Facebook will melt your brain

Image courtesy of tschoerda on Flickr

A British neuroscientist, whose work I've written about before, was the subject of an article in the Guardian yesterday. In it, Lady Susan Greenfield, a professor of synaptic pharmacology a Lincoln college, Oxford, tells us that the fast-paced, instant gratification world of social networking is probably changing the way a generation of networked children's minds work.

If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.

In other words, the symptoms of brains that have spent too much time online might be similar to the ones we equate with ADHD. Maybe that's going to be the new normal. It's really too soon to tell.

Greenfield goes on to speculate that the instant gratification, push-button generation's brain decrepitude might make them more susceptible to the pleasures of drug addiction and other addictions. Also, she says that children reading fewer novels makes them less empathetic because they are learning to interact with a world of things that are the objectives of quest-like behavior. That is: You don't have to identify with Princess Toadstool in order to save her from Bowser.

I'm convinced that Greenfield is a smart and capable scientist and that most of her words in the Guardian article are taken out of context. I say that because three-quarters of what she says sounds rational and only a quarter of it sounds like stodgy traditionalism.

At any rate, it's worth a read.

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