Ever think your electronics may change the way your brain functions? Well as it so happens a new study shows that smartphone usage leaves a mark on the part of your brain that processes touch, although it actually makes you smarter. Swiss researchers were curious about the effect of using digital devices on the digits doing the swiping and tapping, and now according to the study published in the journal Current Biology, all of the typing with your thumb and swiping with your index and middle fingers may be training your brain's somatosensory cortex.
Brain activity in the somatosensory cortex was stronger when smartphone users did a lot of swiping or typing, and the strength of the signal depended on how recently the digital device was used.
"The findings don't offer a major breakthrough for brain science, per se, but they do represent a clever way to track how the brain adapts during daily activity," lead investigator of the study, and neuroscientist at the University of Zurich, Arko Ghosh says. "People should be comforted by the fact that our daily lives are interesting to neuroscientists. We have always studied pianists or athletes and such, but smartphones are going to allow us to start linking our digital footprints to brain activity."
The researchers tracked ten days of activity from 26 touch-screen users and 11 users of old cellphones. They then stimulated the thumbs, middle fingers and index fingers of the users while they were connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG).
Researchers found that there was increased touch-related cortical activity among smartphone users compared to the users with older technology. The strength of these changes were directly related to how recently they had used their touch screen devices.
"The closer they were to their peak usage, in time, the more brain activity they had associated with their thumb," Ghosh says.
The data showed no relationship between brain signals in regards to how long they had been using their devices, nor the their age when they first obtained their touch screen device. Neurologists have been wanting to measure how the brain adapts based on experiences for quite some time now. And according to Ghosh, thanks to smartphones and this study, scientists should soon be able to do exactly that.
"We really can now start tackling questions about the implementation of plasticity through our daily life," Ghosh says. "We can start extracting which factors matter for the brain, which don't, what are the drivers of plasticity and what are not? To do this, connecting our digital footprints to brain activity is what we need to do."
