The Plastic Brain vs. Technology

I had an interesting realization while listening to a book lately (yes, I'm a college student that has time to listen to audio books--but only because I make time), which is that micro-blogging has actually changed the way my brain functions. Let me back up and explain about the book that brought on this realization. The Brain That Changes Itself is a book about neuroplasticity--in plain language, it says that while your brain has areas broadly devoted to certain tasks, if the area devoted to a particular task is damaged, then your brain can reroute the task so that it is processed somewhere else. A key idea for this can be summarized in the catchphrase, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." (I hope you will forgive me this very brief description--it's a difficult subject to wrap your mind around, and I can't actually refer to the book, since I was listening to it.)

The appendix of the book explores the implications of the success stories--which are truly spectacular; stroke victims can relearn how to live normally, even after massive brain damage--for our lives and our culture, and one section in particular struck me. (I may have given it away in my title; not very ninja-like of me.) In the section of the appendix dealing with technology, Norman Doidge, MD, took the key concept that I mentioned above one step further. If neurons that fire together, wire together, then someone who composes with their fingers on the keyboard, so to speak, might be wiring the neurons involved in putting words together coherently with the neurons involved in typing motions. It may actually get to the point, in fact, that this hypothetical person cannot compose while dictating or writing by hand, because the words-into-strings neurons are so bound up with the finger maps of typing.

I know the feeling. I find it very difficult, myself, to write anything without talking, and I write my second language by hand much more than by computer--so much so that I must begin my essays on paper, because I write as fluidly in my second language as I type in my first. But even beyond that, in my day sans technology, I kept a record of the "posts that might have been"--the random thoughts that, on a normal day, sometimes get posted on the internet on my favorite micro-blogging site. Most of the posts in potentia stick fairly strictly to 140 characters (in itself surprising--I'm rather a wordy person), but one in particular amuses me in its sheer enormity. There's no reason why, when I have more to say than will fit into the space allowed at a micro-blogging site, that I shouldn't just blog about it instead (I obviously have a blog, and there might be others, for the ninja is sneaky). I could even write an e-mail to some trusted soul! Yet I wrote more than 10 responses of roughly the same length and division that I would have if I had actually been constrained to 140 characters--my mind finds it easier now, after nearly 2 years of almost daily micro-blogging, to divide enormous chunks of material into bite-sized pieces than to just write it all in a lump.