Society hard-wired for a fall?

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent
The Australian
June 14, 2008

Here is a sample of an article on Susan Greenfield, ‘a passionate advocate for taking science to the masses’. It can be read as a companion article to my previous post:

People who spend many hours a day in front of computer screens and televisions, she warns, are going through an unprecedented process in which the brain is churning out and consuming excessive amounts of a natural chemical called dopamine. Other brain scientists agree that heightened levels of dopamine could produce important changes in the fine wiring and functions of the brain, suppressing certain types of more sophisticated thinking.

The hard scientific evidence is limited but Greenfield believes the result of all that screen time and addictive dopamine will be the biggest physical changes to the human brain since the Neanderthals 100,000 years ago, producing changes in behaviour and thought patterns that amount to nothing less than a different type of person.

Older generations - she describes them as "the people of the book" - have developed powers of imagination, empathy, context and meaning which she fears will be much reduced in "the people of the screen".

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23858718-28737,00.html
previous

Is Google making us stupid?

Nicholas Carr
Atlantic Monthly
July/August 2008

Here is a sample of this extremely important article subtitled 'What the Internet is doing to our brains':

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

HOPE

Hope is a film that documents the fate of the people-smuggling vessel SIEV-X and the 353 people who died when it sank en route to Australia. Here is the link to the official website: http://www.hopedocumentary.com.au/hope/index.htm

For the past three years Steve Biddulph has been working to build a suitable memorial in Canberra for victims and survivors of the SIEV X sinking. The photo above that shows a few of the 353 memorial poles is taken from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIEV-X#SIEV_X_Memorial