How good software makes us stupid?

How good software makes us stupid?

科技是怎样让人变傻的？

People assume that iPhones, laptops and Netflix are evidence of progress. In some ways, that's true. A moderate amount of Googling, for instance,can be good for your brain, and there are apps that can boost brain function and activity. Yet tech advancements also come with some unintended consequences. Our brains being "massively rewired" by tech, says neuroscientist Michael Merzenich in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, a Pulitzer-nominated 2011 book by Nicholas Carr. Merzenich warns that the effect of technology on human intelligence could be “deadly.” That got us thinking. How exactly is technology messing up our brains?

人们认为 iPhone、笔记本、和网飞公司是科技进步的证据。从某种方面来看，这是对的。比如，适度地网上搜索对你的大脑是有好处的，也有不少应用程序能够促进大脑运转,让大脑活跃起来。但是科技的进步同样伴随着一些无法预料的后果。神经系统科学家Michael Merzenich在《浅薄：互联网如何毒化了我们的大脑》中提出，我们的大脑被科技大规模的重组了，这本书是由Nicholas Carr翻译的，曾在2011年提名普利策奖。Merzenich发出警告说科技对人类智能的影响将是“致命的”。那么科技究竟是如何让我们的头脑变得一团糟的呢？

1. Tech is screwing up your sleep (科技搞砸了你的睡眠)

Studies have shown that blue-enriched light, which is emitted by gadgets like smartphones, tablets and laptops, can suppress the body's release of melatonim at night. Melatonin is a key hormone that helps regulate your internal clock, telling your body when it is nighttime and when to feel sleepy. Blue light can disrupt that process, making it impossible for you to stick to a proper sleep schedule. Losing sleep has a number of negative effects on your brain. If you’re not logging seven or more hours of sleep each night, you might suffer from increasingly bad moods, decreased focus at work and problems with memory, not to mention a loss of actual brain tissue– all of which makes you less than a joy to be around.

有研究表明智能手机、平板电脑以及笔记本电脑发出的蓝光，能够抑制人体在夜间释放褪黑激素。褪黑激素是调节人体生物钟的一种关键激素，它能让你的身体保持正常的作息。而蓝光会中断这一过程，让你没办法遵守正常的作息时间。而失眠对你的大脑有一系列负面影响。如果你晚上没有睡够7个小时以上，第二天你就有可能情绪不好，也没办法集中注意力去工作，还有可能产生记忆问题—所有这些都让你无精打采。

2. You’re easily distracted (你很容易分心)

You don't really need science to know this, but technology makes it much easier to get distracted, whether that’s stepping away from an important project to check your smartphone or flipping between multiple browser tabs without really focusing on any one. It has been proven that toggling between multiple tasks at once doesn’t actually work — in fact, you just wind up performing all your duties even worse.

科技让你很容易分心，无论是当你在谈重要项目的时候去看看你的智能手机，还是在你打开多个浏览页却并没有将注意力集中在任何一个窗口上的时候。事实已经证明，想要一次性完成多个任务是没用的，这样你反而什么事都做不好。

Teens in particular are more distracted than ever. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey of more than 2,400 teachers found that most educators feel students are more distracted than previous generations. Some 87 percent of teachers agreed with the statement, “today’s digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans,” while 64 percent agreed with the idea that “today’s digital technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically.” Yikes.

尤其是是青少年更容易分心。2012年，皮尤研究中心调查了2400多名教师，结果发现大多数教育者都感觉现在的学生比前几批更容易分心。87%的老师都赞同这一结果，认为当今的数码科技造成这一代人注意力集中的时间很短暂；有64%的人认为当今的数码科技在学术上帮到学生的很少，只会让他们分心得更厉害。

3. You can’t remember much… (你没办法记太多的东西)

Technology's tendency to butt into whatever else you're doing makes it more difficult to form new memories. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows, memory comes in two types: transient working memory and long-term memory, which is more permanent. Information needs to pass from working memory into long-term memory in order to be stored. Any break in the processes of working memory — like, say, stopping to check your email or send a text message in the middle of reading an article — can erase information from your mind before that transfer occurs.

无论你在做什么科技总会参与进去，这让你很难形成新的记忆。就像 Nicholas Carr 在《浅薄：互联网如何毒害你的大脑》里面谈的那样，记忆有两种类型：暂存记忆和长期记忆。信息要先成为暂存记忆，才能变成长期记忆被大脑储存。任何暂存记忆的中断，比如停下来检查你的电子邮件或者在阅读文章的中途去看短信，都会在你的大脑将其变为长期记忆之前，将这些信息从大脑中抹掉。

There’s also a limit to how much information your working memory can take in at once. Taking in too much information — which happens a lot online — is like “having water poured into a glass continuously all day long, so whatever was there at the top has to spill out as the new water comes down,” productivity expert Tony Schwartz told the Huffington Post last year.

生产力研究专家 Tony Schwartz 在去年接受赫芬顿邮报的采访时说道，你的大脑一次性能接收多少暂存记忆也是有限的。一次性接收太多的信息(这在上网的时候经常发生)，就像“在一天的时间里面不停地往一个玻璃瓶里面倒水，在最上面的水在新的水进来的时候会溢出去”。

4. …so you’re relying on the Internet to remember things for you (你在依靠网络为你记事)

People used to be able to retain really vast quantities of knowledge — like reciting entire novels, word for word – but technology has eliminated both the need and the drive to do so. When you know that Google or your smartphone can retain a piece of information for you, you’re less likely to store it in menory, studies have shown. Scientific American last year likened the Internet to an “external hard drive” for our brains, as we outsource an increasing amount of information to the web.

人们以前能够记住相当大的知识量，比如逐字逐句地背诵一整本小说——但科技使我们丧失了这样做的需要和动力。有研究表明，当你知道谷歌或者你的智能手机能为你记下信息，你就不太会亲自来记住它了。去年，《科学美国人》将网络比喻为我们大脑的“外接硬盘”，因为我们利用存储了海量的信息。

That’s not the worst thing in the world, Scientific American adds. We’ve always outsourced some of that information to external “hard drives” of sorts, relying on friends rather than technology to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. But these day we're "outsourcing" way more.

《科学美国人》还指出，这不是最糟的事情。我们以前一直在利用各种各样的外部“硬盘”，比如依靠我们的朋友而不是科技来填补我们知识的空缺。但现在我们过分的利用的这种“外部存储”的功能。

5. And you're much more forgetful than you used to be (你比之前更健忘)

Millennials are actually more likely to forget what day it is or where they put their keys than people over the age of 55, according to a 2013 Trending Machine survey. In a press release for the survey, family and occupational therapist Patricia Gutentag called out technology as one of the main culprits: “This is a population that has grown up multitasking using technology, often compounded by lack of sleep, all of which results in high levels of forgetfulness,” she said.

根据2013年的一项调查，“千禧一代”（国外的一个专门的术语：出生于1984-1995年，他们差不多与电脑同时诞生，在互联网的陪伴下长大）比55岁以上的人更容易忘记今天是什么日子，或者他们把自己的钥匙放在了哪里。在该调查的一篇新闻稿里面，专业家庭治疗师Patricia Gutentag将科技称作罪魁祸首之一。她说：“这一代人多用科技处理工作，经常睡眠不足，其结果就是高度健忘。”

6. You can’t concentrate on what you’re reading （你没办法把注意力集中在你正在读的东西上面）

Even if you’ve shunned all distractions, you still won’t absorb information you read online as well as you would if you’d read it in a book. And you can blame hypertext for that. Those colorful little links scattered throughout online articles (including this one) make your brain work harder than it would otherwise, leaving less brain power to process what you’re reading. Even just reading on screens, like a laptop or iPad — links or no links — has been shown to diminish comprehension.

即使避开了所有的干扰因素，你仍然不能像看书一样消化你从网上看到的信息，这都是超文本的罪过。这些在线文章（包括你正在看的这篇文章）里面彩色的小链接会让你的大脑工作的更艰辛，因此没什么脑力来理解你正在读的文章。即使是在屏幕上，比如笔记本电脑和平板电脑—不管有没有联网—同样会干扰你的理解力。

Research has shown that reading linked text “entails a lot of mental calisthenics — evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats — that are extraneous to the process of reading,” Carr wrote in “The Shallows.” And giving your brain more work to do makes it harder to absorb information. Text that’s peppered with photos, videos and ads is even worse.

Carr在《浅薄》中写道：研究显示，阅读链接文本“包含一些脑力运动—判断超链接，决定是否点击，调整格式—这些都跟阅读本身无关”，这让你的大脑负荷太重而无法吸收信息。布满了图片，视频和广告的文本更是如此。

7. You can’t find your way around without GPS （没有GPS你就找不到路了）

People who rely on GPS to get around have less activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in both memory and navigation, according to a series of studies presented in 2010. Using spatial memory — which involves using visual cues to develop "cognitive maps" that remember routes — instead of operating on GPS-induced autopilot can help avert memory problems later in life, the studies found.

2010年的一系列研究都表明那些依赖GPS导航的人，其海马体(大脑里面与记忆和导航有关的区域)较那些不那么依赖GPS的人活跃度要低一些。研究发现，用空间记忆而不是依赖GPS导航能防止今后生活中的记忆问题。

A 2008 study from the University of London even found that taxi drivers had more developed hippocamp than non-taxi drivers — perhaps because they are so accustomed to navigating cities using spatial memory, rather than relying on GPS (though that may no longer be true of smartphone-equipped taxi drivers).

2008年，伦敦大学的一项研究甚至表明出租车司机的海马体比非出租车司机要发达一些，可能是因为出租车司机习惯于自己记路线而不是依赖GPS(对于那些利用智能手机的出租车司机来说也许已经不是这样了)。

8. You have the brain of a drug addict （你有一个瘾君子的大脑）

No, “Internet addiction” isn’t just some BS term parents throw around to terrify youngsters who spend too much time playing Candy Crush. Spending too much time on the Internet can actually cause changes in the brain that mimic those caused by drug and alcohol dependence, according to a 2012 study.

不，“网络成瘾”已经不仅仅是家长们用来吓唬那些花太多时间玩“糖果大爆险”（一款网络游戏）的小孩们的一个BS术语了。2012年的一份研究表明，上网过多的人大脑真的会发生改变，就像吸毒者以及酗酒者那样。

Internet addicts — most notably gamers who shun food, school and sleep to play for days on end — have abnormal white and grey matter in their brains, which disrupts and cripples the regions involved in processing emotion and regulating attention and decision-making. Alcoholics and drug addicts have strikingly similar brain abnormalities, the study found.

网络成瘾者—尤其是一些接连几天废寝忘食，甚至逃学的游戏玩家—大脑里面的白质和灰质不正常，这会让网瘾者难以表达情绪，不容易调节注意力，还会产生选择恐惧症。研究表明，酗酒者和瘾君子大脑也有相似的不正常现象。

“I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down” because of Internet gaming addiction, Dr. Henriette Bowden Jones, who runs a British clinic for Internet addicts,told The Independent.

经营一家治疗网络成瘾的英国诊所的Henriette Bowden Jones医生告诉《独立报》，“我见过一些人不再参与大学里的课程，拿不到学位或者婚姻破裂”，原因是对网络游戏的沉迷。

Now that you're properly terrified of the effects of technology on the old noggin, let us remind you that you do have the power to prevent brain drain and time-suck. Just log off every once in a while!

相信你已经被这些危害吓住了吧，你一定要有防止对脑力和时间的浪费。时不时的注销一下你的电脑吧。(英文来源：huffingtonpost 翻译：桃子@煎蛋网)