when people spend time interacting with their
smartphones via touchscreen, it actually changes the way their thumbs and
brains work together, according to a report in the Cell Press journal Current
Biology on December 23. More touchscreen use in the recent past translates
directly into greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are
touched, the study shows.
"I was really surprised by the scale of the
changes introduced by the use of smartphones," says Arko Ghosh of the
University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. "I was also struck by
how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain
signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs."
It all started when Ghosh and his colleagues
realized that our newfound obsession with smartphones could be a grand
opportunity to explore the everyday plasticity of the human brain. Not only are
people suddenly using their fingertips, and especially their thumbs, in a new
way, but many of us are also doing it an awful lot, day after day. Not only
that, but our phones are also keeping track of our digital histories to provide
a readymade source of data on those behaviors.
Ghosh explains it this way: "I think first we
must appreciate how common personal digital devices are and how densely people
use them. What this means for us neuroscientists is that the digital history we
carry in our pockets has an enormous amount of information on how we use our
fingertips (and more)."
While neuroscientists have long studied brain
plasticity in expert groups--musicians or video gamers, for
instance--smartphones present an opportunity to understand how regular life
shapes the brains of regular people.
To link digital footprints to brain activity in the
new study, Ghosh and his team used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the
brain response to mechanical touch on the thumb, index, and middle fingertips
of touchscreen phone users in comparison to people who still haven't given up
their old-school mobile phones.
The researchers found that the electrical activity
in the brains of smartphone users was enhanced when all three fingertips were
touched. In fact, the amount of activity in the cortex of the brain associated
with the thumb and index fingertips was directly proportional to the intensity
of phone use, as quantified by built-in battery logs. The thumb tip was even
sensitive to day-to-day fluctuations: the shorter the time elapsed from an
episode of intense phone use, the researchers report, the larger was the
cortical potential associated with it.
The results suggest to the researchers that
repetitive movements over the smooth touchscreen surface reshape sensory
processing from the hand, with daily updates in the brain's representation of
the fingertips. And that leads to a pretty remarkable idea: "We propose
that cortical sensory processing in the contemporary brain is continuously
shaped by personal digital technology," Ghosh and his colleagues write.
What exactly this influence of digital technology
means for us in other areas of our lives is a question for another day. The
news might not be so good, Ghosh and colleagues say, noting evidence linking
excessive phone use with motor dysfunctions and pain.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Cell Press. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Arko Ghosh et al. Use-Dependent Cortical
Processing from Fingertips in Touchscreen Phone Users. Current Biology,
December 2014 DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.026
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