Will the internet eat your brain?因特网会侵蚀你的大脑吗？

A neuroscientist warns神经学家的警告 Aug 30th 2014 | From the print edition •         •         •         1 Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving their Mark on our Brains. By Susan Greenfield. Rider; 368 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk 《思想的改变：数字技术是怎样在我们的大脑上留下它的印记的》—苏珊-格林菲尔德-瑞德著，368页，售价20美元，可从亚马逊官网或者亚马逊英国网站购买。 2 A PICTURE doing the rounds on social media a few months ago showed two Hong Kong lovers hugging on a train. Resting their heads on each other’s shoulders gave the girl and her boyfriend an ideal vantage point to gaze lovingly at the smartphone that each was fiddling with behind the other’s back. 几个月前，一张照片在社交媒体上被大量转发，照片上是在火车拥抱的两名香港情侣。他们把头靠在对方的肩膀上，在智能手机拍的这张含情脉脉的照片中，他们的姿势也让他们可以看到各自背后所做的无聊举动。 3 It was meant to be funny. But for Susan Greenfield, a British neuroscientist, this is no joke. For several years Lady Greenfield has been warning of what she sees as the dangers of computers and the internet, as they move out of the office and into people’s living rooms, pockets and personal lives. She has written newspaper articles and given lectures about the dangers of the digital world. She frets, worrying that smartphones and social networks are sucking users into an unsatisfying digital facsimile of reality, frying their memories, atrophying their social skills and generally rotting their brains. 这本来只能说是一张挺有意思的图片。但是，对于英国的神经科学家--苏珊-格林菲尔德来说，这可不只是有趣而已。这几年，格林菲尔德女士一直在警告她所看到的，当电脑和互联网走出办公室，进入人们的客厅，口袋和个人生活所带来的危险。她在报纸上发表文章，开设讲座—都是关于数字世界的危害的。她很焦虑，担心智能手机和社交网络正在把用户们吸到一个对现实不满的数字传真机里，瓦解他们的记忆，消弱他们的社交技巧，普遍地腐蚀他们的大脑。 4 These are familiar worries to parents. As a working neuroscientist, Lady Greenfield’s worries carry more weight than most. Yet as plenty of bloggers and other scientists have pointed out, her warnings have thus far been light on supporting evidence. Her latest book, “Mind Change”, is an attempt to corral her arguments into one place and to underpin them with psychological and neuroscientific research. 这些也同样让父母们担心不已。作为一名职业神经科学家，格林菲尔德女士比大部分人更加忧虑。然而，随着大量博客和其他科学家的意见，她的警告也越来越缺乏支撑性的证据。她最新出的书--<思想的改变>，试图把她的论点集中进行论述，并且利用心理和神经科学的研究成果作为她的理论依据。 5 After a brief history of the rise of the internet, Lady Greenfield presents a well-written summary of how the brain works. In particular, she emphasises the brain’s ability to adapt to stimuli. It is this adaptability (or “plasticity”, in the jargon) that is the source of the claim, often associated with Ms Greenfield’s pronouncements that using the internet can alter the physical structure of your brain. That sounds scary, but it shouldn’t. Virtually any experience—reading the morning paper, divorcing your husband—will alter the physical structure of your brain, because such physical alterations, in the form of creating or pruning connections between neurons, are how the brain learns. The brain you go to sleep with every night is not the same as the brain you woke up with that morning. 书中简介了因特网兴起的简史后，格林菲尔德女士对大脑的工作原理进行了一个良好的书面总结。她特别强调了大脑对刺激的适应能力。这种适应性（或“可塑性”--专业术语）--也就是以上言论的根源，经常会与格林菲尔德女士声称的--使用因特网会改变大脑的物理结构--有关。这听起来很吓人，但是不应该会发生。几乎任何事情—读晨报，夫妻离婚—都会改变大脑结构，因为这样的物理改变，表现为创建或修剪神经元之间的连接，正是大脑的学习过程。每晚你睡觉时的大脑和早晨醒来时的大脑是不一样的。 6 Once the basic neuroscience is dispensed with, though, the book begins to run into the sand. Lady Greenfield rehearses familiar worries: that video games make their players violent, that social networks such as Facebook make their users lonely, socially inept and envious, and that search engines are immersing a generation in shallow answers to trivial questions and crowding out the capacity for deep, serious thought. 但是，一旦摒除基本神经科学理论后，这本书就是毫无用武之地了。格林菲尔德夫人详述了那些人们熟知的忧虑：视频游戏让玩家变得暴力，诸如脸谱这样的社交网络让使用者觉得寂寞，不善交际并且容易妒忌，搜索引擎让当代人沉迷对琐碎问题的浅显答案中，无法再进行深层次的，严肃的思考。 7 The evidence offered in support of these arguments is often interesting and almost always tentative. But Lady Greenfield cannot resist extrapolating to catastrophe. After discussing the usefulness of Google as a prosthetic memory, for instance, she jumps to an implausible future in which people had not “internalised any facts at all” and discussion of the world becomes impossible without a pocket digital helper. Her chain of reasoning can be shaky: after pondering whether spending time on social networks erodes real-life social skills, she points out that both Japan and South Korea are nations whose young people have embraced technology and which have very low birth rates, inviting readers to conclude (without ever quite saying so herself) that social networking might abolish sex. 支撑这些论点的证据往往很有趣，而且几乎都是试验性的。但是格林菲尔德夫人却把这些推断提高到她所谓的灾难层次。比如说，在对作为假性记忆的谷歌的有效性进行讨论后，她突然跳跃性地提到了一个让人难以置信的未来，那时候的人们“已经不再认真审视任何事实”，而且如果没有便携式数码帮手的话就没办法侃侃而谈。她的一系列理由是没法成立的：在衡量花费时间在社交网络上是否侵蚀了现实生活中的社交技巧后，她指出，日本和韩国的年轻人现在已经通过网络进行拥抱，而且这两个国家的出生率都很低，让读者不能不觉得（没有表示出一点自己有这样的见解）社交网络可能会取代性行为。 8 The parallels with 20th-century concerns about radio, rock ’n’ roll and television, which is presently enjoying something of a rehabilitation as a proper, serious medium, are striking. Lady Greenfield is aware that misgivings such as hers are as old as writing itself (famously condemned by Plato, who worried that it would atrophy memory). Over the past 500 years everything from chess to coffee houses and vernacular Bibles has been seen as possibly corrupting the young, making them frivolous or indolent or filling their minds with nonsense. Perhaps this time things will be different, and the rise of the web, social networking and video games really will have profound and negative effects on society. But you will struggle to find a convincing argument within Lady Greenfield’s book. 与对二十世纪无线电，摇滚和电视—这些现在已经被作为一种适当的，严肃的，被人们所享受的媒体--担忧的类似相当惊人。格林菲尔德女士知道,她这样的疑虑，和写作本身一样古老（柏拉图提出的有名的谴责—他担心写作会使人的大脑萎缩）。过去五百年间，从国际象棋到咖啡馆，再到白话文圣经等等，都被认为可能会毁掉年轻人，让他们他们无聊或懒惰，或头脑中尽是空洞废话。也许这一次的事情会有所不同， 网络，社交网络和视频游戏的兴起可能确实会对社会产生深刻和消极的影响。但是，人们很难在格林菲尔德女士书中找到一个让人信服的，可以支撑这种想法的论点。 Remark:格林菲尔德女士知道,她这样的疑虑，和写作本身一样古老（柏拉图提出的有名的谴责—他担心写作会使人的大脑萎缩）。过去五百年间，从国际象棋到咖啡馆，再到白话文圣经等等，都被认为可能会毁掉年轻人，让他们他们无聊或懒惰，或头脑中尽是空洞废话 2/支撑这些论点的证据往往很有趣，且几乎都是试验性的。但是格林菲尔德夫人却把这些推断提高到她所谓的灾难层次。如在谷歌对作为假性记忆的有效性进行讨论后，她突然跳跃性地提到了一个让人难以置信的未来：人们“已不再认真审视任何事实”，而且如果没有便携式数码帮手的话就没办法侃侃而谈