New technology may be changing the human brain
Taken from Hansards UK's House of Lords record's of Baroness Greenfield's speech on 20th April 2006:
A recent survey of eight to 18 year-olds claimed that children were now spending on average 6.5 hours a day using electronic media. Most recently, the trend to multi-tasking—that is, using one or more devices in parallel—amounted to an effective 8.5 hours a day. Could this screen and multimedia culture impact on thinking and learning? The journalist Kevin Kelly summed up the issue very well:
"Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts and half-baked ideas. It is a flow of gossip tidbits, news headlines and floating first impressions. Notions don't stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled by the audience".
......
Memory, for example, may no longer be as essential as it was for those of us who had to remember such dates or had to learn reams of Latin grammar. Along with the ability to read and the need to remember, surely we are at risk of losing our imagination, that mysterious and special cognitive achievement that until now has always made the book so very much better than the film. If one is always working with directory trees, where menus are offered with fixed numbers of options—where to get to another action one has to plod up and down various branch-lines of thinking—would that not impose itself on how we think in general?
A recent survey of eight to 18 year-olds claimed that children were now spending on average 6.5 hours a day using electronic media. Most recently, the trend to multi-tasking—that is, using one or more devices in parallel—amounted to an effective 8.5 hours a day. Could this screen and multimedia culture impact on thinking and learning? The journalist Kevin Kelly summed up the issue very well:
"Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts and half-baked ideas. It is a flow of gossip tidbits, news headlines and floating first impressions. Notions don't stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled by the audience".
......
Memory, for example, may no longer be as essential as it was for those of us who had to remember such dates or had to learn reams of Latin grammar. Along with the ability to read and the need to remember, surely we are at risk of losing our imagination, that mysterious and special cognitive achievement that until now has always made the book so very much better than the film. If one is always working with directory trees, where menus are offered with fixed numbers of options—where to get to another action one has to plod up and down various branch-lines of thinking—would that not impose itself on how we think in general?
posted by katharine s. willis at 12:06 pm
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