New technologies are currently an essential part of our existence. The invention of the Internet can be considered one of the great revolutions in the history of civilization because it fundamentally changed our way of socializing, communicating and accessing information. The digital society advances without brake and transforms fundamental aspects of the human being. How? Do they influence our brain? And in our cognitive functioning? We spoke with the neurologist and neuroscientist Facundo Manes, author together with Mateo Niro of the book Being Human. Everything you need to know about the brain (Paidós), about how new technologies are affecting us and if they negatively impact our main control tower: the brain.
Today many of our doubts are quickly resolved in a matter of seconds. We only need to type in Google what we want to find out or remember to immediately get a response. It is logical to consider that this dynamic of entering, seeking and obtaining the immediate result without the need for effort may be affecting our brain, atrophying it for vagueness and causing us not to stimulate memory. Experts distinguish several types of memory: long-term memory, prospective memory, working memory that, in turn, is made up of different parts such as delayed, recent and remote, emotional memory, semantics, memory. selective, autobiographical… Well, the frontal lobe is the brain’s main search engine . It is also the area of the brain that is associated with working memory, the one we use when we carry out complex tasks such as mathematical calculation. As Facundo Manes says in his book: “This area of the brain is related to our attention. It is worth asking ourselves what changes our brain will require in constant adaptation as we face this new way of processing information ”. The neurologist believes that it is no coincidence that the frontal lobe is precisely the area that has gained more space in human evolution .
“There is not going to be a third lobe of the brain because of Facebook. The brain is not going to change anatomically, neither has the printing press. At that time I imagine that people said now the printing press, books, everything printed, is going to atrophy the memory area, and it did not happen because the brain changes in thousands and thousands of years ”, Manes tells us. “Encyclopedic memory is going to be less and less important because everything is already available on the Internet, but we are going to develop human skills such as compassion, empathy, teamwork, creativity, collective intelligence, the ability to detect leaders, from dealing with difficult people… These are all skills that are going to be much needed in the future. They are already more and more necessary for education and work ”.
What is happening with new technologies is that they are modifying our behaviors. An example of this is the phenomenon of multitasking . And is that who has not put his neck with the computer and television in the background? And the number of times we sit in front of a book with our cell phone next to us to check the WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram messages from time to time? The issue is to what extent the human brain is prepared for the multitasking that new technologies encourage . Manes writes in Being Human that “our brain has two bottlenecks: one is attention (when we have two sufficiently complex sources of information, the efficiency of one declines to the detriment of the other); and the other, working memory (the mental space in which we retain information until we do something with it). This memory has a finite capacity and is extremely susceptible to interference. When you try to carry out two demanding tasks at the same time, the information is crossed and errors occur ”. Then our brain is not prepared to be in 20 things at once. What’s more, multitasking can create anxiety, stress and even affect sleep. The illusion that if we do several things at the same time we are more productive, is that, an illusion. The reality is quite different.
With regard to multitasking, there are those who defend it to train our ability to move quickly and efficiently between activities. However, there is scientific evidence that says that people who function in multitasking , are more dispersed between one activity and another , they get hooked on irrelevant stimuli. “In a context like the current one, in which we are surrounded by a lot of stimuli, it is more difficult to hold the attention because we are waiting for another stimulus to arrive and be even more interesting. This permanent alert makes us take longer to complete the tasks, that we make more mistakes, in addition to causing us stress and exhaustion ”, says Manes in his book. The expert’s advice is more than being at everything at once, let’s do the tasks one by one. The idea is to be focused and not get lost along the way.
New technologies, especially social ones, have created in us a certain illusion of being the solution to eliminate boredom . The truth is that nowadays we are no longer bored, every free moment we have, we pull our mobile. However, being bored is not as bad as we may think, quite the opposite. The neurologist tells us that when we do nothing, the brain works hard . There is a brain network called the resting network that connects areas and thoughts that were not connected. “Doing nothing is important for the brain. Even the increase in creativity usually arises when we are not thinking about anything. We must be more bored, we must contemplate more , we must have more patience. This fast-paced world, this anxiety of wanting everything no longer leads us to well-being, ”says Manes. And in his book he points out that “some authors suggest that we are eliminating times of introspection and deep reflection in search of instant gratification in external stimuli. Then, without them, we don’t know what to do, we feel impatient because we have trained ourselves to wait and respond to external stimuli ”. The concern for attention is such that some scholars describe the current era as “the era of distraction” and they are not lacking in reasons.
Another aspect closely related to new technologies is immediacy . All the actions we carry out in a virtual environment have an immediate effect. If we apply this to children, who can become, if no limits are placed on them, great users of technologies, what happens is that they will get used to obtaining immediate gratification, they learn to prefer this type of interaction to others. However, as Manes explains in his book, to function properly in life you have to learn that not everything we do has an immediate effect or that all interactions lead to immediate gratification . We are talking about children, but this obviously applies to adults.
Regarding immediate gratification, Manes tells us about the experiment of the sugar cloud or marshmallow , which was carried out in the 70s with children. A group of boys and girls met in a Gesell room (a room divided in two by a glass in which people in one room can see what is happening in the other, but not the other way around) and each child was given one sugar cloud. Each child was told that if he did not eat it on the spot and waited, he would be given another one. There were those who ate it as soon as they received it, unable to resist the sweet temptation, and those who waited and were later rewarded with yet another treat. Well, in later studies it was seen that children who resisted temptation, or what is the same, immediate gratification, were more productive in their lives, had a better quality of life, better jobs and had earned more money. It is also true that in other, even later studies, it was concluded that the results were not as grand as originally claimed. Of what there is no doubt is that “immediate gratification is not always synonymous with success, on the contrary. Many times resisting immediate temptation has better long-term consequences , ”Manes tells us.
