This is Your Brain on Technology
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Natural Law, Science, and the Social Construction of Reality
IBrain is great book about the effects of technology on our brains.
The man point of the book is that how learn, especially in our formative years, determines how the pathways in our brains are formed. Different kinds of information lead to different connections.
The book starts off by talking about the brain and how connections are made, especially in regards to how the different parts of the brain work together. If young people spend too much time using technology and not enough time interacting with others, frontal lobe development may be stunted. The implication of this is that such people will have difficulty in later life dealing with interpersonal relations. An example of this is given where a non technological person asks a bunch of young techies to develop a new marketing plan. They come in, do a presentation, do make small talk, do not make eye contact, and though they do a great presentation, they do not get the job because the person hiring wants to be able to relate to the people he hires.
The first half of the book goes through these issues and talks about problems such as the lack of social interaction and addictions to technology, and the problems they lead to. And in each case Dr. Small explains how these behaviors affect the brain, along with diagrams of the brain. He argues that adult deficit disorder is really a result of too much technology, which leads to the need for constant stimuli. This need is caused both by expectations and by how the brain circuitry has developed due to the extended use of technology.
In many ways this part of the book is scary since technology can be seen as controlling people, at least with regards to how we learn to think.
But this is where the second part of the book comes in. Dr. Small presents basic questionaires regarding how people use technology and then he presents exercises that can help to reshape the brain.
The unscary part of the book is that the connections we make are not necessarily permanent. As we continue to learn, our brains continue to develop and create new pathways and new connections.
What makes this book is that it present a real problem and then provides real solutions.
So play your computer games, answer your email, surf the web, buy stuff on ebay you don't need. AND read this book.
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