Quote Originally Posted by Crankin View Post
I just saw a thing about this book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. She is a professor at Tufts Child Development Center. It discussed how reading improves the brain and compares it to the effects of technology on the brain.
I started that book in the fall and never got around to finishing it... I'll have to pick it up again as soon as I'm done with the novel I'm reading now.

Another fascinating book - less scientific I thought, but interesting nonetheless, and the author is a surgeon so not entirely lacking in scientific qualifications - was The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain. He discusses how written language causes the brain to conform to literally linear, black-and-white thinking, and how the abstractions inherent in alphabetic writing take that to an even greater level.

This conversation reminds me a bit of the news stories a few years back about how the drug MDMA causes "brain damage." They didn't bother to mention that the brain changes brought about by that drug are identical to those caused by pharmaceutical anti-depressants.

The bottom line is that the brain is a dynamic organ, especially in childhood. Everything children do changes their brains; everything they do repetitively shapes the structure of how their brains will function in the future. I don't think it's possible to make value judgments beyond saying that a sedentary lifestyle is not good for anyone. As long as you're only spending a couple of hours a day alone in that darkened room, who's to say that a book is better than an online message board is better than a video game?


ETA: there's a great irony here, because of course computer programming, including video game programming, is about as linear and black-and-white as it gets. And yet most of today's game designers were yesterday's gamers.