John Brockman - What Should We Be Worried About?

I know that my own perception of time has been changed by technology. If I go from using a fast computer or Web connection to using even a slightly slower one, processes that take just a second or two longer—waking the machine from sleep, launching an application, opening a Web page—seem almost intolerably slow. Never before have I been so aware of, and annoyed by, the passage of mere seconds.

Research on Web users shows that this is a general phenomenon. Back in 2006, a famous study of online retailing found that a large percentage of online shoppers would abandon a retailing site if its pages took four seconds or longer to load. In the years since then, the so-called Four Second Rule has been repealed and replaced by the Quarter of a Second Rule. Studies by companies like Google and Microsoft now find it takes a delay of just 250 milliseconds in page-loading for people to start abandoning a site. “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” a top Microsoft engineer said in 2012. To put that into perspective, it takes about the same amount of time for you to blink an eye.

A recent study of online video viewing provides more evidence of how advances in media and networking technology reduce our patience. Shunmuga Krishnan and Ramesh Sitaraman studied a huge database that documented 23 million video views by nearly 7 million people. They found that people start abandoning a video in droves after a 2-second delay. That won’t surprise anyone who has had to wait for a video to begin after clicking the Start button. More interesting is the study’s finding of a causal link between higher connection speeds and higher abandonment rates. Every time a network gets quicker, we become antsier. As we experience faster flows of information online, we become, in other words, less patient people. But it’s not just a network effect. The phenomenon is amplified by the constant buzz of Facebook, Twitter, texting, and social networking in general. Society’s “activity rhythm” has never been so harried. Impatience is a contagion spread from gadget to gadget.

All of this has obvious importance to anyone involved in online media or in running data centers. But it also has implications for how all of us think, socialize, and in general live. If we assume that networks will continue to get faster—a pretty safe bet—then we can also conclude that we’ll become more and more impatient, more and more intolerant of even microseconds of delay between action and response. As a result, we’ll be less likely to experience anything that requires us to wait, that doesn’t provide us with instant gratification. That has cultural as well as personal consequences. The greatest of human works—in art, science, politics—tend to take time and patience both to create and to appreciate. The deepest experiences can’t be measured in fractions of seconds.

It’s not clear whether a technology-induced loss of patience persists even when we’re not using the technology. But I would hypothesize (based on what I see in myself and others) that our sense of time is indeed changing in a lasting way. Digital technologies are training us to be more conscious of and more antagonistic toward delays of all sorts—and perhaps more intolerant of moments of time that pass without the arrival of new stimuli. Because our experience of time is so important to our experience of life, it strikes me that these kinds of technology-induced changes in our perceptions can have broad consequences. In any event, it seems like something worth worrying about, if you can spare the time.

SARAH-JAYNE BLAKEMORE

Royal Society University Research Fellow and professor of cognitive neuroscience, University College London; coauthor (with Uta Frith), The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education

Until about fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the majority of brain development occurs in the first few years of life. But recent research on the human brain has demonstrated that many brain regions undergo protracted development throughout adolescence and beyond. This advance in knowledge has intensified old worries and given rise to new ones. It is hugely worrying that so many teenagers around the world don’t have access to education while their brains are still developing and being shaped by the environment. We should also worry about our lack of understanding of how our rapidly changing world is shaping the developing teenage brain.

Decades of research on early neurodevelopment demonstrated that the environment influences brain development. During the first few months or years of life, an animal must be exposed to particular visual or auditory stimuli for the associated brain cells and connections to develop; in this way, neuronal circuitry is sculpted. This research has focused mostly on early development of sensory brain regions. What about later development of higher-level brain regions, such as prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex, which are involved in decision making, inhibitory control, and planning, as well as social understanding and self-awareness? We know that these brain regions continue to develop throughout adolescence; however, we have very little knowledge about how environmental factors influence the developing teenage brain. This is something that should concern us.

There is some recent evidence from the Dunedin longitudinal study that adolescence represents a period of brain development particularly sensitive to environmental input. This study reported that persistent cannabis use in adolescence had long-lasting negative consequences on a broad spectrum of cognitive abilities in adulthood. This was not the case if cannabis use started after the age of eighteen. Could the same be true for other environmental factors—alcohol, tobacco, drug use, diet, medication, Internet usage, gaming? These are all likely to affect the developing brain. The question is how, and we simply don’t know the answer.

There’s a lot of concern about the hours some teenagers spend online and playing video games. But maybe all this worry is misplaced. After all, throughout history, humans have worried about the effects of new technologies on the minds of the next generation. When the printing press was invented, there was anxiety that reading might corrupt young minds, and the same worries were repeated for the invention of radio and television. Maybe we shouldn’t be worried at all. It’s possible that the developing brains of today’s teenagers will be the most adaptable, creative, multitasking brains that have ever existed. There is evidence—from adults—that playing video games improves a range of cognitive functions, such as divided attention and working memory as well as visual acuity. Much less is known about how gaming, social networking, and so on influence the developing adolescent brain. We don’t know whether the effects of new technologies on the developing brain are positive, negative, or neutral. We need to find out.

Adolescence is a period of life when the brain is malleable, and it represents a good opportunity for learning and social development. However, according to UNICEF, 40 percent of the world’s teenagers have no access to secondary-school education. The percentage of teenage girls who lack this access is much higher, yet there is strong evidence that the education of girls in developing countries has many significant benefits for family health, population growth rates, child mortality rates, and HIV rates, as well as for women’s self-esteem and quality of life. Adolescence represents a time of brain development when teaching and training should be particularly beneficial. I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world’s teenagers access to education.