Does our compulsion to live life online make us smarter? Not according to Dr. Gary Small, author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.
Dr. Small is a neuroscientist and director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior. He has studied how technology has given us more resources, but perhaps is robbing a generation of critical thinking skills.
We are in the first techno-boom of the human race, but many of us experience a quiet panic, a perception that we are multi-tasking, yet things are slipping through the ether. Important things… things we want to do and can't focus on.
What we once wrote in a simple leather dayplanner now oozes from cell phone to email to the web of a thousand faces we call our friends. This is your brain on technology.
So slow down and pick up a copy of iBrain. Small and co-author Vorgan explain how the pace of digital advancement forces our brains to evolve at uncomfortable speeds. While Small's focus is on the effects of technology, the book also does a good job of explaining the evolutionary brain process that has emerged over the time span of just a single generation.
Look beyond the benefits brought about by technology in life, medicine, science and our work, and you'll find troubled thinking, and a level of exhaustion caused by multitasking.
Small explains how unaware we are of the changes in our neural circuitry and how hard the brain has to work to master new things. This is especially true for the adult brain. Sort of like that awkward feeling, if you're right-handed, of trying to comb your hair or brush your teeth using your left hand.
As we move toward these new skills, we do adapt, but at what price? The author says we drift away from fundamental social skills of communication and non-verbal social cues that are important in understanding each other.
Our ability to function changes as we age, and iBrain includes a well-written section explaining how the brain develops over time. Small refers to those who grew up with technology, who are now in their 20s, as "Digital Natives," while those of us two or three decades older than the Natives are "Digital Immigrants."
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