#digitization2dementia

Dementia is a very common psychiatric non-specific disease, which sees more than 10 million cases in India itself. Though treatment is helpful but this condition is literally incurable and is chronic in nature. Dementia is describes a decline in the cognitive abilities, i.e., decline in memory, decreased ability to focus and pay attention, difficulty in communication and language, impairment in reasoning, judgment and visual perception. Dementia, which is caused by damage to brain cells is progressive in nature and not at all age oriented. Earlier most of dementia cases came as a package of the Alzheimer’s today a new form of dementia has evolved—Digital Dementia.

According to neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer digital dementia is the breakdown of cognitive abilities as a result of overuse of digital technology. This potentially addictive Internet does undoubtedly provide us with easy and fast answers and may add to our knowledge, but is actually impairing our brain functions. Though taking selfies and catching Pokémon might be the craze of the upcoming generation, this same generation can’t remember their home phone numbers without their smartphone. As we become more dependent on our gadgets to search information our ability to memorize and remember decreases.

South Korea one of Asia’s most wired societies, faces this problem the most with people from their late 20s regularly show up exhibiting signs which were earlier associated with mental disorders in the elderly, like memory problems, inability to concentrate and sleeplessness. This comes from the high exposure levels to the digital screens, ranging from television to computers, gaming consoles to smart phones. Out of love and sometimes just to save our skin we introduce our children to digital devices at a very young age but are we doing them good. Neuroscientists firmly believe that digital devices can cause damage to the development of children’s brains. Now we are not talking about 5 minutes a day, but 7 hours a day, which is the average use of gadgets in India. During childhood and early adolescence the human brain is astonishingly “plastic”. That is, it forms its circuitry of neuron paths in response to the way the brain is used and later, in adulthood, this circuitry becomes fixed.

The virtual world provides fewer stimuli to the developing brains than the real world cutting off its ability to achieve its full potential. Just pointing a mouse at something, rather than touching and handling it, you don’t use approx. 1/3 of your brain that controls motor behavior. That is, when your hands plan to do something. So basically this one third of your brain is not learning about that object. Video games have a number of ingredients that are powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc. the rapid switching between topics when surfing the internet, or between images when playing a video games, can impede the developing brains ability to build up the neuron patterns used for long term recall of specific subjects and for other complex cognitive skills.

For all these reasons neuroscientists argue for minimizing young peoples use of digital media until late adolescence, by which time the brain mostly has fully developed. They are adamantly against children under 17 using computers in schools.

Today children of silicon valleys geniuses study in schools without computers, eBay’s chief technology officer sent his kids to this kind of school. The employees of other major companies do the same: Google, apple, yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. When in these schools the children doesn’t use any of these latest technologies. There is not a single computer or screen to be found- they are banned in class and at home. They believe that computers have a negative effect on creative thinking, mental agility, human interaction and attention span. They understand that a child can get a grip of the needed knowledge later on.