The Internet Is Changing Your Brain, Like Everything Else

With some regularity, the media will work itself and audiences
into a tizzy over the way Thing X—some new technology, an online
activity, a way of gathering information—”changes
the brain“. With great magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) technology comes great opportunity for scaremongering
backed by pretty visual aids. And so we see how those orange
splotches mean social media
causes brain changes, and those yellow patches
mean online
gaming causes brain changes, and so on. This isn’t wrong, per
se—these new technologies and means of communication are almost
certainly changing our brains in myriad ways. But it’s wrong to see
this as a negative, or even an anomaly. The human
brain is shaped continually throughout life.
Everything changes the brain.

Learning changes
the brain.
Fatherhood changes the brain. Curiosity,

sugar,
smoking,
art,
overeating,
psychotherapy, drug
addiction,
chronic stress,
yoga, living
in an urban environment, antidepressants,

inactivity,
anorexia, childhood
trauma, fish
oil,
tanning,
multitasking, and
meditation change the brain—some in good ways, some in bad
ways, and some in ways we don’t yet understand. Some in ways that
are reversible, others not so much.

Fast Company’s Jason Feifer talked to UCLA
neuroscientist Gary Small about this for the magazine’s November
issue:   

“You’re the third journalist I’ve talked to today,” (Small) says
when I call to learn more. He explains the results like this: “The
brain is a very responsive organ. What you expose it to will alter
its structure and its function.”

So, I ask, what would have happened if that car-fearing dean
from Princeton had access to an MRI machine? Had he been able to
watch the brains of drivers and nondrivers, would he have seen the
same neural activity that Small saw in his Internet experiment?

“You’d see the same pattern, probably. Yeah,” Small says.

Read Feifer’s
whole piece for a nice takedown of technological panics
aided by poorly-interpreted science and how this panic “stalls
progress that should unfold naturally from our connectivity” and
leads government officials to focus more on technological risks
than opportunities.

Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum looked more
at neuroimaging ambiguities here. And in Reason’s
March 2014 issue, Stanton
Peele wrote about how “neuroreductionism” confuses issues
surrounding brain scans, hypersexuality, and other forms of
addiction.