Miranda Devine, Susan Greenfield, plastic fantastic brains, and the hideous effects of screen culture

(Above: warning Will Robinson, danger. If you click on the link below, you will not only get to read Miranda Devine, you will also get to see and hear Miranda Devine babbling away on the same subject. And she starts automatically, without even a click! It is ad intrusiveness, sensory overload, profound proof of her theory that screen culture can reduce a human to gibbering idiocy in seconds. Can you endure, will you survive? You have been warned, and if by chance an idiot from Fairfax reads this, they also have been warned. On the first sign of brain damage, I intend to sue. Oh wait, I am brain damaged. Get ready for the papers to land because it's likely this kind of behavior will produce a new GFC. Damn vampire zombie screen culture fetishists).

Profoundly disturbing and distressing news folks.

It seems Al Gore didn't invent the intertubes after all. How so you say? Surely he had something to do with it.

Nope. Because you see startling new evidence reveals that the intertubes were active during the nineteen thirties. Even more surprising, they were around in the depression in the eighteen nineties. And I understand historians are standing by to reveal the astonishing news that the intertubes were active during the great South Seas bubble of the eighteenth century.

The doomsayers are still arguing over the role they played in the great Dutch tulip financial crisis, but I guess we'll just have to stand by for conclusive evidence.

Most likely coming from that dedicated futurist and avant garde technologist Miranda the Devine, who's also a dab hand at economics and the psychology and sociology of human behavior.

Don't believe me? Well lordy, the good news is all here in We're losing our minds over technology.

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, which triggered the global recession, the former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan this week blamed the ensuing global financial crisis on "human nature".

He was echoing comments by the US President, Barack Obama, who blamed recent economic woes on "reckless greed and risk-taking".

This recognition of the impact of neuroscience and psychology on the world was music to the ears of the Oxford University professor Susan Greenfield.

Speaking at a lunch at the Centre for Independent Studies in Crows Nest this week, the eminent British neuroscientist theorised that the global financial crisis may be a portent of worse to come, as recklessness becomes the norm for technology-warped brains.

You see! Screen culture recklessness produced the great depression. And it couldn't have just been the work of silent films surely? Computers, video games and the intertubes just had to be involved. Unless watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had a more anarchic deviant effect than even their most jaundiced viewers realized.

Yep, and I reckon Miranda the Devine and Susan Greenfield are clear examples of the technology warping ways of the modern world. They are soooh weird. Because you see it's such an easy, remarkable, facile and dumb leap to go from reckless greed and risk-taking and human nature to technology-warped brains. Unless of course you've been typing the insight on a computer for release on the intertubes. Then the link is crystal clear.

Could Miranda the Devine be the first example of a plastic distorted brain? Should it be opened up in the name of medical science?

Meanwhile, I'm pleasantly relieved to realize that previous explanations of the causes of the great depression overlooked the crucial role of video games. It explains so much about the reasons why young men plunged the world into a a second financial crisis, the likes of which the world hadn't seen until that first screen culture driven event - so now we have Doom Reloaded, after the first outing Doom the Vendetta was such a remarkable hit.

The bankers, brokers and traders, mostly young and male, whose impulsive decision-making and poor judgments fuelled the collapse of financial markets last year, may very well have possessed a version of a newly evolved human brain, physically changed by prolonged time in front of computer screens.

From a generation "brought up in two dimensions", they are used to playing computer games that deliver thrills and risks without consequences.

Just as those leaping from the window execs in the thirties had their brains warped and evolved into thrill taking risk without consequence recklessness by watching Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock.

Even as I scribble, hard core evidence is being compiled that hard core gamers were responsible for the start of not just the first, but also the second world war, while there's convincing proof that the Vietnam war was begun because of the desire of young male Americans to see war covered in detail on television. What is it with young men and their desire to play war games? Do they just want to create a circumstance where Wilfred Owen can write great poetry?

"If the screen culture creates a world dominated by sensation and process rather than by content, significance and narrative, it may well be that those playing computer games have brains that adjust appropriately."

Indeed it may well be. It may well be that Adolf Hitler could have won world war 11 if only he'd been a better game player (it will come as no surprise to many that not only was he an indifferent artist, he famously failed to get to the tenth level of Blitzkreig without losing half his forces through an ill timed venture into Sovietgrad).

Greenfield is famous for warning that we are at risk of losing identity, attention span, empathy and the essence of what it is to be human, as we spend increasing amounts of time using new technologies - from Twitter and Facebook to Google and games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft - and less time developing an interior life.

Others are of course famous for warning about the dangers of looms and mills, and the failure to spend enough time reading Jane Austen, but these were called Luddites, but let's remember that those Luddites didn't far technology so much as the impact of change on lifestyle, and employment (here):

The guilty may fear, but no vengeance he aims

At the honest man's life or Estate
His wrath is entirely confined to wide frames
And to those that old prices abate

Still, the original Luddites had a healthy fear of the new. Deep down they understood the implications of looms for pricing and computers for the brain. No wonder Aussie shearers revolted against the wide comb introduced by deviant pervert New Zealanders:

The plasticity, or adaptability, of the human brain, which hard-wires new connections between its neurons as it learns, makes it particularly vulnerable to its environment. This ability to learn and adapt has allowed humans to reign supreme on the planet, but it also holds the key to our undoing.

Greenfield suggests prolonged computer use, particularly rapid-fire computer games, which drive the brain synapses into a frenzied state, may make people better at answering IQ tests. "The brain will adapt, survive and thrive."

But it may also lead to an underuse of the area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, the centre of higher executive functions, where judgment, planning, personality, goal-setting and social moderation occur. It is the last part of the brain to develop, in the teenage years, and was the most recent to develop in evolutionary terms.

Better at answering IQ tests? Bummer dude. Goal setting slides? Bummer dude, so that's why the Soviets trotted off to Afghanistan, and dozens of countries thought it such jolly, useful fun, they've followed them.

It seems there's also convincing evidence that Attila the Hun, and Adolf Hitler, both war mongers, were - apart from being relentless war gamers - schizophrenics over loaded with drugs:

Studies show people with underutilised prefrontal cortexes, due to brain damage or obesity, tend to take more risks. Schizophrenics, preoccupied with transitory sensations rather than cognition because of excess dopamine in the brain, also have underactive prefrontal cortexes.

Greenfield has applied for a grant from the University of Chicago to study the brains of computer gamers in order to prove her theory.

Well I hate to be a killjoy but my conclusive study of the role of Dungeons and Dragons in the development of trench warfare tactics in the first world war is about to be unleashed on the world, and will make further research in the area irrelevant.

But first I'd like to see the piano, and perhaps all music instruments banned because of their implications for the operation of the human brain:

To demonstrate the power of thought to transform the architecture of the brain, she cites an experiment involving a piano. One group of adults was given a set of five-finger piano exercises to practise each day for five days. A second group mentally rehearsed the exercises by imagining they were playing the piano. A third group did nothing.

Remarkably, the group that imagined playing the piano showed the same changes - an increase in brain cell connections - in the same part of the brain as those who physically practised on the piano. The group that did nothing showed no change.

So thought can hard-wire the brain in the same way that experience can.

Which is of course why the presence of the piano in our lives is so disturbing. For a start, it helps explain why Percy Grainger liked a good whipping and Tchaikovsky was such a sicko.

As for the electric guitar, this is more than a worrying trend, it's a disaster which explains hippies, Woodstock, the drug culture, the state of Mexico today, the decision to invade Iraq and the rise of screen culture.

This is why, Greenfield says, screen culture is problematic. She points to the "worrying trend" of attentional disorders in children. "Between their 10th and 11th birthday, [British] children will spend 900 hours at school, just under 1300 hours with their family and just under 2000 hours in front of a screen."

Developing friendships on social networking sites means you miss the subtle skills essential for real-life friendship. You may avoid real people and become like the Japanese hikikomori, the 1 million young men who have withdrawn from society to their bedrooms to play computer games by themselves.

What a disaster. Worrying trends and real life friendship ruined (unless you can get special powers by picking up health points and hiring a hooker to guide you around Sin City).

And these young people will by definition lack the subtle skills with which to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, instead preferring to play with themselves rather than play with others on a larger social scale. Personal or social abuse? Such a difficult choice.

"Have we gone through 100,000 years of evolution for this … adults sitting in a room spending their leisure time on 'yuck and wow' activities [instead of] having love affairs, walking in the rain and thinking about things?"

Oh and not just walking in the rain and thinking about things. There's swimming and surfing and skipping stones and dancing and cursing and reading good literature, like Batman Meets the Joker, not to mention driving cars, which were once thought to have had a disastrous impact on human thinking and social structures (who can forget that vivid damning portrait of Toad of Toad Hall and his fetishistic love of toot toot motor cars).

Now of course we know the car only leads to the likes of Tim Blair and the doofus types on Top Gear. Hang on, Miranda the Devine is a petrol head too. It's all starting to fit together, in a cosmic screen culture flash. The Devine's real grip is where once you could grease and oil a car with your own hands, now you have to toddle off to a centre to get it diagnosed by a computer! Using a screen. It's not just our brains that've been warped, car brains have been taken over too. Oh this is deep man, really deep, philosophical and all that jive.

Greenfield acknowledges she is straying from science into philosophy, but sees no distinction between the brain and the mind. The idea of an examined life, rather than an existence awash with sensation, is crucial to the idea of being human. It is the essence of what we call our soul.

Oh strangle me in the shallow water, before I get too deep. But I see you're in the depths of despair now, especially you geeks and nerds with your hyper plastic brains melting down. Never fear. Because you see the solution to what ails you is not less computer time. It's more, playing with specially devised computer programs:

The good news is she is looking for ways to develop computer programs to extend attention spans, enhance identity, creativity and empathy.

Oh yes, the disease is the cure, the disaster is the solution, and if you can't live with screen culture, heck you can't live without it either.

Because you see Greenfield is no luddite, but an adept, a high priestess of screen culture, a delphic oracle of the dark arts:

An eloquent and attractive 59-year-old baroness with a blonde fringe and silver wedge-heeled pumps, Greenfield has been hammered as a Luddite, although she texts and googles along with the best.

She texts and googles, she laughs and she dances, she smiles and she winks and if you're worried, or anxious, she'll flash you an emoticon that'll wash away the tears. Except ... except ... it might not stop you from dying of cancer ...

... she points out anyone in the 1950s who suggested a link between cancer and smoking would have been howled down. And she remains unconvinced that Twitter, with its 140-character demand for brevity, is giving rise to a new literacy.

Well yes, but then anyone who'd suggested a link between computers, the intertubes, human nature and the cause of the great depression would also have been howled down, and great advances in the cause of science would have been lost forever. I'd never realized that Charlie Chaplin was responsible for the financial collapse of that time, but it does go to show the dangerous impact of comedians with a taste for young girls and socialism.

As for the demand for brevity, I'm also developing a profound theory on the phenomenology of the koan, which has been around for hundreds of years, which helps explain not only the failure of Japanese, but also Chinese culture. Let's face it, four lines is not enough to give rise to any kind of literacy, new or old, and there's startling evidence that hackers and computer nerd affection for the koan did indeed give rise to Twitter. Which is why whenever I encounter a twit twittering I like to order them shot on sight. Or at least give them a healthy load of guilt as they play with their post-modernist baubles:

There was a guilty silence during the lunch as Greenfield looked around at the assembled journalists and business people and said, "I'm sure no one in this room has Twitter." The closet twitterati kept their mouths shut, and text messages went unanswered.

Which just goes to show that asceticism and Jansenism and proscription and banning and prohibition will never leave us, and nor will saucy doubts and fears, nor illogical and incoherent thinking.

But thank the lord we have a scapegoat. Screen culture. After all, we'd all be much better off in the army going out fighting and killing and making the world safe for western culture than sitting behind a plastic fantastic screen absorbing dangerous brain waves and illegal thoughts.

I wonder if Mirada the Devine has tried self-flagellation with birch twigs? I believe it's terribly efficacious in bringing freedom from compulsions and temptations ... and the devious influence of screen culture.

Now I'm exhausted. Time for a walk in the rain with the Ronettes:

I want him, and I need him,
And someday someway wooo I'll meet him
He'll be kind of shy, and real good lookin' too
And I'll be certain he's my guy by the things he'll like to do..
Like walking in the rain (like walking in the rain)
And wishing on the stars (and wishing on the stars) up above
And being so in love
When he's near me, I'll kiss him,
And when he leaves me woo I'll miss him
Though sometimes we'll fight, I won't really care
And I'll know it's gonna be alright cause we've got so much we share
Like walking in the rain (like walking in the rain)
And wishing on the stars (and wishing on the stars) up above
And being so in love

(Below: Susan Greenfield in what seems to be a slightly gothic environment, and further below the leader of the Luddites from an 1812 engraving).