Technology and the brain - Unit 3

C1 Advanced · Gapped Text · Ready for C1 Advanced 4th Edition, Macmillan Education

You are going to read an article about neuroscience and technology. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap (1–6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Technology and the brain

While these may appear trivial, it turns out that they are just as demanding on our neural resources as bigger ones. And one of the first things we lose when our brains lack energy is impulse control: something essential when it comes to making informed and logical decisions.

Certainly you can choose to ignore these attempts to get your attention. However, findings from a recent study have shown that simply having the opportunity to multi-task is detrimental to cognitive performance.

All of what we can now do for ourselves via our smartphones, while simultaneously keeping up with our friends, careers and favourite TV shows. Our smartphones have facilitated a 21st-century mania for cramming a lot into every spare moment of downtime; a habit we call multi-tasking.

On the other hand there is the social expectation that an unanswered message feels insulting to the sender. It’s a perfect recipe for addiction: you receive a message, and that activates your novelty centres. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task.

This means that its attention can easily be hijacked by the constant influx of notifications that flood our daily lives – most of which demand some sort of action. Share this link to a video of a baby panda, answer this query from a co-worker, or complete this brief survey.

If a loved one corresponded with you via a poem or a song, even before the message was apparent, you had a reason to assume something about the nature of the content and its emotional value. If that same loved one corresponded instead via a court document, you would have expected a different message before even reading it.

If students, for example, study and watch TV simultaneously, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum. This is a region of the brain specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without distraction, it heads to the hippocampus, where it is organised in a way that makes retrieval easier.

Neuroscientists are increasingly voicing concern, however, that this practice actually makes us demonstrably less efficient. Although people think they are expert jugglers, they’re actually just switching one task to another very rapidly. This has been found to increase the production of both adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex – an area which plays a significant part in directing focus and pursuing goals – is also attracted to novelty.

This wasn’t the case in the old days. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach people at all times and get an immediate response. But with smartphones, it is taken for granted that people can be contacted by text, instant messaging or email, regardless of whether they’re in a meeting or desperately trying to meet the deadline for a project.

Indeed, it turns out that the knowledge of an unread email sitting in your inbox while you’re trying to concentrate on a task can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. In other words, the sense of a backlog building up contributes to a state of information overload. Yet another problem with multitasking is its impact on acquiring new knowledge.

And this isn’t the end of the negative impact that multi-tasking can have on your brain. It also requires you to make an endless series of choices. Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I file this email? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a break?

This inevitably leads to poorer outcomes when we must determine the right course of action for something that has real importance. So why do we allow our concentration on priority activities to be interrupted in this way? Part of the problem is that nowadays the medium for any kind of interaction is the same. Until recently, each of the many different modes of communication was used to signal relevance, importance and intent.

Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transmit different business from that of letters. But now emails and texts are used for all of life’s messages. We completely check them in part because we don’t know whether the next one will be for leisure or amusement, an overdue bill, a ‘to do’, a query … something you can do now, later, something life-changing, something irrelevant. No wonder we are suffering from information overload.

In this era, when technology is developing at a breath-taking rate, we’re constantly required to do several things at once. Here we discuss the impact of technology on our efficiency. Thanks to modern technology, our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts and rumours, all posing as information. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped with choosing goods in shops, and professional secretaries and typists helped deal with correspondence. ___ Neuroscientists are increasingly voicing concern, however, that this practice actually makes us demonstrably less efficient. Although people think they are expert jugglers, they’re actually just switching one task to another very rapidly. This has been found to increase the production of both adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex – an area which plays a significant part in directing focus and pursuing goals – is also attracted to novelty. ___ This wasn’t the case in the old days. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach people at all times and get an immediate response. But with smartphones, it is taken for granted that people can be contacted by text, instant messaging or email, regardless of whether they’re in a meeting or desperately trying to meet the deadline for a project. ___ Indeed, it turns out that the knowledge of an unread email sitting in your inbox while you’re trying to concentrate on a task can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. In other words, the sense of a backlog building up contributes to a state of information overload. Yet another problem with multitasking is its impact on acquiring new knowledge. ___ And this isn’t the end of the negative impact that multi-tasking can have on your brain. It also requires you to make an endless series of choices. Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I file this email? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a break? ___ This inevitably leads to poorer outcomes when we must determine the right course of action for something that has real importance. So why do we allow our concentration on priority activities to be interrupted in this way? Part of the problem is that nowadays the medium for any kind of interaction is the same. Until recently, each of the many different modes of communication was used to signal relevance, importance and intent. ___ Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transmit different business from that of letters. But now emails and texts are used for all of life’s messages. We completely check them in part because we don’t know whether the next one will be for leisure or amusement, an overdue bill, a ‘to do’, a query … something you can do now, later, something life-changing, something irrelevant. No wonder we are suffering from information overload.

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