Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains
Susan A. Greenfield
Random House (2015)

A brilliant examination of “what is surely the most far reaching and exciting challenge of our time.”

If the mind is what the brain does, then the ever-accelerating increase of data to be processed creates new challenges for our cognition skills and their support resources. In this context, I am again reminded of an observation by Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

I hope that Susan Greenfield is right: “The human mind will adapt to whatever environment in which it is placed. The cyberworld of the twenty-first century is offering a new type of environment. Therefore, the brain could be changing in parallel, in corresponding new ways. To the extent to which we can begin to understand and anticipate these changes, positive or negative, we will be better able to navigate this new world. So let’s probe further into how Mind Change, just like climate change, is not only global global but also unprecedented [, controversial, and multifaceted .”

These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Greenfield’s coverage:

o Digital services as causes of distraction (Pages 28-30)
o Videogames and recklessness (42-43)
o Consciousness (72-75)
o Attention (107-110)
o Cyberbullying (144-147)
o Having fun (151-152 & 225-226)
o Identity (163-165)
o ADHD (176-181)
o Increase of violent aggression (184-189)
o Digital services as learning tools (226-233)
o Enhanced perception of reality (253-256)
o Benefits of gaming (257-258)
o Living in the moment (258-259 & 267-268)

In the final chapter, Greenfield focuses on the importance of making connections, an initiative for which the Internet and then the Web offer almost unlimited opportunities. Connections between and among electronic devices can now be made almost anywhere and at any time. Given the abundance of information already available, and given the rapidly increasing critical mass of data, predicting the future now seems easier to do than it was at any prior timer that I can recall. Detailed scenarios proliferate and Greenfield discusses several. All manner of connections are suggested. In essence, she poses a critically important question: Are the technologies examined in her book part of the problem, part of the solution to the problem, or both? She recalls an observation by H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” The answer to her question is for each of us to answer, determined by the nature and extent of our emotional as well as intellectual connections with various technologies. Mind Change “depends on what each of us wants and where we want to go as individuals.”

Susan Greenfield suggests that the theme of connectivity might provide an appropriate ending point for her book. “Our experiences over time give each and every one of us meaningful episodes that in turn contribute to a linear narrative, a personal story whose very unfolding echoes the thought process itself. But as we become increasingly hyperconnected in cyberspace, might not our global environment begin to reflect and mirror the networking in our individual physical brain? Just as neuronal connectivity allows for the generation and evolving expression of a unique human mind, the hyperconnectivity of cyberspace could become a powerful agent for changing that mind, both for good ands for ill. Working out what this connectivity may mean, and what we decide to do about it, is surely the most far reaching and exciting challenge of our time.” How we respond to that challenge may well determine the nature and extent of the human condition for generations to come.