Technology and the Human Brain

 by Isabelle Aston

The incredible advances in the world of technology and machinery have shaped modern society into something unimaginable to a person just 50 years ago. The way in which the current population relies on said technology, although useful, could potentially be harmful in the growth of intellectual capacity, as the world continues to depend on computers to correct, revise and ultimately change the way human beings think.

The last time you used a computer to write an essay, type your work, or even send a text message, the influence of tools such as auto-correct undoubtedly fixed capital letters that you had failed to insert, correct punctuation that you had let slip, or even a spelling error that you had simply forgotten how to rectify. Although incredibly useful, this ability to neglect such mistakes could potentially allow the whole of the next generation to perhaps not bother learning the easy rules of the English language in the first place, as the smart technology permits them to do so.

The speed and accuracy of the inviting technology tempts the fingers to forget the full stop or the hyphen, the pieces of language that are lost in translation. It is impossible to not think of the implications that this will have on the general understanding of dialect, communications, and even basic intelligence. My use of technology to work began not one year ago, and already I rely on the internet for spellings of particular words that I need no longer to remember.  In a survey taken last year, only one in five adults out of 2,000 who took a short spelling test were able to answer all five questions correctly. Sixty-five per cent failed to spell ‘necessary’ correctly while 33 per cent struggled with ‘definitely’ and ‘separate’. This negligence towards the spelling of common everyday words has been allowed by the detrimental impacts of autocorrect. The ability to simply have the answers at a click of a button could be potentially harmful to the growth and development of the general intelligence of the human population.

The same effects of the internet were unearthed in 2018, when studies showed that the purchase of encyclopaedias had fallen by 57% in the last 10 years, and dictionaries by 24%, due to the continued increase of platforms such as Google and Wikipedia. Another study showed that there is a 4 in 5 chance that you are more likely to remember something if you’ve read it in a book than if you looked it up online. This is due to the fact that humans are more likely to remember which page and which part of the page a text comes from, and therefore more likely to remember the information within the text, if read in a book. This evidence all points to the suggestion that the increased use of search engines including Google and Yahoo as a source of information will impact the brain’s ability to hold onto information and knowledge. In the short term, this could potentially stunt a person’s capability to revise for a test or exam, for example. But in the long term, this could detrimentally impact the progression of the human race, as the brain’s capacity for new facts, figures, and general information steadily and undeviatingly declines.

In conclusion, the way in which the human population has acquired knowledge has altered significantly over the past decades. The power to hold a fount of knowledge in your back pocket at all times has allowed people to become lazy, and unresourceful. The extreme developments of technology, although creating endless possibilities, has potentially caused the abilities of human intelligence to rapidly change, and not necessarily for the better.