Cognition and Digital Technology: Assumptions Versus Reality

Hello. I am Doctor net.

I'm a neuroscientist and honorary research associate at

College University Psychology School.

This lecture is on the impact of digital technology on

cognition assumptions versus reality.

It's widely agreed in the mainstream at least that

digital technology is having a detrimental on cognition and

cognitive development.

But this is all anecdotal by a large.

You regularly see newspaper headlines or in-depth articles

strongly suggest, if not flat out state,

that modern technology,

particularly given how widespread and invasive it is,

is having a damaging effect on how our minds and brains work.

But take when it comes to younger people, children,

teens, adolescents, and so on,

you often see claims about how modern technology like

smartphone and social media is corrupting and harming children in particular.

To be completely fair,

there are many valid points which would support this viewpoint.

For instance,

modern technology makes it much easier for younger people to

access things and material that they are not necessarily

cognitively mature enough to deal with.

Honorary is an obvious and common example cited here.

Humans typically develop sexual understanding via a long

process of graduate Uinson trial and error from one to the

better description.

Actually it's in the more extreme types of a sexual

stimuli at a age can be sort of like skipping several vital

steps, like the kid to try and to fly a plane, well,

after skipping your pilot in

There is also, recent reports, the time of recording of TikTok kicks.

Where young people upon watching video influences on TikTok,

with Tourette's,

manifested facial ticks themselves with no real

neurological or like, yatric calls for them.

So ultimately young people are watching,

TikTok influencers who had terets and displayed the

symptoms and ended up displaying the symptoms

themselves. You know,

threats and other disorders like that are not known to be

contagious. You shouldn't be able to catch them,

but they seem to be spreading via the medium of digital technology.

However, these issues are either very nebulous and

subjective. For instance,

the age at which sexual content is deemed appropriate varies

considerably from culture to culture or very niche and not

really that shocking. As in people, especially young

younger, mimic and copy those they admire all the time.

It's not just just not usually expressed,

via tourette's symptoms,

but there's nothing in our understanding of the brain says

that can't happen or wouldn't happen.

So in this context, even the supportive examples of digital technology,

damage of people's thinking are rather the big able. But even so,

the general consensus in the media at least is that it's

definitely happening. The actual research, however,

presents a very different picture.

One thing we need to make clear though is alarmism about how

new technology is corrupt in brains and cognition is by no

means modern development. It's actually very old phenomenon.

Consider the following quote. If men learn this,

it will implant forgetfulness in their souls.

They cease to exercise memory because they rely on that,

which is written,

calling things to remembrance no longer from within

themselves, but by means of external marks.

This quote is basically saying that if people embrace this new technology,

people's memories suffer and decline because they won't have

to rely on them anymore.

It may have heard similar warnings and gloomy predictions

about, the internet or smartphones.

However,

the person responsible for this particular quote was man who

lived nearly two thousand five hundred years ago.

And this technology he was so worried about writing,

the actor put in words on paper. These days, writing by

hand, is widely accepted as being good for us.

Helpful learning to learn a vital So clearly soccer's

opinion didn't win out in the end.

Even though he was a very prominent thinker on influence,

so much so we're still talking about what he said twenty five centuries later.

A more recent example from when I was a teenager in the

nineteen nineties was the media hysteria on video games,

from the eight to sixteen bit sole era.

Many a newspaper and columnist insisted that these blocky

pixelated games were turning young people into violent

disrespectful monsters,

a claim that persists in some shape or form to this day in

some some areas. But again,

the fact that video games are more popular than ever,

that half the population my age didn't turn into mindless beasts.

It's been your criterion reveals that these views

despite how confidently they were repeated to audience of

millions were flawed at best, flat out wrong and are clearly,

actively misleading at worst.

The point here is that the impact of technology on brains

and may seem obvious, even to very intelligent people,

but the reality is often far more complex and nuanced,

and this fact is regularly looked.

Much of the pessimism seems to be derived from fear of change.

While fear of the impact of technology is a very old phenomenon,

it would also be fair to say that never in the has

technology been so widespread and accessible.

So this issue is perhaps more prevalent than ever before.

There's also a stark generation gap that will play into the

at present, we're in a unique situation, societally.

It's impossible to deny that,

the most consequential technological development of

the past few decades and possibly of all time was the

invention of the internet.

The world went to digital very quickly,

which led to the profound changes in pretty much every

aspect of every life and how society worked.

But because this happened relatively recently in the

grand scheme, it resulted in a bizarre situation.

With older people, we have a generation of digital immigrants.

Who were born and developed, before the internet.

So they were cognitively mature when it became a part of life.

With younger people, we have digital natives.

Those who were born when internet was around.

I've never known life without it,

so I have developed cognitively while taking while taking

technology into consideration.

The tricky thing is because of we age and how a reproduction works,

we currently have digital immigrants raising digital natives.

Digital immigrants are more likely to be fearful and

suspicious of one technological development because they are

not how the world as they understand it should work.

Digital natives are the opposite issue.

It's just part of life for them.

They see no reason to be suspicious of it.

This matters because while digital immigrants may be more

wary or suspicious of origin developments and the effects on

cognition they may have,

these concerns are going to be amplified considerably if those

suspicions have to incorporate their children's safety and well-being.

Like waste, digital natives, especially teenagers,

perhaps could stand to be more away or objective about the

possibility of digital technology effect the cognition.

But this is going to be much less likely to happen when such things,

such concerns are experienced by the medium of their parents

trying subject or control them.

This will lead to an unhelpful blurring of the parent team

team power dynamic,

where digital immigrant parents have the authority,

but digital native teams have the expertise when it comes to

modern technology, digital technology,

having to obey instructions about something from who know

much less than you do about it is always a difficult sell,

shall we say. So in this way,

digital technology does affect the cognition of more parents

and routines regarding how they think about their relationship

and interactions.

Granted, this is a more indirect effect,

but it's one that explains why the mainstream assumptions and

conclusions about the impact of modern tech ends up so

different from the reality insofar as we understand it.