Thursday, April 12, 2012

Baroness Greenfield, junk neuroscience, and the dangers of video games



Technology has become a major part of the majority of our lives. We spend our spare time in front of the screens to get rid of our stress from a long period of working or to just kill some time, which is quite normal for not just the teenagers but also everyone nowadays. However, according to the former director of the Royal Institution, Baroness Greenfield, video games as well as other technological recreations are deteriorating our brains and damaging the nerve connections in the brain.
Greenfield says that the technology, such as video games, which sometimes strongly affects the sense, could give a temporary or permanent damage to our brain nerve connections, and could addict people to have more screen-based lives. She also says that people would get a habit of sitting in front of a screen for a long time instead of doing activities and the average child would spend approximately 2,000 hours with such technology between his or her tenth and eleventh birthday.
Of course, this report about such negative effects of video games and technology on the brains is probably written to aim at the teenagers rather than other age groups. Yes, Greenfield focuses more on the negative impact of video games than actual technological devices. However, technology is now one of our most important necessities and few people spend time in front of a screen to the point where they could actually “damage their brains”. The majority nowadays do spend their leisure time on their phones, tablets, computers, etc. for their entertainment or relaxation. Spending 2,000 hours in front a screen in a year means that one would spend five and a half hours every day, but it doesn’t necessarily imply that he or she games for that long every single day. Such technology could be addicting and attract our hands anytime, but this is the reality; we are all already living in the screen-based world in which the technology plays a major role.
This report written by Greenfield is quite ambiguous and not persuasive enough in terms of clarity of each point. However, this provides us a good opportunity to just ponder carefully about how much time we spend using our technological devices and to remind ourselves of how to use not only the time but also our technology effectively.

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