The Changing Minds of Students
Growing up in a context-free reality, written by Evan I. Schwartz
author of Digital Darwinism

A college basketball coach recalled the players he led a generation ago reading books on the bus to pass the time. Today, they don their iPod headphones and break out their Nintendo Gameboys. For year, the coach diagrammed plays on the backboard, representing opposing players with Xs and Os. More recently, however, he began noticing the athletes do not understand the plays unless he shows them videos of the teams in action. "The kids have changed over the years," he says. "They seem to have lost their abstract thinking skills."

Such stories are rather typical these days. And they are sending childhood psychologist and neuroscientists down a new path of inquiry. Are new technologies altering the structure and abilities of the human brain?

Biopsychologist Shery Dingman, assistant professor of psychology at Marist College, suggest that Children today are developing awesome capabilities in their right cerebral hemispheres "at the expense of left-hemisphere skills." The left cerebral cortex, she says, is specialized to process language and abstract functions such as translating a narrative from a book into visual image in the mind. The right cerebral cortex is specialized to process visual information, such as video. The faster and more intense the visual information, the more work and practice the right brain gets.

The result, Dingman says, is a generation of "children who may be deficit in left-hemisphere skills," and who can become addicted to the fast-action electronic visual feast. By contrast, the "camera angle" in a classroom or book never changes. This helps explain why children seem to pay more attention to vidogames and electronic media than they do when they read or listen to a lecture.

Changing environments means changing neural wiring. The human has perhaps the most malleable brain of all creature; young brains are the most plastic of all, developing neural connections up to age 14. Today's youth seem better able to process many different contexts at once, says Karl Pribram, director of the Center for Brain Research and Information Science at Radford University. Minds nurtured on electronics become adept at context switching, going back and forth between two or more difference scenes or entire programs.

People handle massive amounts of information provided it's in a context - a narrative story or documentary news format, for instance. Context overload comes when you don't have time to make information a part of yourself. "When you’re multitasking on TV or a computer, you’re processing a tremendous amount of information," he notes. "When you're able to context-switch effectively it allows you to be more tolerant of other viewpoints."

"Some people would say the new technology puts us another notch away from thoughtfulness. Pribram adds, "Will we use our brains less thoughtfully? With massive computer storage we are less dependent on memory, everything is momentary. We have to find new ways to alert people to the past. Hypertext is one technique - just click on something, and it will trigger reference from the past. We only have to remember the triggers. We'll have to develop better triggers to the past."

Does this mean that the brain is changing in an evolutionary sense? Not that obviously. The genetic blueprint takes thousands of years to vary significantly. But for all practical purposes, "our culture has changed the way the brain develops." Pribram concludes, "We have invented technology that is changing us and we have to pay more attention to it."

Now read Einstein's Mind and consider the difference and similarity.