Dumbed down

“Five hours on the Internet, and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small marvels. The experiment serves to highlight how quickly the brain can be trained. But while Digital Immigrants—those over 30, who came to the Web with brains fully formed—can acquire attributes of the New Brain, becoming quite proficient, the impact is limited because their early wiring was different.

Teenagers’ brains are much more vulnerable. There’s a reason we don’t let 14-year-olds vote or drive or drink vodka, and it goes beyond their apparent physical or emotional maturity. “Normal” adolescent cognitive development follows a certain arc. During the teen years, empathy skills (the amygdala region in the temporal lobe) and complex reasoning skills (the frontal lobe) are not yet fully developed. This is why, physiologically anyway, teens are predisposed to being self-centred, seeking instant gratification and not being able to always put themselves in others’ shoes—an attribute they develop over time, through social contact.

But brain scientists are speculating that too much technology may get in the way of normal frontal lobe development and stunt this maturation process—ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode. A controversial 2002 study out of Tokyo’s Nihon University found that the more time teens spend playing video games, the more they suppress key areas of the frontal lobe associated with learning, memory, emotion and impulse control. The study’s author, Dr. Akio Mori, a cranial nerve specialist, says chronic players—identified as those who play two to seven hours a day—can sometimes develop what he calls “video game brain,” a condition that essentially turns off the frontal lobes, even when kids aren’t gaming. In other words, because their brains are still maturing, an excessive amount of stimulation in one area can literally leave them lopsided.

And so the so-called brain gap is not just about intergenerational name-calling (although there is some of that going on, too). Instead, it’s about what the human brain of the future will look like—and whether or not we’re making good cognitive trades. “Are we developing a generation with underdeveloped frontal lobes—unable to learn, remember, feel, control impulses,” asks Small, “or will they develop new advanced skills that poise them for extraordinary experiences?”

In Grown Up Digital, one of several new books that explore this question, Tapscott takes the optimistic view. He sees young people using technology to develop ingenious and hyper-efficient new ways of finding, synthesizing and communicating information. New technologies present Digital Natives with “a giant opportunity,” Tapscott writes, “an opportunity to fulfill their intellectual potential and be the smartest generation ever.”

And if we understand intelligence as the ability to react quickly to visual stimuli, sift through large amounts of information, and decide, quickly, what’s useful and what isn’t, then he’s right; Digital Natives are miles ahead. Studies have shown that regular use of the Internet, video games and other digital technologies can even improve these cognitive abilities in adults. Groups from the military to laproscopic surgeons have turned to video game training to improve their peripheral vision and reaction time, and reduce error. Some brain scientists believe technological facility has contributed to the Flynn effect—the phenomenon that has seen young people’s IQ test scores climb steadily every decade since the Second World War.

But the important question we have to ask ourselves, according to Dr. Michael Merzenich, an international expert in brain plasticity and co-founder of San Francisco-based brain fitness company Posit Science, is this: if I’m spending lots of time doing these sorts of online activities, what am I not doing? Am I not reading a book (engaging the hippocampus, involved in learning and remembering)? Am I having fewer face-to-face interactions (engaging the area linked to empathy skills, the amygdala region)? “What are the cognitive tasks we’re ignoring?” he asks. “And what are the consequences of not doing those things?”

As techno-skeptics are quick to point out, among the great paradoxes of modern life is that people have more information at their fingertips than at any other time in history, and yet we’ve never known less. Examples of just how little the average person knows abound. Last year, Ipsos Reid and the Dominion Institute conducted a survey comparing what Canadians know now to what we knew in 1997. The results were dismal: 10 years ago, 72 per cent of us could name all four political parties then represented in Parliament. Last year, only 38 per cent could.