early high-tech stimulation of the Digital Native's brain, we are witnessing the beginning of a deeply divided brain gap between younger and older minds...in just one generation. What used to be simply a generation gap that separated young people's values, music, and habits from those of their parents has now become a huge divide resulting in two separate cultures. The brains of the younger generation are digitally hardwired from toddlerhood, often at the expense of neural circuitry that controls one-on-one people skills. Individuals of the older generation face a world in which their brains must adapt to high technology, or they'll be left behind... politically, socially, and economically.
Young people have created their own digital social networks, including a shorthand type of language for text messaging, and studies show that fewer young adults read books for pleasure now than in any generation before them. Since 1982, literary reading has declined by 28 percent in eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds. Professor Thomas Patterson and colleagues at Harvard University reported that only 16 percent of adults age eighteen to thirty read a daily newspaper, compared with 35 percent of those thirty-six and older. Patterson predicts that the future of news will be in the electronic digital media rather than the traditional print or television forms.
iBrain. Copyright © by Gary Small. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Your Brain Is Evolving Right Now 1
It's All in Your Head 4
Young Plastic Brains 6
Natural Selection 9
Honey, Does My Brain Look Fat? 11
High-Tech Revolution and the Digital Age 12
Your Brain on Google 14
Techno-Brain Burnout 17
The New, Improved Brain 20
Taking Control of Your Brain's Evolution 22
2 Brain Gap: Technology Dividing Generations 23
Digital Natives 24
Digital Immigrants 40
Coming Together 46
3 Addicted To Technology 47
Anyone Can Get Hooked 50
Email Junkies 54
Virtual Gaming-Bet You Can't Play Just One 56
Online Porn Obsession 58
Las Vegas at Your Fingertips 59
Shop Till You Drop 60
Getting Help 61
4 Technology and Behavior: ADHD, Indigo Children, and Beyond 63
Driven to Distraction 64
Multitasking Brains 67
Indigo Children 69
Can TV Trigger Autism? 71
Mystery Online Illness 74
Cybersuicide 76
I'm Too Techy for My Brain 77
5 High-Tech Culture: Social, Political, and Economic Impact 79
Multiple Choice 79
Infinite Information 81
The Electronic Marketplace 84
Webonomics 85
Social Networking and Entertainment 89
Women vs. Men Online 91
Fractured Families 92
Love at First Site 95
Technology and Privacy 97
Cyber Crime 99
I'd Rather Be Blogging 101
Online Politics 102
Uploading Your iBrain 104
6 Brain Evolution: Where Do You Stand Now? 105
Human Contact Skills 105
Technology Skills 112
7 Reconnecting Face To Face 115
That Human Feeling 117
Tech-Free Training of the Brain 120
Social Skills 101 123
High-Tech Addiction 146
Maintaining Your Off-Line Connections 147
8 The Technology Toolkit 149
Making Technology Choices 150
You've Got Email152
Instant Messaging Right Now! 158
Search Engines: Beyond Basic Google 158
Text Messaging: Short and Sweet 160
Mobile Phones: Smaller Is Not Always Better 161
A Menu of Hand-Held Devices 163
Entering the Blogosphere 165
Internet Phoning and Video Conferencing 166
Digital Entertainment: Swapping Hi-Fi for Wi-Fi 167
Online Safety and Privacy 168
Cyber Medicine 172
Brain Stimulation: Aerobicize Your Mind 178
9 Bridging The Brain Gap: Technology and The Future Brain 181
Understanding The Gap 181
Social Skills Upgrade for Digital Immigrants 184
The Future Brain 186
Appendix 191
1 High-Tech Glossary 191
2 Text Message Shortcuts and Emoticons 199
3 Additional Resources 205
Notes 209
Index 231