The Great Internet Paradox: how the internet influences our brain A view at the neurological consequences of the Information Age Promoter: Mrs. Ann Deraedt Project Performed by

Jenthe Thienpondt To achieve the degree Bachelor in the

New Media And Communication Technology Howest, University College West Flanders | 2015-2016

i

The Great Internet Paradox: how the internet influences our brain A view at the neurological consequences of the Information Age Promoter: Mrs. Ann Deraedt Project Performed by

Jenthe Thienpondt To achieve the degree Bachelor in the

New Media And Communication Technology Howest, University College West Flanders | 2015-2016 ii

Preface In the summer of 2015 I conducted a small, personal experiment. I have a terrible predisposition for procrastinating and became intrigued by my own nonsensical lack of productivity, sometimes weeks in a row. After eliminating diet, sleep and physical health as a contributing factor I changed my focus on my behavioral patterns. Every time a task of more than minimal complexity involved using a computer I shifted attention to more passive sources of information, where no active involvement was needed. Checking my Facebook feed was one of them, probably the most recognizable and clichéd example of non-productive replacement behavior. But what if I eliminated internet usage for a month? How would my behavior change if the possibility of shifting attention to the internet was removed? It was an utterly revealing experience. It was a long time ago I was forced to actively think about what I was going to do next. In an interactive, always-stimulating environment like the internet, it’s not difficult to make a decision on what to do next because there’s always something new a mouse-click away. To put it bluntly and a bit exaggerated, the duty of the web is to make you consume as much content for as long as possible. And even when you’re not physically using a web browser, there’s always a string of synapses that’s luring a part of your brain to want to consume more content. It was a situation that my brain simply was not used to and it felt confusing. A lot of tasks involving computers automatically requires accessing the internet. I was forced to search for offline replacements. Reading books became my favorite substitution of time that would otherwise be spent online. I’ve always enjoyed reading books but for some reason it was extremely difficult to convince myself to start the actual act of reading. We will see later in this paper that similar experiences are reported among authors of high-profile news-papers. The process of reading a passage from a book or reading you’re a news feed online may look like they got a lot in common, but in fact they are completely different. A book has no hyperlinks, buttons, pop-ups or mail notifications where your brain can turn to if it’s bored of the current chapter you’re reading. After a few days, I felt that some of the restlessness was slowly ebbing away. It was like my brain was accepting the fact that it had no possibility to engage in the fast-paced world of the internet. Reading extended periods of time without breaks in concentration became more easier the longer I restrained from the web. After a while I caught myself with a misleading trivial thought: life without internet isn’t as hard as I would have thought at first. Because of the internet-dependent nature of my studies it was impossible to extend the experiment beyond that one month. But it was enough to trigger my interest in what I just had experienced in those past 30 days. I began studying the way our brain works and how it reacts on the internet, an extraordinary stimuli we never met before in our 200,000 years of existence. Our brain is the most marvelous organ we possess and still poses many unanswered questions in the world of neuroscience. Still, there seems to be quite a bit of scientific research on this topic and while it’s in a developing state, a few key points can be made. The result is this paper in which I will try to conduct my personal findings into a scientific back upped document. It’s interesting for a wide range of people, and certainly not only targeted at major users of the internet. If you ever find yourself struggling with concentrating on a task on the computer, this paper will help you to understand some potential reasons of that behavior. Most people should at least gain a few insights and will be able to understand some behavior that’s potentially related to iii

their internet usage. It was a great eye opener for me, and I hope this will also be the case for at least a few of you.

iv

Abstract The Internet bears many paradoxes. Despite an ever-available connection trough social media with each other, people lacking good social skills are getting even more lonely with increased internet usage (Junghyun et al., 2009). Several journalists and bloggers like Nicholas Carr and Tony Schwartz of the New York Times began reporting loss of concentration and ability to focus on a task for a longer time while increasing internet usage. It seems counterintuitive that a medium which makes information access such a trivial thing could be harmful to our ability to concentrate and memorize. This paradox will be the focus of this paper: how does the internet influence our brain? While the internet is almost solely responsible for the widespread availability of information, we discovered that it can have a detrimental effect on our ability to memorize and concentrate in the short term. The brain is made to adapt and it can adapt quickly, which has both positive and negative consequences. Habit formation is a crucial point here and most problems arise when a user frequently associates computer usage with the being exposes to short bursts of information and social media content. This can expose problems when more cognitive demanding tasks on the computer are required to be done. Neural pathways get strengthened each time a habit is performed and it gets more difficult to get started with the actually important task. The internet also has a profound influence on our reward system, affecting some user’s ability of delaying gratification. People can develop a reward-cycle that is triggered by using a computer. The term ‘reward’ in this context consists of the aforementioned short bursts of information like a new chat message, news article, forum post, tweet,…etc. This can interfere with the ability to concentrate on more cognitive complex tasks like reading, writing long texts and deep learning. The current evolution in the field of neuroplasticity seems to support this view, although even more time and research is needed to get a definitive answer regarding the effects of regular internet usage.

v

Table of contents The Great Internet Paradox: how the internet influences our brain ................................................... ii Preface ................................................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... v Table of contents ................................................................................................................................... vi Figures and tables ................................................................................................................................ viii Symbols .................................................................................................................................................. ix Glossary ................................................................................................................................................... x Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 1 1 The internet today ............................................................................................................................... 2 2 Brain structures .................................................................................................................................... 4 2.1 Cerebrum ...................................................................................................................................... 4 2.2 Limbic System ............................................................................................................................... 5 2.3 Cerebellum .................................................................................................................................... 6 2.4 Brain stem ..................................................................................................................................... 6 3 Information processing ........................................................................................................................ 7 3.1 The neuron .................................................................................................................................... 7 3.2 Formation of neural pathways...................................................................................................... 8 3.3 Memory......................................................................................................................................... 9 4 Neuroplasticity ................................................................................................................................... 10 4.1 The case for neuroplasticity ........................................................................................................ 10 4.2 Neuroplasticity and the brain ..................................................................................................... 10 4.3 Neuroplasticity and behavior ...................................................................................................... 11 4.4 Neuroplasticity and the brain systems ....................................................................................... 11 5 The internet ....................................................................................................................................... 12 5.1 Internet in modern society ......................................................................................................... 12 5.2 The internet: a different medium ............................................................................................... 12 5.3 Effects on behavior ..................................................................................................................... 14 6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 17 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 18 Appendices............................................................................................................................................ 20

vi

vii

Figures and tables Figure 1: The ongoing growth of internet users across the globe .......................................................... 2 Figure 2: an overview of the location of the lobes in the cerebrum ...................................................... 4 Figure 3: Components of a typical neuron.............................................................................................. 7 Figure 4: A detailed view of the synaptic connection of two neurons ................................................... 8 Figure 5: The amount of time the average household spends watching television since 1950 ........... 13 Figure 6: The cue-routine-reward cycle, popularized by Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit ...................................................................................................................................................... 15 Table 1: lobes of the cerebrum and their corresponding functions ....................................................... 4 Table 2: parts included in the 'motivational core' .................................................................................. 5

viii

Symbols   

IAD: Internet Addiction Disorder PFC: Prefrontal cortex OFC: Orbifrontal cortex

ix

Glossary Term Axon

Dendrite

Excitation Globalization

Hemispheres

Homeostasis Inhibition Neuroplasticity

Procrastination

Self-perpetuating

Sagittal section

Supernormal stimulus

Synapse

Definition A long, thread-like structure attached to a nerve cell that sends out signals away from the nerve cell. One of the short parts like threads at the edge of a nerve cell that carry messages to the cell. The process of making something, for example a particle or a cell, more active. A situation in which available goods and services, or social and cultural influences, gradually become similar in all parts of the world. Refers to the left and right parts of the brain, each responsible for controlling opposing sides of the body. The property of remaining stable and constant. The process of blocking the activity of a cell. A term for describing various phenomenon causing the brain to change by forming new neural pathways. The act of delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring. Having a system that prevents change and produces new things that are very similar to the old ones. A cross section obtained by slicing, actually or through imaging techniques, the body or any part of the body. an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved. The point at which electrical signals move from one nerve cell to another.

x

Introduction It’s absolutely critical to have a basic understanding of the brain’s structure and mechanisms. The first chapter gives a summary of a few important elements and their functional purposes. It’s solely based on general accepted science and is used to make the reader known with the anatomy of the brain organ. How the parts actually communicate and work together is the subject of the second chapter. Information processing is how the outside world is translated by our brain. Everything we smell, see, hear, touch and feel gets to the center of our nervous system in a certain way. This is the result of millions of years of evolution that shaped our brains in various ways and it’s mandatory to understand how we evolved in processing information. Although studies on neuroplasticity date back to the 1970s it has only relatively recently gained substantial popularity in the scene of brain research. While for many years the belief of a hard-wired brain remained indisputable, it is now known that the brain is constantly evolving and adapting in various ways (Kolb & Givv, 2003). It’s a fascinating and critical characteristic of the ever evolving brain. It’s also the underlying fundament of the theories that will be explained in this paper. The working of this phenomenon and its current status in neuroscience will be thoroughly explained in the third chapter. The internet is not the first technological evolution that impacted the brain. We adapted in various ways to the changing shape of our environment along with its presented tools. The development of writing systems across the globe, ranging from the first ideographic writings to the formation of the Latin alphabet brought with them a new sort of thinking. The invention of the printing press in 1440 by German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, caused a global revolution in the access of information not dissimilar with the early days of the internet. The fourth chapter will look shortly at a few of these examples which will help to understand the similarities with internet adaptation. The last chapter will look at the specific application of neuroplasticity and internet usage. It will dive deeper into individual differences and specific examples of how the internet can manipulate our behavior. It will also take a look at anecdotal experiences of various people and link them with findings of studies regarding this topic.

1

1 The internet today The internet. A source of unlimited knowledge, world-changing ideas and an infinite stream of information. The invention by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 didn’t take long to become the symbol of modern society. What started as a simple set of protocols to provide static, text-based information across a network has evolved into a dynamic, ever-evolving content delivering source. We don’t need the grey, big brick-like computers of the 90’s to access a stream of lifeless text anymore. Since the hardware capabilities in smartphones resemble more and more the likes of a full blown computer it’s possible to receive content of the world wide web everywhere. There’s no doubt this communication revolution has a tremendous impact on efficiency in nearly all existing fields of contemporary life. Businesses that were early to incorporate the Internet regularly in their work had a faster growth of their share (United Nations, 2008, p. 39) than their more conservative counterparts. The explosion of globalization is a direct result of the advances in information technology and brings with it a huge potential of human interaction across the globe. There’s simply no precedent of a technology that imprinted itself so deep in the layers of society as the internet.

Figure 1: The ongoing growth of internet users across the globe

You would begin to expect that these electronical innovations would be capable to give everyone a superhuman mind, brutally efficient and overflowing of various intellectual resources. Or at least make us a little bit smarter and faster with processing information. The truth however, is more complicated.

2

A study examining human behavior in a virtual environment discovered that people looking for information on a research site “spend as much time finding their bearings as actually viewing what they find” and used “a form of skimming activity” (British Library & Jisc, 2008). The same researchers found a preference for quick, easily digestible pieces of information instead of their larger counterparts among the participants of the study. Science has improved considerably in understanding the working mechanism of the brain but there’s still a lot of dissidence and uncertainty in major fields of this organ. Lots of studies regarding for example the topic of neuroplasticity have flaws and outright opposing outcomes. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to produce a conclusion that fits for everybody, everywhere. It’s tough to contribute significantly on the research of brain functioning in an internet environment on a personal level. It’s however worthwhile to compile the overwhelming sources of existing brain studies into practical key points. This paper will look at the effects of regular internet usage on the brain, how it reacts, adapts and how this ultimately affects the behavior of the user. This will make the reader able to more deeply understand how the internet could potentially influence his brain. It’s important to note it will not focus on extreme cases, like persons with Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) but on moderate, nonproblematic usage.

3

2 Brain structures The brain is without a doubt the most important organ in the body. It has large control over other organs by acting as the center of the nervous system. The vast majority of species is controlled by a brain. The components of the brain can be divided into categories in various ways. This chapter describes the brain structures from the outside to the inside based on a medial sagittal view of the brain.

2.1 Cerebrum The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain and is responsible for all controlled movements. It’s divided in two cerebral hemispheres, the left and right, both controlling opposing sides of the body. The right hemisphere is responsible for the left side of the body and vice versa. The surface of the cerebrum consist of the famous grey matter, called the cerebral cortex, a network of enormous length that covers the inner brain. Its characteristic wrinkled structure is a way to increase the available space for storing neurons. This cortex is divided into four lobes, each associated with a distinctive function as shown in the table below. Name of lobe Frontal lobe Parietal lobe Occipital lobe Temporal lobe

Related aspects Related with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving. Related with movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli Related with visual processing. Related with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech. Table 1: lobes of the cerebrum and their corresponding functions

The frontal lobe deserves extra attention. The component of the cerebral cortex located on the front of the brain is called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This structure is heavily associated with the personality of a person. Two regions inside this prefrontal cortex are especially important for us. The medial PFC, which is related to individual characteristics of a person and self-identity and the dorsolateral PFC, responsible for cognitive capabilities, recalling memories of experiences and analyzing them. Parietal lobe

Frontal lobe

Occipital lobe

Temporal lobe Figure 2: an overview of the location of the lobes in the cerebrum

4

The cerebral cortex and its underlying structures will play an important role in the following chapters. It’s important to remember the voluntary nature of the actions associated with this part of the brain.

2.2 Limbic System A much older system of the brain than the cerebrum is the limbic system. It consists of the inwardly located parts of the aforementioned frontal, temporal and parietal lobe along with a few deeper lying components. It will play a vital role in the upcoming chapters. The underlying structures of this system are related to feelings, motivation, desire, emotions and learning. It’s the reason why you can’t resist taking that chocolate lying on the table, although you know very well that it will not help with your current diet goals. While no part of the brain works in complete isolation there are a few key elements in the limbic system connected with certain behavior. Author Marc Lewis of the book The Biology of Desire (2015) calls this the ‘motivational core’, as it is a great factor in our decision to take action. They are listed in the table below. Note that technically the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex are not located into the limbic system, but for a better understanding it is also included in this table. Name of structure Ventral striatum Dorsal striatum Amygdala Hippocampus Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)

Related aspects Related with impulsive actions, feelings of attraction, desire, anticipation and cravings. Related with compulsive actions and stimulus-response learning. Related with emotional associations, repeated emotional responses on subsequent occasions. Related with memory and spatial awareness Related to generating expectancies and helps initiate an appropriate response. Table 2: parts included in the 'motivational core

A key component later in this paper will be the striatum. This structure is evolved to make us take action, which leads to a certain goal. A ‘goal’ could be almost anything: food, a kiss and information are some examples. It’s connected to other structures located in the cerebrum to make us physically perform the action. As Marc Lewis points out in his book, the striatum is fueled by a very strong emotion: desire. This mix of emotional (the trigger that leads to action) and physical (performance of the action) elements makes the striatum an important part of the motivational center.

Figure 3: Limbic system and associated structures

5

The striatum produces emotional states like attraction and commitment to make you actively seek the reward. It will subconsciously compare the amount of effort that the action took with the final pleasure derived from the reward. You’re chance of repeating the action and how frequently will be determined by this outcome.

2.3 Cerebellum The cerebellum is related to coordination and sensory awareness of movement. Like the cerebrum it also has two hemispheres. Given its physiological function it will not play an important function in this paper.

2.4 Brain stem Probably being the part of the brain that shares the most resemblances across animals is the brain stem. This structure is responsible for vital functions. It does this by controlling heartrate, blood pressure and breathing.

6

3 Information processing If the Internet changes the way we think, we would first need to know how actual thoughts are created and maintained by the brain. The brain has an efficient and stupendous way of doing this and this chapter will explain how.

3.1 The neuron Earlier, doctors and scientist believed that the brain consisted of one long chain of nerve fibers. With the advances in neuroscience they established a much more detailed and correct view. Instead of a chain of nerve fibers, the brain exists of many cells, called neurons. The amount of neurons is estimated up to an average of 100 billion. A neuron is an integral component that makes up the nervous system. The body consists of many cells but the neuron is a bit different as it’s specialized in transferring information across other neurons.

Figure 4: Components of a typical neuron

A neuron can be divided in three main parts: the cell body or soma, axons and dendrites. These last two root-like parts are located at the ends of the neuron and have the ability to send and receive electrical signals. When the neuron is activated as cause of for example a thought or action, a signal originating from the soma travels to the ends of the axon. This causes the release of chemicals, known as neurotransmitters such as oxytocin (sometimes referred to as “love hormone”, released when people cuddle or socially connect) , melatonin (makes you sleepy at nightfall) and endorphins (preventing the transmission of pain signals, believed to cause the “runner’s high). Another neuron receives this signal through a synapse. Note that this synapse does not physically connect the neurons but should be thought of as a tiny gap between the axon (sending end of the neuron) and

7

the dendrite (receiving end of the other neuron).

Figure 5: A detailed view of the synaptic connection of two neurons

This practice of receiving and sending neurotransmitters causes the two neurons to interact with each other in different ways. By creating electrical pathways of connected neurons thinking patterns are established. A brain cell can have as many as 10,000 connections with other neurons. Thoughts and memories are formed through this process.

3.2 Formation of neural pathways A neural pathway will be strengthened if this connection between neurons is frequently used. On the other side, when the pathway is not actively maintained the formed pattern will be weakened. This hypothesis can be described by Siegried Löwel famous quote “Neurons that fire together, wire together” and is known as the Hebbian theory. Recent studies (Gallistel & Matzel, 2012, p. 171) have confirmed this theory as “widely accepted by neuroscientists”. Each time we experience anything from the outside world, molecules pass from the sending neuron to the receiving neuron. When the amount of molecules that reaches the receiving neuron is high enough, the electrical charge of that neuron changes. The result is a an excitation or inhibition which is respectively an increase or decrease in the firing rate of that neuron. This firing rate affects the other brain cells that are connected to the receiving neuron and a neural pathway is born. Habits are a good way to illustrate this concept. Most people have a seemingly hard-wired routine of brushing their teeth before sleeping. Brushing teeth is not an elementary evolutionary practice like eating or sleeping so it’s an entirely intentional habit we formed ourselves. The brain’s pathway associated with the act of brushing teeth is fired each time you’re ready to go to bed. It’s an action that’s performed almost automatically that does not need active thinking because the path of connected neurons is maintained vigorously (on a daily basis). If you brushed your teeth every evening before going to bed since childhood, you’ll probably will maintain this habit for the remainder of your live. This idea is also the basis of learning. When you’re learning a foreign language you’re in fact trying to form or strengthen a connection between neurons that fires together when you’re recalling the translation of a word. When you’re repeatedly recalling the translation of a word the neural pathway gets more efficient and the corresponding neurons will fire faster. The result is that the recalling will happen easier and eventually mean you’ll have no trouble remembering the word. 8

3.3 Memory It’s generally accepted that the memory architecture of the brain can be divided in two types, being the short-term memory and the long-term memory (de Jong, 2009). The first time you receive some new information (like a foreign word or reading a new book but also direct impressions like someone coming through a door), it’s stored into what’s called the short-term memory. The vast majority of them disappear in just a few seconds. Fortunately, otherwise the brain would be occupied with trivial information. But a many things, consciously and unconsciously get stored into the long-term memory. It can hold on data for a few hours or keep it accessible for the rest of our lives. While it’s certainly useful for storing factual information, it also is responsible for conceptual understanding. The long term memory is not a simple database of knowledge but also connects all the pieces of content it holds, tries to make associations and establishes a deeper form of thinking. A special kind of short-term memory is the so called working memory. It contains everything you’re currently thinking about. Australian psychologist John Sweller goes as far as saying it “can be equated with consciousness” (Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011, p. 42). Conversely, if we need to access the information that’s stored into the long-term memory, we have to bring it into the working memory. The efficiency of this process depends on the strength of the neural pathway described in the previous section. The process of transferring short-term memory into long-term is also limited by the amount of information that we can store into the working memory. It’s an interesting yet somewhat unclear topic. How can you measure working memory capacity? A popular method to quantify this is by making people memorize a string of words and immediately repeat them. The number of words that can be recalled is than regarded as a representation of the working memory’s ability to store information. This study approach became famous by the widespread known paper of George A. Miller ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two’, which proposes that the number of objects that can be hold into the working memory lies between five and nine. More recent research believes that the actual number is somewhere between three and five (Cowan, 2010). It’s clear that our working memory has a limited capacity of storing information, and it’s rather on the small side. Erik Fransén (2013), Professor in Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden states that an Internet session can easily cause an information overload. ‘In fact, when you try to process sensory information like speech or video, you are going to need partly the same system of working memory, so you are reducing your own working memory capacity.’ Processing information from the working memory is most efficient when it has a steady stream of data without much external interruption. As we will see in later chapters, the Internet is not such a place. Consider reader an online news article. Although It may seem you’re only concentrated on the words of the text, there’s more going on. Your brain is constantly pondering about whether to click that blue underlined link or not, to begin typing in the search bar or watch that inline video. It’s a fraction of seconds, and while you’re not consciously noticing it, it’s something that potentially keeps the brain distracted from deep understanding. Fransén concluded boldly that ‘when we max out our active states with technology equipment, just because we can, we remove from the brain part of the processing, and it can’t work’.

9

4 Neuroplasticity Neuroplasticity is simply the ability of the brain to change. Long time it was thought that the brain was more or less defined when we have reached adulthood. Slight chances could occur in some extreme occasions but for the greater part, your brain would not undergo structural changes anymore. It is now believed that the brain is a constantly evolving and adapting organ and is changing through all stages in life. Recent research regarding neuroplasticity ranges from the study of pianists (Vaquero et al., 2016) to blind mice (Kaneoka & Stryker, 2014) and traumatic brain injury (Grant, Su & Veeragu, 2016). It’s also the underlying concept of how the Internet causes the brain to adapt to its many stimuli. In this chapter we will first establish a better understanding of the term ‘neuroplasticity’ and then continue by involving the Internet in this concept.

4.1 The case for neuroplasticity When you plant an apple tree seed in your garden you know how it will grow. The seed sprouts into a seedling, leaves began to grow and eventually a mature tree rises up. This predictable process will repeat itself for all other seeds you plant. Brains don’t work that way, the development of the neural pathways doesn’t follow a predetermined road. Otherwise everyone would have the same personality, thoughts and opinions, luckily this isn’t the case. Mammals are a unique species when it comes to adapting to their environment. Because of our learning capabilities we can harmonize our behavior to the outside world. This is what sets us apart from other species. If we convince our self in trying a new type of food and the outcome is a one way ticket to the toilet, we will not eat it again. Our brain tells us we don’t like that certain food and has now developed a distaste for it. It grows and learns.

4.2 Neuroplasticity and the brain Not only our tastes for food but also our look at sports, science, relationships, friends, family and our whole worldview are formed through our experiences in life. We possess a wide network of programmable neurons, that are always changing and adapting. These changes mainly take place in two different places. The cerebral cortex being the first one, the ‘grey matter’ below of the cerebrum. As mentioned in chapter one, this part is mainly responsible for controlled actions like reasoning, planning and controlling audiovisual stimuli. The other part is the limbic system, which is involved in emotional responses and memory. About one fifth of the total number of brain cells are found in those two structures. They connect to each other by a synaptic gateway mentioned in chapter two. The interesting thing here is that they connect in a specific way through experiences, which on their turn influence the way we look at other experiences. This is known as the self-perpetuating brain, it acts and build on previously confrontations. You can think of it as a whiteboard. When we’re born the whiteboard is clean and unwritten. When we gather experiences and are confronted with several problems and conflicts in life, the whiteboard gets filled with ideas and opinions about these events. Now, when we are challenged again with these events, we now have something internally which we can refer to, we will look at it in a different manner than the first time. Also our look at not directly related experiences will change, it shapes our whole worldview. People come to the world with roughly the same blank whiteboard, but at the end of their life it’s a unique piece of writings, presenting their inner world.

10

4.3 Neuroplasticity and behavior As mentioned previously, it is a good thing that our brain is able change rapidly. It would be no good if our children didn’t learn from the pain caused by touching a burning stove. However, the opposite of a constantly on the fly rewiring of neurons would cause an unstable mind. Our concepts and thinking patterns would continuously be changed and result in agonized people. Therefore we have habits. As previously mentioned habits arise from strengthened neural pathways. The more a certain behavior is repeated, the stronger the connections between the neurons responsible for that behavior become. We look at habits as either good, like running twice a week, or bad, for example drinking a coke every day. The truth is, the brain doesn’t care. It’s a just another neural pathway and it prefers to keep it that way. This concept is known a homeostasis. Therefore, habits can be very hard to alter. This concept of habit formation is extremely important to understand because we will later see that the internet has the potential of creating certain neural pathways that can interfere with other behavior. Many people probably developed habits with the use of internet without knowing they did because they weren’t consciously repeating certain behavior. Marc Lewis, author of The Biology of Desire (2015, p. 43), says this about habit formation: ‘In fact, the newer, more attractive, and more engaging something is, the more likely the brain is to change, and the more likely those changes are to condense into habits—an outcome of more frequent repetitions.’ We’ll discover that the internet is a very stimulating place according to habit formation because of the constant stream of novelty it offers.

4.4 Neuroplasticity and the brain systems The formation of habits is also an interplay between different regions of the brain. They include parts of the cerebral cortex, like the prefrontal cortex, perceptual cortex and other structures responsible for things like hearing, seeing, planning and reasoning (see chapter one for more information), you can call it the rational part of the brain. Another part is the limbic system, more specifically the hippocampus and the amygdala, which is responsible for our feelings and motives among other things (Lewis, 2015). Because of the distribution of the neural pathways in the brain, habits are neither strictly voluntary nor completely unconsciously. It’s the whole brain that changes itself and created habits that interfere with other habits. This concept of a ‘brain that changes itself’ gained mainstream popularity by Norman Doidge, writer of the aptly named book ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’ (2007, p. 26). He says that ‘the brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.’ Now knowing the changing capabilities of the brain, we will see that new technology has a tremendous impact on the way our brain adapts. In the next chapter we will overview a few big technologies that rewired our brain in such a way it affects our daily lives.

11

5 The internet 5.1 Internet in modern society ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ is the title of a cover-article written by Nicholas Carr that appeared in American magazine The Atlantic in 2008. In this essay Carr takes a critical stand on the cognitive effects of internet usage. He writes: I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.’ It’s one of the earlier moments of media attention that raises the possibility of negative side-effects on cognition by time spent online. Carr is not an exception. In following years more people took a similar stand, resulting in columns describing roughly the same remarks of those in Carrs article. Tony Schwartz wrote an article last year in the New York Times titled ‘Addicted to Distraction’, describing how his compulsive use of the internet caused a relentless urge for novelty, preferably short and easy-to-read, ultimately leading to a decline of his attention span. Another recent column also appeared in Fortune magazine (Sehgal, 2016). A more nuanced article was written by Tom Stafford on the website of British national television channel BBC. He states that everything changes the brain , even ‘making a cup of tea’. As described in the chapter of neuroplasticity, this is true. The brain is constantly making new neural connections based on your actions, including making a cup of tea. However, non-stimulating actions like this probably won’t affect other behavior, nor interfere with daily activities. Stafford also correctly refers to the more profound changed brain structures of taxi drivers and keyboard players. Taxi drivers, as a result of their need of a very accurate representation of a city map, have larger developed areas in the hippocampus and the keyboard players do have a more complex motor cortex. Accepting this point isn’t exactly the interesting thing. The fact that the brain changes, or ‘rewires’ using the internet is normal and doesn’t imply a necessarily negative point. What is interesting, however, is what the consequences of those changes are.

5.2 The internet: a different medium The internet is very different than anything that came out of the recent technology advancements. We often think of a webpage containing some text and images, but it’s so much more. Hyperlinks, pop-ups, animated gifs, videos, sounds, banners, notifications, all demanding the attention of our limited working memory. Those are also called ‘supernormal stimuli’, a term used to describe attractions outside our natural environment, like junk food, porn and the internet. The term became famous by Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Dutch biologist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology. He was fascinated by the behavioral interaction of animals within their environment. His research found that animals had a preference for an artificial but stronger stimulus over their natural ones. He tested his beliefs with some interesting experiments. One of these experiments involved replacing the eggs of a bird with constructed plastered ones. These artificial eggs, a stimuli for birds, had brighter colors, where larger and had a perfectly smooth surface. Not to Tinbergens surprise, the birds where more attracted to these fake, plastic eggs. Those imitation eggs where an example of what he called a supernormal stimulus, an object with more profound and appealing characteristics than his natural counterparts.

12

While Tinbergen didn’t dive deeper in the role of those supernormal stimuli on the internet, others did. Harvard professor Deirdre Barrett (2010) researched the stimuli we encounter every day in life, like the internet and television and how they take a more obtrusive stance in our daily activities. He discovered that we are extremely attracted to non-natural stimuli, to the point of being never satisfied. Barrett points to an interesting statistic regarding the effect of the internet on television viewing in America. While there was an expected decrease in television viewing, the opposite was true. Time spent before a television screen just kept rising at a similar rate as the previous years. In the figure below we see an almost uninterrupted linear increase since 1950 (Lule, 2012).

Figure 6: The amount of time the average household spends watching television since 1950

However Barret couples this statistic with another notable one: 31 percent of Internet use in America occurs in front of a television set. The internet doesn’t keep us away from television, it just accompanies it. It seems we are incredibly attracted to the novelty of the internet and television, but how does it affect our behavior? As noted before, the brain is the result of billions of years of evolution, how are these previously established habits affected by these new technologies? Adrian Ward (2015), a researcher at the university of Colorado, puts it this way: “when old cognitive tendencies and new technologies meet—when the world of flesh and blood collides with the world of bits and bytes—the Internet may act as a ‘supernormal stimulus,’ hijacking preexisting cognitive tendencies and creating novel outcomes.” He refers to our natural attraction towards other humans. We are social beings and have evolved this way for many years. Social behavior was defined ‘by small groups of daily interaction partners (Dunbar, 1993).’ Our reward system is triggered every time we post a blog or tweet, in the same way it is triggered when we would share that information physically (Tamir & Mitchell, 2012). The tricky part here is that the potential negative feelings of physical interaction, like social anxiety, are basically eliminated in the digital world. This explains the immense success of social networks on the internet. People more inclined towards an introverted nature have the ability to interact with other people in a way that would be much more difficult in real life regarding their more withdrawn nature. More extraverted people have a 13

way to express themselves continuously and everywhere even when there’s no one to physically interact with. This can however affect the cognitive capabilities of these users, introverted and extraverted, because of the widespread access to those stimuli. Take for example the almost iconic Facebook notification, a number with a red background in a website that’s otherwise based on a completely blue color scheme. People quickly learn that such a notification means something new, a new like for your comment, a new event you’re invited to, a new post in a group or something else that we believe will be interesting. The brain is also quickly to learn this. Every time you react by clicking on the notification when it appears, a neural pathway gets strengthened. The reward center of the brain kicks in. The brain loves novelty, especially in such a quick and non-cognitive demanding way. An important factor in this process is the infamous neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s often called the ‘pleasure’ hormone, however this isn’t completely accurate. A better description would be ‘pleasure seeking’ hormone. It’s this substance that drives our reward seeking behavior. It’s triggered by a certain cue, which causes the release of dopamine in the brain. This process results in us actively seeking the reward, like surfing to the Facebook website. It’s the reason why everyone checks his phone multiple times a day, because our brain knows that there could be a potential reward, like a new message. You may not be consciously aware of this but it’s not only the cerebral cortex that decides to check your phone or Facebook, it’s mostly the more primitive reward seeking part of the brain. A similar analogy could be made with compulsive mail checking and reading endless news feeds. The brain likes the short bursts of information. The brain even gets good at it. Studies have shown that regular internet usage can keep the brain younger in certain people. The prefrontal cortex is constantly occupied with processing the stream of information and determining whether to act on all those stimuli or not which makes it a more efficient structure.

5.3 Effects on behavior We saw that the brain likes the compact information of the internet and that it even can help with developing certain areas in the brain. But there are also potential downsides. While our brain is getting good at consuming those short bursts of information the ability to read larger pieces of text is sometimes compromised. There could be a few reasons for this. The most important being concentration. When you have the opportunity to read a book, it’s almost always accompanied with the possibility to go online. Reading is a cognitive demanding task, with no immediately obvious reward for the brain. When you finished a book and it was preferably a good one, you learned something, are enriched by its content or had a quietening effect, we can say we’ve been productive.

About the writing of this paper It may seem like another paradox: how did I manage to write a paper, for which a must frequently go to the internet without being distracted every other moment? It did initially took some effort to really get started. As I explain on the next page, it all had to do with reversing a habit. I associated a computer with internet surfing, not with writing a paper. My nointernet experiment made clear that I had to consciously change the habit. The ‘consciously’ of the previous sentence is really important. I started by searching relevant information in such a way that I was very aware of my actions. I did not let myself be distracted by the various hyperlinks or urges to check the various social media channels. Eventually I started to write some sentences with the information I gathered. It felt good to be productive and my brain learned this too. The reward my brain was after changed. Instead of the short bursts of information I usually craved I now wanted that feeling of accomplishment. I began associating my laptop with writing and searching relevant information. In fact, you can broaden this knowledge to change various habits in life. The cue-routinereward cycle doesn’t solely apply to internet usage!

14

This is called delayed gratification, resisting smaller rewards to receive a larger one later. It’s believed to be one of the characteristics of happiness. The internet is a tremendous pool of immediate rewards and because of its presence everywhere it’s always competing for attention. This makes it harder to concentrate on longer texts, a skill often needed in an educational environment. Here comes the striatum into play. As described in chapter one, the this component of the brain is evolved to make us take action and is influenced by the amount of effort it took to get the reward. As mentioned before, the internet houses many rewards. It’s however important for the striatum that the action that’s needed for this reward is of a very trivial nature: a mouse-click. The striatum learns fast: it knows the short-bursts of information are just a click away. It will actively send signals to other parts of the brain to make us take action, especially if the user is already on a device capable to deliver internet content. This can make it difficult to concentrate on or even start an important task that has to be done on a computer. A good example of this would be, ironically, writing a paper. Nowadays this is almost exclusively done with a computer connected to the internet. As many students and authors will know, writing can be an intimidating and very hard task, requiring a lot of cognitive capacity and a constant concentration span. The internet certainly made some aspects of this task easier, informationlookup, source-control, searching for interesting figures and tables and lots of other things are more readily available than ever. But besides information, distraction is also lies around the corner. Our short term gratification system is constantly trying to lure us away from the tedious task of writing. The brain likes to known what other people are doing or what other interesting things could potentially be happening in the world and with the internet it has a mechanism that never fails and always delivers. Some people will always give in to this urge, some not. This is where the information of chapter 4.3 about habit formation is important. If you’re not able to concentrate on more demanding tasks on the computer like writing a long text and instead are mindlessly surfing the internet, you’ve created a habit that reinforces this behavior.

Figure 7: The cue-routine-reward cycle, popularized by Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit

15

You can conceptualize this as a circle pattern as shown in figure 5. MIT researchers found a simple neural loop that’s responsible for our actions: you’re triggered by a cue, perform the habit and ultimately are rewarded. This cue-routine-reward cycle became famous by Pulitzer prize-winning author Charles Duhigg in his first book The Power of Habit (2011). In our previous example of not being able to concentrate on the task the cue would be simple: sitting in front of your computer. For many younger people this is almost immediately followed with surfing on the internet purely for entertainment purposes and surely not in a cognitive demanding way. This surfing is the routine, the habit itself. The reward is obvious: a constant stream of novelty and short bursts of information. A common cue of going to Facebook or other non-productive information resources is mostly opening the browser or even starting the computer. The more you repeat this pattern, the more you will be inclined to actually start it, it’s a typical example of a vicious circle. But the opposite is also true: people that let them distract on a frequent basis by the internet have developed also a habit, one we would call good. They associate their computer as an instrument suited for work and play, without blending these. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important part in this behavior. This cortex is responsible for planning and controlling impulses, very different from the striatum. Habits can also be formed based on actions originating from the PFC and when you’re not distracted when working on the computer it’s a habit formed by this structure.

16

6 Conclusion While the internet is almost solely responsible for the widespread availability of information we discovered that it can have a detrimental effect on our ability to memorize and concentrate in the short term. The brain is made to adapt and it can adapt quickly, which can be seen as both positive and negative. Habit formation is a crucial point here and most problems arise when a user frequently associates computer usage with short burst of information and social media usage. This can expose problems when more cognitive demanding tasks on the computer are required to be done. Neural pathways get strengthened each time a habit is performed and it gets more difficult to get started with the actually important task. The current evolution in the field of neuroplasticity seems to support this view, although even more time and research is needed to get a definitive answer regarding the effects of regular internet usage. When you’re disconnected from the internet for even a short period of time your neural pathways that are responsible for this behavior will be disused, and as a consequence weakened. Most people will automatically replace this time spent online with another activity, like reading. If you’re not giving in to the urge to go online, your brain will quickly learn that the urge for novelty is followed by, in this example, reading a book. Repeat this process for long enough (the most general accepted amount of time to really establish a habit is around 21 days) and your cravings for rapid internet information should decline. Stuart McMillen, an intelligent cartoonist who is most famous for his comic about supernormal stimuli, is right when he says the key point is awareness. There’s no need to completely remove any internet connected devices, even if you feel they are compromising your capabilities to concentrate. Just knowing that we are naturally attracted towards social media posts and news messages can be a major breakthrough in changing your behavior. It’s never a bad idea to insert a temporary nointernet period from time to time as it will be helping you in understanding your cravings towards information from the internet. Short term gratification is seldomly really rewarding and awareness about you internet usage can be a major help in not caving in to those impulses from the internet.

17

Bibliography Junghyun, K., LaRose, R., & Peng, W. (2009). Loneliness as the Cause and the Effect of Problematic Internet Use: The Relationship between Internet Use and Psychological Well-Being. CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR, 12(4), 451-455. doi:10.1089/cpb.2008.0327 Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York City, United States: W. W. Norton & Company. United Nations. (2008). Measuring the impact of ICT use in business: the case of manufacturing in Thailand. Paper presented at United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, New York, United States. Retrieved from http://unctad.org/en/docs/sdteecb20073_en.pdf British Library, & Jisc. (2008). information behaviour of the researcher of the future. Retrieved from http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140614113419/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf Internet Live Stats. (n.d.). Internet users in the world [Dataset]. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ Kinser, P. A. (n.d.). Brain Structures and their Functions. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/brains/structures Carter, R. (2009). The Human Brain Book. London, United Kingdom: DK Publishing. Kolb, B., & Gibb, R. (2003). Brain Plasticity and Behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(1), 1-5. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01210 Andrews, S., Ellis, D. A., Shaw, H., & Piwek, L. (2015). Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use. PLOS One, 1, 1-8. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0139004 Gallistel, C. R., & Matzel, L. D. (2012). The Neuroscience of Learning: Beyond the Hebbian Synapse. Psychology, 64, 171. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143807 de Jong, T. (2009). Cognitive load theory, educational research, and instructional design: some food for thought. Instructional Science, 38(2), 105. doi:10.1007/s11251-009-9110-0 Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive Load Theory. New York City, United States: Springer Science & Business Media. Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. Cowan, N. (2010). The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 51-57. doi:10.1177/0963721409359277 Fransén, E. (2013, September 20). Online time can hobble brain’s important work. Retrieved from http://www.kth.se/en/aktuellt/nyheter/online-time-can-hobble-brain-s-important-work1.415391 Vaquero, L., Hartmann, K., Ripollés, P., Rojo, N., Sierpowska, J., François, C., … Altenmüller, E. (2016). Structural neuroplasticity in expert pianists depends on the age of musical training onset. NeuroImage, 126(1), 106-119. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.11.008

18

Kaneko, M., & Stryker, M. P. (2014). Sensory experience during locomotion promotes recovery of function in adult visual cortex. Retrieved from http://elife-publishingcdn.s3.amazonaws.com/02798/elife-02798-v1.pdf Grant, G., Su, S., & Veeravagu, A. (2016). Neuroplasticity after Traumatic Brain Injury. In D. Laskowitz, & G. Grant (Eds.), Translational Research in Traumatic Brain Injury (pp. 80-97). Boca Raton, Florida, United States: CRC Press/Taylor and Francis Group. Lewis, M. (2015). The Biology of Desire. New York City, United States: PublicAffairs. Oakley, B., & Sejnowski, T. (n.d.). Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects [Online course]. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/learn/learninghow-to-learn/ Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. New York City, United States: Viking Press. Carr, N. G. (2008). Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 107(2), 89-94. doi:10.1111/j.17447984.2008.00172.x Stafford, T. (2012, April 22). Does the internet rewire your brain? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120424-does-the-internet-rewire-brains Sehgal, K. (2016, February 3). The Internet Makes Us Stupid and Here's Why. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2016/02/03/nicholas-carr-internet/ Schwartz, T. (2015, November 28). Addicted to Distraction. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/sunday/addicted-to-distraction.html Tinbergen, N. (1965) Social Behaviour in Animals: with Special Reference to Vertebrates. Methuen & Co, Ltd., London. Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. New York City, United States: W. W. Norton & Company. Lule, J. (2012). Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication. Washington, DC, United States: Saylor Academy. Ward, A. F. (2013). Supernormal: How the Internet Is Changing Our Memories and Our Minds. Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory, 24(4), 341-348. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2013.850148 Dunbar, R.I.M. (1993). Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size, and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(4), 681–735. Tamir, D. I., & Mitchell, J. P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, 109, 8038–8043. Duhigg, C. (2011). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York City, United States: Random House. McMillen, S. (2011, November). Supernormal Stimuli [Illustration]. Retrieved from http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/supernormal-stimuli/

19

Appendices

20