In
the recently released movie Lucy featuring Scarlet Johansson, the
director plays with the idea of the potential of our brain, of how unlocking
‘portions’ of brain’s true capacity will grant us superpowers. The movie states
that we normally use only about 10% of our brain’s true potential, while going
beyond that threshold will allow us to acquire new knowledge and skill with
superhuman speed, to hack electronic device, or even to alter the material
world. While the majority of those attributes seem impossible, it does raise
certain awareness that by just simply rewiring our brains, the possibilities
are infinite. While we discussed about the concept of Digital Immigrants and
Digital Natives, a question pops into my mind; to what extent can
technology affect our brains?
In 2001 Marc Prensky came up with the terms Digital Natives and Digital Immigrant, a concept used to
describe people’s relationships towards technology. Digital Immigrants are those who was born in the analog ages and
has witnessed the rise of the new millennia, in which digital technologies are
a necessary part of our life. Unlike the immigrants, Digital Natives are those
who are born into the world of techs, readily equipped with internet,
smartphones, and tablet PCs. We are supposedly the transitional generation who
saw the world before and after the global digital revolution.
Just like every other new concepts that are brought to
the table, there are hypes and hysterias
about Prensky’s concept. Digital immigrants, born without the convenience of
smart phones and internet, usually find learning to use new gadgets
challenging, almost like learning a new language. Digital natives, despite
their ability to multitask and to easily understand a new device’s how-tos, are
said to have shorter attention spans, less effective reasoning and social
skills compared to their older counterparts. What comes into my mind however,
is the potential pros and cons of this
new generation, those we not yet fully understand. Unlike the digital
immigrants, the natives’ brains’ are expected to be wired differently because
they were brought up in the world full of information. People our ages absorb
and process large amount of data quickly and efficiently as they go through
various webpages during their researches. Unlike our grandparents who focused
on one task at a time, we multitask; listening to the lecture, checking our
Facebook, and texting our friends at the same time. In the near future, we
might end up entirely different mentally from our ancestors, perceiving the
world in a totally different perspective.
From this assumption, I can come up with a few pros for
the digital natives. First of which is overall physical health of the brain. My
grandmother used to be an active old lady who did not show any sign of dementia
or Alzheimer’s. She would go out every weekend to play mahjong with her
friends, a kind of traditional Chinese rummy involving calculating numbers and
strategies. At some point, however, she stopped going, and her condition got
worse from that point. What happened to her confirmed that just like our
bodies, the brains also needs regular exercise. If that is the case, wouldn’t
our brains, which have been through regularly heavy exercise by multitasking,
be like a body builders compared to our grandparents? Most mental disease,
including Alzheimer’s, then, might go extinct. The other pros is intelligence
in general; kids in the future will learn multiple subjects very rapidly and
adapt to new technologies with ease.
We are not certain what will happen in the future. Just
like every new technologies, people freak out about new things, supporting both
good and bad sides of them. Our brains have unlimited potential, and the movie
Lucy really exaggerate on that. But really, who knows?
No comments:
Post a Comment