by Nick Bilton
The researchers showed volunteers different types of content while monitoring them using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners, special machines that allow the research subjects to watch screens or perform certain tasks while the scanner records the blood flow in their brains and how the brain handles its processing.
First, volunteers were shown a table of contents from a book and given fifteen seconds to pick the chapter they wanted to read. Then they had just under thirty seconds to read a page of the book. Next, the same participants were shown a search page from Google and asked to decide on a search and enter a word in the search box within fifteen seconds. The display took them to a website that corresponded with their search, and they were asked to read the page for an additional thirty seconds. To make sure they were paying attention, the participants were told they would be tested on their reading of both the print and digital versions.
When reading the printed page, the Net Naive and Net Savvy brains reacted the same way. Those brains were slightly stimulated, although there was a little less activity in the brains of the Net Savvy while reading the printed text. But during the online searching and reading tests, the Net Savvy brains were much more active. In fact, the Net Savvy group showed almost twice as much activity while online compared with reading a book. The reading task stimulated parts of the brain used for language and reading, memory, and visual abilities. In comparison, the Web surfing task activated the same areas of the brain as reading, but in addition, the brain was involved in decision making, complex reasoning, and vision detection.
Even more interesting, the volunteers weren’t a bunch of young kids with malleable brains. Rather, the group consisted of people between fifty-five and seventy-six years old, all of them digital immigrants with varying degrees of success in adapting to the online world. The Internet wasn’t even around in a meaningful way until they were in their late thirties or early forties to midfifties, yet the brains of the Net Savvy rewired and sprang into action to work with this new stimulation.
What was happening with those brains is a process called neuroplasticity, a theory that our brains’ 100 billion neurons, or nerve cells, can re-form, or create new cells and new connections, as we learn and grow.6
Many new activities we engage in on a daily basis can make this happen, from touching something hot for the first time to using the Internet or even juggling, as Bogdan Draganski and a group of scientists from the department of neurology at the University of Regensburg, Germany, discovered.
Draganski, with previous brain research as a foundation, developed a hypothesis that our brains must act differently when they learn something new. After watching a group of kids text messaging on their mobile phones at dramatic speeds, he wondered if sending hundreds of messages a day with one’s hands made the thumbs work differently. He theorized that the brain correlations that operate these functions should look different from what they look like in people who rarely text.
To explore this theory further, Draganski told me in a phone interview, he got permission to scan the brains of a small group of young people. The initial results showed that the heavy texters had a larger area of mass in the portion of the brain that controls the right hand, but other areas were similar to normal brains he had studied earlier. Draganski believed that this larger mass most likely signified heightened use of the right hand used for texting. His original goal was to understand if brain growth would become more obvious over time as more kids learned to text. But, he said in an interview, with so many young people already familiar with texting, he decided to switch to a different task that involved a clear and steep learning curve: juggling.
Draganski and his researchers took a group of participants who had never juggled before and measured the gray matter, the neurons, in each of their brains as they gradually learned to juggle with three and then four balls. As Draganski predicted, he saw significant areas of growth of gray matter in certain areas. The motor areas of the brain actually grew over a three-month period of learning. When the participants stopped juggling, however, their gray matter began to recede and return to its previous size and shape.
Another group of researchers in a different study found that when a completely new task is learned, changes in brain shape are visible after a mere seven days of practice.
When these theories were tested in a later study by the UCLA researchers in late 2009, it was found that Net Naive Web surfers could catch up to the Net Savvy. When the Net Naive repeatedly used the Internet over a one-week period, the brain scans showed that they, too, started to adapt and respond to the online experience in a very similar fashion to the Net Savvy. Their brains also began to show twice as much stimulation from reading a Web page as from reading a printed page.
Gary Small, director of UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and one of the nation’s leading experts on memory and aging, was one of the key researchers in this study. He said the brains were learning, benefiting from practice and experience. In theory, Small said, as we learn, the brain should show less activity. For example, when we get a new phone, it takes a while to figure out where all the functions are hidden. “At first I’ll show a lot of activity in my brain,” he said, but then, once he gets used to the experience and better at navigating the device, the activity should slow down. At that point, he said, the brain’s “synapses … will grow, become strengthened, and then become efficient,” and less activity should be required.
But that isn’t what happened when he watched people become experienced digital surfers. Instead, his research found, our brains work completely differently while reading online than while reading a printed page, making numerous decisions based on the many options, menus, photos, text, and links on each page. In fact, the first study concluded, “Internet searching appears much more stimulating than reading.”
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What happens when we’re online that keeps the brain so busy?
The online experience isn’t simple or controlled; it’s like the Wild West. The user interface alone is enough to send you running for the comfort of the printed page. Every last piece of real estate on the screen is vying for your attention. Your Web browser has back buttons, reload buttons, and a bright red stop button that screams, “Hey, look at me!” Other windows may be floating in the background of your computer screen. You probably have a desktop image of your cats or a cute baby.
Then there’s the actual Web page, which includes eye-popping banner ads, search boxes, logos, and colored text showing you links to other Web pages, which then link to even more Web pages. In the course of a day, you might go to a few news websites, read a blog or two, look at the weather, search Google for a range of answers, and buy a book on Amazon or eBay. Before you know it, you may have visited well over a hundred Web pages in a day. That may not seem like a lot, but the amount of content you see can be mind-boggling.
In research at the New York Times labs, we found that on average, each Web page in the top 100 most-visited news and information sites and blogs online has about 370 links; some have more, some a little less. So if you were to visit the home page of each of those top websites in one day, you would have faced more than 37,000 links.
It can be completely overwhelming for our brains to navigate the Web. No wonder Small’s study said a book is sometimes less stimulating than the Internet. The Web is vying for our attention constantly.
Although our anchoring and trust communities help us determine where to go and what we can trust, the links also help us navigate the trails. Imagine what it’s like when you walk into a large bookstore like a Barnes & Noble. You will see thousands of books displayed on the store’s shelves. All around, there are filters to help you find where you want to browse and what you want to buy. Books are organized by subject matter. There are recommendation tables organized to help you find specific genres. There are top ten lists, top fiction lists, employee recommendations, New York Times bestsellers. Or you can ba
se your decision about what to read on a friend or coworker’s suggestion.
The Web eventually will get to this place, too, and once again, history can show us the way. A front page of the New York Times a hundred years ago was a messy cacophony of more than sixty headlines and stories. Today’s paper has a grand total of six stories. You would think that over a hundred years, during a time when content creation has essentially exploded into trillions of little bits of information, the newspaper would stuff in more stories and headlines. But the Times and other newspapers came to understand that their job wasn’t to print every single piece of news of the day but to do a better job of filtering it. It’s an editor’s job to reduce what a reader’s brain has to wrestle with.
Until now, the Web has taken a contrasting path. When we go online, the limitations of the print experience—the size of a piece of paper—just evaporate. In 1995, when the New York Times debuted its website, the concept was to re-create the newspaper experience in a digital form. On the home page, you might have seen a whopping two stories, with one photo and links to eighteen different sections of the website. That’s a grand total of close to fifteen links on the home page. Fifteen years later, the home page of nytimes.com has more than 550 links, nearly 300 of which are headlines related to stories. No wonder the brain is busy.
Beyond the links, the websites have plenty of words, too. In a story I wrote and visualized for the United Kingdom version of Wired magazine, I found that the top two hundred news and information sites in the United States and the UK put forth an astounding grand total of 487,881 words and 66,248 links. And get this: Hitting those two hundred sites is the equivalent of flipping through Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is 480,000 words long.
Granted, two hundred Web pages is a lot. If you’re flying along like that, you’re probably a media junkie on a tight deadline or a bored Web surfer stuck inside on a rainy day. But let’s go a little further and combine this with all the information we eat up every day.
Technology researchers at the University of California–San Diego looked at the number of words we read in all kinds of media and quantified it as if it were placed on a hard drive at the end of each day. The researchers calculated that in 2008 American households collectively consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information.8
What’s a zettabyte, you ask? I had to look it up too. Here’s how I described it in a blog post for the Times: “I’ll be honest: this is the first time I’ve ever used the word zettabyte. I’ve heard of petabytes and even exabytes, but zettabytes are a whole new level of bytes. If a zettabyte is beyond your comprehension, too, it’s essentially one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. To put that into perspective, one exabyte—which equals 1/1000 of a zettabyte or 1 billion gigabytes—is roughly equivalent to the capacity of 5.1 million computer hard drives, or all the hard drives in Minnesota.”
In other words, it’s an ocean of information. The researchers also found that the average American can take in up to 36 million words a year. This doesn’t mean that we are reading 100,000 words every day. But it does mean that we are subjected to these words through any number of channels: television, radio, text messages, the Internet, video games, and advertising.
There’s no sign of this slowing down. The researchers also calculate that the information wave continues to grow 6 percent each year, representing a 350 percent increase since 1980 in the amount of information we regularly confront.
Finally, our brains are stimulated while we’re online by the physically interactive and unpredictable nature of using a computer: You’re challenging your brain by holding a mouse, looking at a screen, and navigating through choices and buttons. It’s a very hands-on experience that is completely different from the more passive and linear activity of reading a book or watching TV or a movie. When you’re reading or watching a movie, your body and your hands are relatively still. And though you can certainly skip around, you’re more likely to read or watch from the beginning to the middle to the end.
Although there is a beginning, middle, and end to most online content, those links also form thousands of branches of information that essentially allow you to devise your own narrative, creating a whole new form of storytelling. The Web does have its linear possibilities, but you have to add a broad level of multidimensionality. There are uncountable coexisting narratives and stories.
All of this is enough to make your head spin. It makes perfect sense that our brains are active as a scanner when we’re online.
Online our brains are stimulated, calculating and exploring. They are working differently. This is consistent with another development researchers have found: Mastering another electronic challenge—video games—also engages the brain and may actually make us more adept at certain tasks.
But this doesn’t mean our brains can’t handle this new form of storytelling. It just means we are telling and consuming stories differently. In addition, content creators and consumers are feeling their way through a digital metamorphosis. It took decades for the editors at the New York Times to realize it wasn’t in their best interest to put sixty headlines on the front page of the newspaper and that in actuality it made more sense to put six highly curated headlines on that page.
As our brains adapt and continue to grow and change shape, the technology and storytelling will continue to do the same thing. Our brains have done this successfully for thousands of years as they have learned new forms of communications and storytelling.
Does Your Surgeon Play Video Games?
The next time you have surgery, ask your surgeon if he or she played video games in the past.
A few years ago, researchers quizzed more than thirty surgeons and surgical residents on their video-game habits, identifying those who played video games frequently, those who played less frequently, and those who hardly played at all.9 Then they put all the surgeons through a laparoscopic surgery simulator, in which thin instruments akin to extremely long chopsticks are inserted into one or more small incisions through the skin along with a small camera that is inserted into an additional small opening. Minimally invasive surgery like this frequently is used for gallbladder removal, gynecologic procedures, and other procedures that once involved major cutting and stitching and could require hours on an operating table.
The researchers found that surgeons or residents who used to be avid video game players had significantly better laparoscopic skills than did those who’d never played. On average, the serious game players were 33 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer errors than their colleagues who didn’t have prior video-game experience.
The more video games the surgeons had played in the past, the better their numbers. This wasn’t tested on a group of kids who played twelve hours of video games a day and hadn’t showered in weeks. These residents and practicing surgeons simply played three or more hours of action video games a week. Some of the more advanced video-game-playing students managed to make 47 percent fewer errors than others and were able to work as much as 39 percent faster.
The results were surprising given the criticism video games have received for rotting young minds, turning upstanding youngsters into juvenile delinquents, and just wasting time. Instead, surgeons and researchers have begun to test whether the games should be a key part of a future surgeon’s education, since speed and accuracy are crucial to conquering the learning curve associated with using laparoscopic techniques to perform delicate procedures. Game skill, the researchers theorized, could translate into surgical skill and help cut “medical errors,” which have become the eighth leading cause of death in this country.10
A couple of years ago, a researcher at Arizona State University tried this out on surgeons at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center, using a Wii golf club that was reshaped into a laparoscopic probe.11 One group of residents played a suite of games called Wii Play and a game that involves subtle hand movements, Marble Mania, using the probe, while another group didn’t. The game players showed 48 percent more impro
vement in performing a simulated laparoscopic procedure compared with those who didn’t play.
But not every game helps surgeons improve their skills. It turns out that Wii’s Marble Mania stimulates the areas of the brain needed for surgery. Games such as Wii Tennis, where you swat your arms in the air as though you were hitting a virtual ball, did not help surgeons’ scores. But many studies have found that even limited practice on video games may increase speed and skill in surgery.
It’s no surprise, of course, that dexterity improves with practice. But what makes these studies stand out is how effectively human brains can make the leap to conquering new technologies and then putting those new skills to use in innovative and varied ways. For example, these studies consistently show that playing video games improves hand-eye coordination and increases one’s capacity for visual attention and spatial distribution, among other skills. These increased brain functions are tied not only to game play but to several other real-world scenarios, including surgery.
You may feel like your brain cannot cope with so much information or jump seamlessly from one medium to another, just as you may have felt in high school that you couldn’t learn a foreign language or conquer higher math.
But as the brain faces new language (or acronyms and abbreviations), new visual and auditory stimulation, or new and different ways of processing information, it can change and grow in the most remarkable fashion. In fact, it may well be a natural part of human behavior to seek out and develop unnatural new experiences and technologies and then incorporate them into our daily lives and storytelling.
Seventeen Buttons and Ten Fingers
I personally can’t justify playing video games to practice my surgical skills. Medical procedures aren’t exactly my strong suit. But video games have helped my brain master new forms of storytelling in ways I didn’t even realize.
