ScienceDaily reports that the effects of pulling out your iPhone to perform actions such as; checking the weather, what your friend just posted on Facebook, or reading the latest news – isn’t just changing your personal daily habits, but could also be affecting your brain’s direct relation to your thumbs – too.
“I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones,” said Arko Ghosh of the University of Zurich located in Switzerland.
“I was also struck by how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs.”
In short, using your smartphone is physically changing the way your brain sends signals to your thumbs. In fact, the evidence is now so strong – that the report claims the ‘link’ between the brain, fingers and thumbs is actually being modified the more we all use our phones.
When people spend time interacting with their smartphones via touchscreen, it actually changes the way their thumbs and brains work together. [...] More touchscreen use in the recent past translates directly into greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched, the study shows.
So, just remember that. When you’re playing all those Festive Holiday Games – what you are really doing is increasing your brain activity!
Well, apparently anyway.
/ Image Credit: ScienceDuck (Flickr), PCAdvisor
/ Engadget