Tech
Your Smartphone May Change How Your Brain Interacts with Your Fingers
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Dec 24, 2014 10:05 AM EST
Do you have a smartphone? Then you may be changing the way that your brain and your thumbs interact. Scientists have discovered that spending time interacting with your smartphone can actually cause greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched.
"I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones," said Arko Ghosh, one of the researchers, in a news release. "I was also struck by how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs."
In order to better understand how smartphones might be affecting the way's people's brains interact, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG). They recorded brain responses to mechanical touch on the thumb, index and middle fingertips of touchscreen phone users and then compared their responses to people who used old mobile phones.
"I think first we must appreciate how common personal digital devices are and how densely people use them," said Ghosh. "What this means for us neuroscientists is that the digital history we carry in our pockets has an enormous amount of information on how we use our fingertips (and more)."
So what did they find? It turns out that the electrical activity in the brains of smartphone users was enhanced when all three fingertips were touched. Not only that, but the thumb tip especially was sensitive to day-to-day fluctuations.
The findings suggest that repetitive movements can actually reshape sensory processing from the hand. In fact, it's possible that cortical sensory processing in the brain is continuously shaped by personal digital technology.
The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
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First Posted: Dec 24, 2014 10:05 AM EST
Do you have a smartphone? Then you may be changing the way that your brain and your thumbs interact. Scientists have discovered that spending time interacting with your smartphone can actually cause greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched.
"I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones," said Arko Ghosh, one of the researchers, in a news release. "I was also struck by how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs."
In order to better understand how smartphones might be affecting the way's people's brains interact, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG). They recorded brain responses to mechanical touch on the thumb, index and middle fingertips of touchscreen phone users and then compared their responses to people who used old mobile phones.
"I think first we must appreciate how common personal digital devices are and how densely people use them," said Ghosh. "What this means for us neuroscientists is that the digital history we carry in our pockets has an enormous amount of information on how we use our fingertips (and more)."
So what did they find? It turns out that the electrical activity in the brains of smartphone users was enhanced when all three fingertips were touched. Not only that, but the thumb tip especially was sensitive to day-to-day fluctuations.
The findings suggest that repetitive movements can actually reshape sensory processing from the hand. In fact, it's possible that cortical sensory processing in the brain is continuously shaped by personal digital technology.
The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone