Digital Understanding

Baroness Greenfield Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greenfield (CB)]

I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for the opportunity to contribute to this timely debate. As a neuroscientist, I urge that digital understanding should go further still and include a deeper awareness of the impact of screen technologies on the physical brain and how it is changing our actual thought processes and consciousness.

Humans possess the superlative ability to adapt to the environment. The human brain becomes highly personalised after birth by the development of unique configurations of connections between brain cells. This, I suggest, constitutes an individual “mind”. These neuronal connections are constantly being modified by input from the outside world—a world now increasingly mediated by screens. Our highly impressionable brains, our minds, will be adapting in an unprecedented fashion.

While the internet can be a source of high-quality entertainment and education and of socialising in new ways, such benefits, especially for the young, should be weighed against some very basic considerations. Young children, who are still developing the ability to regulate their emotions and cope with frustration and boredom, need to develop self-calming skills that do not rely on the palliative of the screen. No matter how high-quality the content of what is flashed up, time spent in a screen-based world displaces time spent learning, playing and socialising in the real world. Real-world toys, activities and human-to-human interactions foster the imagination, creativity and social skills of a child in ways that screen technologies typically cannot. Computer gaming has been shown to bring benefits such as improved dexterity, but the content and context of these activities should not be ignored. Put bluntly, is it not worth pondering the relative merits of 10,000 hours spent playing “World of Warcraft” online versus 10,000 hours developing skills on the guitar or piano in the sociable company of other musicians?

The temptation to immerse oneself obsessively in the screen world is well-nigh universal. Over 2,000 peer-reviewed articles relating to internet addiction offer increasingly strong evidence that it is a real phenomenon. What exactly is an internet addict addicted to? We have always found pleasure in finding new information, whether through intentional searching or happenstance, but the preference to engage with the screen world could be because it offers a qualitatively different experience from that encountered in the three-dimensional, less-compliant real world. Whatever you do in the screen world will elicit an instant response, unlike real life. This instant feedback is not merely reassuring, but so compelling for some that it becomes a prerequisite for their well-being. A recent Harvard study found that, rather than sit alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes, many people chose to give themselves painful electric shocks. That was in Science in 2014.

Screen culture, characterised by its never-ending traffic of input and output, appears symptomatic of a new type of existential challenge: to sustain and enjoy a rewarding personal, inner world that is independent of external stimulation. The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, should be applauded for founding a think tank highlighting a key area: examining the internet’s effect on how we live, care, consume, love, learn, work and die. Surely central to such examination should be careful consideration of its unprecedented effects on the brain itself.