Will Tiny Phones lead to Tiny Brains

 

Will tiny phones lead to tiny brains?

 

The short answer to the above question is, I think, “Yes.” The rest of this article is made up of the reasons I came to this conclusion. Underlying my considerations of this idea is the impression an article I read many years ago made on me. It was about brain research being done at the time, around the mid-sixties.

As a part of their studies, the doctors doing it examined the brain of a fit and healthy young manual laborer who was killed in a road accident and compared it with the brain of a Judge, in his eighties, who died of natural causes.

What they found was that the Judge’s brain was in better physical shape that that of the young man’s. There was nothing wrong, as such, with the younger man’s brain, it was just that it was less well developed than the Judge’s. And it was not the case that the judge’s brain was in great shape ‘for a man of his age’ – it was in great shape, period. As a functioning organ it was, in effect, younger. The rest of the judge’s body, though, was another matter; wielding a pen was about as much as it could handle.

There was nothing really surprising about the bare facts revealed by the examination;

The judge had spent his life using his brain to ‘work with’, whereas the young man just let his brain ‘work at’ an elementary level. Just enough to control his body and give him a limited grasp of intellectual tools like reading, writing and mathematics. As far as his brain was concerned, he was either, never called upon to, or interested in, pushing it.

The judge was a sort of mirror image of the young man. He used his body like the young man used his brain; at an elementary level. Just enough to get him to where he wanted to be; driving to work, for instance, not jogging there.

What was particularly interesting about the results was that they showed the brain to be much closer in type to the rest of the body than was generally accepted. There always has been, and it persists, some confusion as to how the mind and the brain are related. As a result the brain has always been treated as an altogether more superior entity to, say, a bicep. But is it? This study suggests that at some level it can be influenced in the same way biceps are, by exercise.

Today the notion of exercising the brain has become more widespread and there is a growing body of literature dealing with it becoming available. When I read the article I mentioned, such ideas were just not around. Bodybuilding, on the other hand, was very popular. At that time it was accepted that being ‘brainy’ was something you were born with or you weren’t. If you were a boy in those days there was an illustration of you on the back of every comic book; a skinny little guy looking miserable. But with it was the cure to this cruel joke God played on you in the form of Charles Atlas. He looked fabulous and for a few dollars you too could look like that if you did his course of exercises.

There was no advert showing an equally miserable looking little guy sitting in the corner with a dunces cap on his head beside the big beaming face of Albert Einstein who, in exchange for a few dollars, could do for your brain what Charles Atlas could do for your body. Today such an advert is perfectly viable.

So – what has all that got to do with phones? If you accept my argument – a lot.

When I lay the blame for this potential catastrophe at the door of the phone I am referring to one particular function it performs – ‘texting’

So, what’s the problem with texting? It’s the impact it has on language, and ‘impact’ is a very appropriate word because what it does is demolish it. It is not that it cuts it very short; ‘shorthand’ has been used for generations by journalists to enable them to take notes as events unfold in front of them. The difference is that it is a stage of the whole process. When, whatever event the journalist is covering has ended the journalist takes his notes back to his desk and transcribes them into full-bodied language, including punctuation, which is what is published. Text, on the other hand, does not need to be transcribed as, once it is read, it has fulfilled its function. This removes the necessity for formal structuring.

“So what?” might be your reaction, “it works, doesn’t it?” Well, yes it does, but this, if anything, gives rise to cause for greater concern, not less. Especially when you take into consideration who it is using Text; young people, or, to put it more dramatically, the next generation.

It is something else besides being easy and effective – its fun. You know – the opposite to work. An example of the media being the message. It is fun because it is the opposite of work and a great proportion of those using it are kids at the stage when they are suppose to be working at being educated. Now as long as the kids doing the texting are as good at conventional writing as they are at texting, then there is no problem. But, without any detailed research, I am willing to bet that there are a great number of young people who could not pass an elementary essay test but are expert Texters. And this is the nub of the problem. Once you have mastered the simplistic abbreviations of words and tiny little sentences you can communicate all you want. That is if all you want to communicate is simplistic little sentences which, usually, contain simplistic little ideas.

Again “what’s wrong with that?” – Nothing, except why do kids spend hour after hour doing it. Can you imagine the reaction of the average teenager if you had, before Texting was invented, suggested that it might be a nice idea to write a note to their friend?

Even if you could have come up with an answer to their question, “why?...” I doubt if they would have spent all day doing it; or sneaked in doing it while they were in class with a frustrated teacher trying to teach them how to write boring old conventional writing.

Which brings us back to the brain research I introduced this piece with; it proved that lack of exercise was why the young man’s brain was in a similar condition to the old Judge’s muscles, underdeveloped. And for the same reason, lack of, or light, use. Given enough generations of this and we could Text ourselves back into the Stone Age.

A gross exaggeration I’ll grant you – but sure an argument isn’t worth its salt without a bit of exaggeration.