Brain Drain from Electronics and Technology; Restoring our Mental Wellness

The article in the NY Times is titled "Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain and is at the following link, and below are some of the highlights for me, related to the question "What is happening to people?"  I am providing this 'offering' related to the 'mind' aspect, and have written initially about the 'body' aspect as it related to nutrition and foods that are affecting our brains.  It was while pouring over the Evolutionary Psychiatry blog by Emily Deans, MD that I found a reference in one of her articles to this fascinating story about the neuroscientists and others who ventured away from technology for a week to see what happened to them. (So THANK YOU, Dr. Emily Deans for having the MOST interesting and helpful information and mental health that I have found on the Internet in terms of it 'fitting' with Lumigrate's perspective. 

 

Here are a few of the highlights from this four Internet page article, which I want to pull out and present here, word for word (because they were so expertly crafted by Matt Richtel: 

 

The believers in the group say the drumbeat of incoming data has created a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s ability to focus.

What he is getting at is something the scientists won’t put a fine point on until the last few minutes of the trip: they have ideas on how to answer this question. 

Mr. Atchley says he can see new ways to understand why teenagers decide to text even in dangerous situations, like driving. Perhaps the addictiveness of digital stimulation leads to poor decision-making. Mr. Yantis says a late-night conversation beneath stars and circling bats gave him new ways to think about his research into how and why people are distracted by irrelevant streams of information.

Even without knowing exactly how the trip affected their brains, the scientists are prepared to recommend a little downtime as a path to uncluttered thinking. As Mr. Kramer puts it: “How many years did we prescribe aspirin without knowing the exact mechanism?”

As they near the airport, Mr. Kramer also mentions a personal discovery: “I have a colleague who says that I’m being very impolite when I pull out a computer during meetings. I say: ‘I can listen.’ ”

“Maybe I’m not listening so well. Maybe I can work at being more engaged.”

Mr. Strayer, the trip leader, argues that nature can refresh the brain. “Our senses change. They kind of recalibrate — you notice sounds, like these crickets chirping; you hear the river, the sounds, the smells, you become more connected to the physical environment, the earth, rather than the artificial environment.”

“That’s why they call it vacation. It’s restorative,” Mr. Braver says. He wonders if there’s any science behind the nature idea. “Part of being a good scientist is being skeptical.”

Mr. Braver  ..... wonders: Why don’t brains adapt to the heavy stimulation, turning us into ever-stronger multitaskers? “Right,” says Mr. Kramer, the skeptic. “Why wouldn’t the circuits be exercised, in a sense, and we’d get stronger?”

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention — from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

This has become such a sizzling field of research that two years ago the National Institutes of Health [4] established a division to support studies of the parts of the brain involved with focus.

Now, Mr. Yantis says, “we can study the brain and the mind together in a rigorous scientific way, rather than a Freudian sit-back-and-think-about-it way.”

Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah [5], says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory [6] and learning are affected — is important science.

“Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”

Echoing other researchers, Mr. Strayer says that understanding how attention works could help in the treatment of a host of maladies, like attention deficit disorder [7], schizophrenia [8], and depression. And he says that on a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can “take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they’re not psychologically healthy.”

The quest to understand the impact on the brain of heavy technology use — at a time when such use is exploding — is still in its early stages. To Mr. Strayer, it is no less significant than when scientists investigated the effects of consuming too much meat or alcohol.

But stepping away is easier for some than others. The trip begins with a strong defense of digital connectedness, a debate that revolves around one particularly important e-mail.

The five scientists on the trip can be loosely divided into two groups: the believers and the skeptics.

The believers are Mr. Strayer and Paul Atchley, 40, a professor at the University of Kansas [9], who studies teenagers’ compulsive use of cellphones. They argue that heavy technology use can inhibit deep thought and cause anxiety [10], and that getting out into nature can help. They take pains in their own lives to regularly log off.

The skeptics use their digital gadgets without reservation. They are not convinced that anything lasting will come of the trip — personally or scientifically.

This group includes the fast-talking Mr. Braver, 41, a brain imaging expert; Steven Yantis, 54, the tall and contemplative chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins, who studies how people switch between tasks; and Art Kramer, 57, a white-bearded professor at the University of Illinois [11] who has gained attention for his studies of the neurological benefits of exercise.

Also on the trip are a reporter and a photographer, and Richard Boyer, a quiet outdoorsman and accomplished landscape painter, who helps Mr. Strayer lead the journey.  

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Again, please visit the NY Times article to see all these guys before they took off down the river. (But may I make a note that this group might have had a different outcome if there were some people with two X chromasomes and not all people with XYs -- I was hoping THAT would be explained somewhere in the article ... isn't it the 21st century? (Though with river trips, I know from experience on relatively simply day trips, it simplifies things if people can be very comfortable around each other, which gets more complicated with a mix of sexes. Still, one of my first experiences floating a river was in the Colorado mountains on the Arkansas River, with two complex quadruplegics, one male, one female, and many other developmentally disabled adults. We also camped above timberline one night -- and it ended up being about 1/3 females and 2/3 males, just because there perhaps were fewer females with disabilities who were 'up to the challenge' or thought of by their preceptors for a most interesting and beneficial week at the Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center.) 

www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html [12]