Don’t test your brain age with half a bottle of wine inside

Two solid months in the company of my darling teenagers and I have learnt new ways to waste my life. (It was my son, regular readers will remember, who got me hooked on the Game Cube). This summer’s technology briefing began when my daughter asked “have you heard of David Bowie?” Heard of him? David Bowie?
Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane were my youth. Prettiest Star was “our ( first boyfriend) song”. Rebel Rebel, Jean Genie... Space Oddity. Fashion... Changes.

“Ok, calm down, mum. Show us.” Which is how I was introduced to the addictive, time wasting sport of summoning up clips on You Tube. We exhausted the Bowie concerts. Waded through the entire repertoire of Talking Heads - children now rolling their eyes and yawning.

Then I found the Stones in Berlin (Urban Jungle tour - still have the t-shirt)
“Look - maybe you’ll spot me in the audience! As the offspring fled in horror, I whiled away the rest of the week watching my youth flash by in a series of video clips.

To distract me (and get their hands back on the computer) they made me test my brain age on the Nintendo DS. (a software originally designed to help oldies exercise their grey matter but now a big hit with the Gameboy generation.) Triumph! Despite the machine insisting it could not understand my perfectly good BBC English, and despite being too slow on the buttons, I came out years below my real age. (This is good. ) You are meant to re-test yourself daily so you get better and your brain age goes down until it reaches the “optimum” 20 years old.

Here’s a tip for adults: on no account allow your children to test your brain age late in the evening and with half a bottle of wine inside you. It soars to 80+ and provides them with endless mirth. (It’s already bad enough that you have to put your reading glasses on to see the screen.)

You Tube and DS brain tests are self-inflicted distractions, however. The endless pings of emails, junk mails, burblings of the Skype phone, flashing lights to indicate texts, beeps to let you know you have voicemail , the pop-ups on websites are a daily assault of distractions which make it virtually impossible to concentrate on work - or leisure.

Soon after arriving in Fleet Street I was handed one of the very first “portable” phones - about the size of a small bag of shopping. After the thrill of calling everyone I knew just to tell them I was ringing from the car! I immediately recognised the newfangled mobile as a Bad Thing. No more going blissfully AWOL on a story - the editor could track you down anywhere, any time.

Now everyone thinks they can track anyone down, any time and nobody can wait five minutes for a reply. Have you noticed how many people call your home number, leave a message saying they are now going to try your mobile. They leave a message on the mobile telling you they have just left a message on your landline. Then they send a text alerting you to the messages already left, try Skyping and then immediately send an email saying they are increasingly concerned that they can’t get hold of you and are you OK? Can you get back to them urgently, please.

That’s at least half a dozen communications and they’ll start the whole round of calls all over again in half an hour’s time.

It takes an enormous effort of will to ignore all this and concentrate on writing an article or reading a book or talking to your family. Indeed, alarmist research from America says we are now so overwhelmed by distractions that we may soon lose altogether the ability for deep concentration.

If you can’t ignore the rings and beeps the only other option is to hide, out of earshot, at the bottom of the orchard or swim out to sea.

But you’ll pay for it. If just a handful of people have been trying to get hold of you in the meantime, that’ll be 120 messages, minimum, to wade through when you get back - and before you can double check your brain age, run a You Tube clip and wind down with a quick blast on the Game Cube.

No wonder the only time I get to read a book is when the rest of the world is asleep.

July Editor's blog

"Losing our identities:
the Nobody Scenario"

There is a computer game which, so the blurb goes, has been specially designed to tax the older brain and keep it perky. I don’t need this software - I get more than enough mental stimulation trying to make head and tail of my daughter’s text messages. Take this one, from last month’s school trip to Italy: Ostia zin.

She had already explained to me that’s it all phonetic. So - Ostia is...thin? Is the ancient Roman port spectacularly narrow? Maybe she meant Ostia, seen - as in: done that, got the t-shirt ? But still my mind kept straying back to that picture of a very narrow set of ancient ruins.

“Amazin” she sighed when she got back.

God save these poor teenagers - their parents are so dim.

But far from, as BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys would have it, “doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago” texting, according to a new report, is good for children. It improves literacy.

Frequent texting develops their reading and writing because of the imaginative abbreviations needed, according to the latest academic research. These help vocabulary and phonological awareness.

Hmmm. I can hear it now: but mum, you know texting is good for me…

As we gear up for that annual screen fest which is the summer holidays (especially, God forbid, if the weather is anything like last year) parents throughout the developed world are plotting strategies to lure their offspring away from the virtual world and into the real one.

Bang on cue, the maverick British scientist Susan Greenfield has come to some really scary conclusions. A specialist in brain degeneration and the loss of identity associated with Alzheimer’s, Greenfield says that today’s teens are heading not just for an identity crisis but are in danger of losing their identity altogether. She calls it the Nobody Scenario.

And she goes further: the actual make-up of the brain changing in response to the hours spent in the unreal world.

When you, say, rescue the princess from the tower during a computer game you don’t know - as you would if you were reading the story - anything about the princess, her personality, why she is in the tower, why it is your job to rescue her? There is no narrative and we human beings need narrative both to make sense of who we are and to understand the world around us.
Add spoon-fed menu options which avoid the need for free ranging enquiry, tick box multiple choice options, the death of imagination and creativity, a text language which avoids the need for the verbs and the conditional structures essential to complex thought process and you create a generation of screen addicts unable to link facts together and understand how they are related to each other.

To create our unique identities we need unique adventures, conversations and interactions with the real world around us. But individuality is being obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations - a “yuck” and “wow” mentality where the ability to make connections is entirely lost.

A generation which won’t be able to build the mental framework necessary to link actions to consequences - a moral compass in other words.

The Nobody Scenario is particularly scary because nobodies want to become somebodies and those without a sense of personal identity are more likely to opt for a collective identity: within a gang, for example, or political or religious extremist group. Fundamentalism is, after all, the suppression of uniqueness.

Greenfield’s hypothesis gets worse. The constant “hits” of wham bam computer games promote the addictive over-release of the brain’s natural feel good chemical, dopamine. The brain is a supremely malleable organ and excessive dopamine hits could, she believes, be leading to an underfunctioning of the prefrontal cortex - i.e. an inability to make connections typified by a total absorption in the here and now and an inability to consider past and future actions. It could lead, in other words, to a generation literally unable to understand the meaning of their actions.

She is talking about children who spend between six to nine hours a day in front of one screen or other - apparently not uncommon. Of course none of our children fall into this category. Do they?

Go on: count the hours.

One of my concerns about particularly, hand held computer games, has always been the effect on the eyesight of scowling at tiny screens for hours. But I’ve just unpacked a box of my childhood books, saved for my own children’s long summer holidays, and had to go in search of a magnifying glass. The writing is miniscule - far smaller than your average text message . Ditto all those old Penguins, price 1/- , inherited from my mother. No wonder we didn’t have any holes in the ozone layer in those days - one tree must have been enough for an entire print run. It’s a wonder that those of us who spent eight summer weeks with our nose in a book, not to mention all those hours with a torch under the bedclothes, have any eyesight left.