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We can’t ignore that technology is changing our brains: Notice that the one thing left out is "Wireless Internet"
United Kingdom Created: 22 Aug 2015
We can’t ignore that technology is changing our brains
An un-biassed assessment of the effects on humans of digital technology is hardly 'scaremongering’.

Do computer games and internet use wreak havoc on young brains? That’s the debate I seem to have been dragged into, thanks to the potentially adverse effects of information technology (IT) that I described in my recent book Mind Change.

As the Telegraph detailed, an article in the British Medical Journal has now accused me of scaremongering. But its authors (one of whom is a colleague of mine at Oxford University) have got the wrong end of the stick.

I have never suggested that reasonable use of the internet “harms” the adolescent brain. But it’s worth noting that recent research shows that some teens are using IT for up to up to 18 hours per day, when media-multi-tasking is taken into account . Palatable or not, other research suggests that intense use of the internet and video games may lead to microstructural abnormalities in the brain, and the effects may be comparable to those of drug abuse.

A further item on the BMJ charge sheet is that I have not published my claims in peer-reviewed scientific literature. But I am not pretending to conduct experiments that test a specific, falsifiable hypothesis. Rather I set out to provide a review – accessible to everyone – of the current state of all the research in this field.

This research is continuously evolving, just as the technologies it evaluates are doing, and spans a host of complex and diverse disciplines: neurosciences, psychology, sociology, among others. Nonetheless, Mind Change does cite some 250 peer-reviewed papers – as such it has been described by the distinguished neurologist Richard Cytowic, as “the most reference-dense and annotated work of its kind I can recall”.
Article by Susan Greenfield, A Oxford Lady Don

Read the whole article at link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11802081/We-cant-ignore-that-technology-is-changing-our-brains.html
Click here to view the source article.
Source: Agnes Ingvarsdottir

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