Computing The Cost, Nicholas Carr

Cooper: Is there any real evidence that the Internet is “rewiring” our brains?

Carr: There’s certainly a lot of evidence that the brain readily adapts to experience — that our neural circuits are “plastic,” as scientists say. And we’re starting to see direct evidence that Internet use alters brain function. There was a fascinating study done in 2008 by Gary Small, who heads the UCLA Memory and Aging Research Center and recently published a book called iBrain. He and two of his colleagues scanned the brains of two dozen people as they searched the Internet: half the subjects lacked online experience, and the other half were experienced Web users. The researchers found very different patterns of brain activity between the two groups. The subjects with little experience on the Internet showed activity in the language, memory, and visual centers of the brain, which is typical of people who are reading. The experienced Web surfers, on the other hand, had more activity in the decision-making areas at the front of the brain. Interestingly, after five consecutive days of Web surfing, the brain activity of the “inexperienced” group began to match the activity of the experienced Web users. That indicates that the brain adapts very quickly to Net use, just as it does to other repeated stimuli.

Now, there’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that, if you’re older, using the Net may help keep you mentally sharp. It “exercises” the brain in the way that, as Dr. Small observed, solving crossword puzzles does. On the other hand, neurology experiments demonstrate that decision-making consumes a lot of your mental resources, leaving less available for other modes of thinking. That may be why it’s so hard to read deeply when we’re online — our brains literally become overloaded. Imagine trying to read a book while simultaneously working on a crossword puzzle. That’s the intellectual environment of the Web.

Cooper: Do the different areas of activity that show up on the scan necessarily mean the brain is being “rewired”?

Carr: If everybody in the study had shown the same pattern of brain activity from the start, that would have told us that this is just the way your brain works when you surf the Web. But because the patterns differed between experienced and inexperienced users, and because they changed for the inexperienced group as they used the Web more, it means the brain is adapting. People used to think that after childhood your brain was basically hard-wired, but we know today that even the adult brain is very plastic. Throughout our lives our brains adapt to the way we gather and process information. Performing an action over and over changes the brain’s circuitry. The new firing patterns of neurons become more stable and push aside older patterns. If you give up performing an action, then neural circuits formerly dedicated to it get weaker and are eventually used for other activities.

Cooper: So this rewiring isn’t something unique to Google or the Internet.

Carr: That’s right. Anything we do on a regular basis rewires the brain. There’s a saying among neuroscientists that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” When you practice a certain skill, the circuits get stronger, and the area of your brain dedicated to performing the skill gets larger.

What that means is that, as the Internet becomes our universal medium for gathering information, we’re training our brains to take in information in the way the Internet supplies it — that is, with an emphasis on speed and with continual distractions. We’ve seen this with previous intellectual technologies like the alphabet, the clock, and the printing press: new modes of intelligence come into being that stress different aspects of our brain’s functioning. Some people would argue that, with the current change, we’re gaining a great deal, because we have access to all this information. And for most of us the obvious benefits of being online overwhelm any fears and concerns. This has been particularly true with young people who’ve grown up with this new technology. Because it’s become so natural, they don’t pay attention to what they might be losing. They might not even be aware of it. You don’t worry about losing something you never knew you had in the first place.

From: http://westallen.typepad.com/brains_on_purpose/neuroplasticity/

If you are interested in how the brain dances with its surroundings, you might want to follow the field of cultural neuroscience. I have for you an article that gives an overview of that discipline. From "The cultural neuroscience of person perception" (Progress in Brain Research) [pdf]:
It seems unassailable at this point that the adult human brain is a place where plasticity is the norm, not the exception. This is a point that has startled some neuroscientists and psychologists, who have generally privileged anatomical and functional fixity. As one neuroscientist said, writing in Science: ‘‘If the neural systems used for a given task can change with 15 min of practice ... how can we any longer separate organic structures from their experience in the organism’s history?’’ The field of cultural neuroscience should answer with a resounding: we cannot! [footnotes removed]

The authors go on to mention the lone-ranger versus dancing-with-environment approach to the brain.
The epistemological stripping of the brain from its environment, social context, culture, and ecology — a notion that pervades the fields of psychology and neuroscience — has provided major challenges for the emergence of a research field dedicated to the study of the interactions between brain and culture, between the neural and the ecological. We hope that by studying how the brain and culture interact, the burgeoning field of cultural neuroscience can move beyond these dichotomies and provide novel insights into psychological processes. This is especially true for the cultural neuroscience of social perception, given the dynamic and interactive nature of perceiving and interacting with others.

Certainly cultural neuroscience will give us good information about minds and brains in conflict with other minds and brains.

As if spoken from my own mouth. Words from Gordana Novakovic

Remanufacturing Intelligence

Should we artists – designers and manufacturers of digital art – know more about brain science? Maybe we should. The recent discovery of neuroplasticity – the brain’s capacity for rapidly rewiring itself through interactive processes – offers new and powerful perspectives on the way in which the digitally enabled and technology dense environment affects our brains and our cognitive abilities.
If you want to see an intelligence that has been formed by digital technology, you have only to look in a mirror. The digital revolution has changed the nature of our perceptual processes, and this in turn has changed our conscious experience of the physical world, inducing changes in our cognition and intelligence on a scale that is still unknown.
As inhabitants of the modern city we are in constant interaction, both active and passive, with digital technology. Even at home, we are surrounded by screens and digital displays: DVD player, computer, television, cell phone, cooker, clock. But the majority of scientists investigating cognition still refer to the ‘real world’ as a constant, an axiom, unchanged through time, ignoring the fact that the present-day real world, saturated by the latest technologies, differs fundamentally from that of even a decade ago.
The new science of neuroplasticity is teaching us that the brain can no longer be regarded as a fixed, closed, passive receiver of information from the senses – a mere processor for the information that is controlling our body through a kind of one-way communication. We are now seeing the recognition of growing scientific evidence that the brain is in fact almost nakedly open to external influences, and is capable of rapid and radical change by remodelling itself through learning and interaction with the environment. What should concern us is the peculiar vulnerability of our brain to the influence of electronic media. As Doidge (2007) notes: “It is the form of the television medium – cuts, edits, zooms, pans and sudden noises – that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the ‘orienting response’, which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement. […] The response is physiological..."
The truth is that our intelligence is being constantly remanufactured by our exposure to, and interaction with, commercially motivated artefacts. Our consent to this process was never sought, because it did not have to be sought; mostly, we were unaware of the existence of the process.
So how does this affect the artist? This new understanding of cognitive processes is warning us that experiencing art, and especially electronic art, or technology-enabled art, is far from being an innocently entertaining or aesthetically pleasing experience extending for a limited period of time. The disturbing evidence of neuroplasticity raises the possibility that experiencing particular forms of art may itself affect and mark our cognition – perhaps with irreversible and unknown changes? But the news is not all bad; the dramatic shift in neuroscience also brings with it a fascinating opportunity to explore and analyse the effects of electronic media through scientifically informed art, which could give rise to an entirely new art form: neuroplastic art. It may be possible to structure art works according to this new scientific evidence, to fuse scientific knowledge with imagination to exploit the nature of electronic media to create platforms for experiences that have never existed before – and to knowingly remanufacture our own intelligence in benign and desirable ways in the process.

(The SHARE Festival, Torino, 2008 http://www.toshare.it/ita/about/conferences )
Posted by Gordana Novakovic at 12:52