Computer use can alter your brain: Study
- January 7, 2014, 4:05 pm
- Health News
- 359 Views
ISLAMABAD, Jan 7 (APP): Using a computer may not only change the
lifestyle, but also alter the way the brain learns, according to a new study.
People who use computers regularly are constantly mapping the movements
of their hand and computer mouse to the cursor on the screen, Health News
reported.
Now, researchers have shown that all that pointing and clicking the
average computer user performs an impressive 7,400 mouse clicks per week
changes the way the brain generalises movements.
"Computers produce this problem that screens are of different sizes and
mice have different gains," said Konrad Kording of Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
"We want to quickly learn about these so that we do not need to relearn
all possible movements once we switch to a new computer. If you have broad
generalisation, then you need to move the mouse just once, and there you are
calibrated," said Kording.
Research found that Chinese migrant workers accustomed to using
computers made broader generalisations when it comes to movement learning than a group of age- and education-matched migrant workers who had never used a computer before.
While both computer users and non-users learned equally quickly how to
move a cursor while their hand was hidden from view, computer-experienced
individuals more readily generalised what they learned about movement of the
cursor in one direction to movements made in other directions.
To get to the bottom of that difference, the researchers studied
another group of 10 people unfamiliar with computers both before and after
they spent 2 weeks playing computer games that required intensive mouse use
for 2 hours each day.
That two weeks of experience was enough to convert the generalisation
patterns of those computer-naive individuals to that of regular computer
users, the researchers said.
The findings show that computer use not only changes our lifestyle but
also fundamentally affects the neural representation of our movements, the
researchers said.
