Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Is the Brain Good at What It Does?

October 14, 2011

"So if you find yourself stopping every 30 seconds to check your Twitter feed, your brain has no more been rewired than if you find yourself taking a break for ice cream rather than celery. Picking the more rewarding stimulus is something our brains can do perfectly well with the wiring they start out with."

If this discovery proves reliable, it implies that the Internet doesn’t change our brains at all, for good or for ill. It doesn’t damage brain areas, destroy links between parts of our brains, or grow new areas or connections. What the Internet does is stimulate our reward systems over and over with tiny bursts of information (tweets, status updates, e-mails) that act like primary rewards but can be delivered in more varied and less predictable sequences. These are experiences our brains did not evolve to prefer, but like drugs of abuse, they happen to be even better suited than the primary reinforcers to activating the reward system. So if you find yourself stopping every 30 seconds to check your Twitter feed, your brain has no more been rewired than if you find yourself taking a break for ice cream rather than celery. Picking the more rewarding stimulus is something our brains can do perfectly well with the wiring they start out with.

Machine::Wiring

Reading

Christopher Charbris, "Is the Brain Good at What it Does?" New York Times Book Review (October 14, 2011). <Link to NYTimes.com>

A version of this review appeared in print on October 16, 2011, on page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: "Think Again."

10/17/2011