Book Review of Susan Greenfields Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark On Our Brains

Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark On Our Brains. New York: Random House, 2015. xvii + 348 pp. ISBN 9780812993820, $28.00 (hbk) Reviewed by: Todd Davies, Stanford University, USA Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield's Mind Change grew out of controversial statements she made as a member of the UK House of Lords. In a 2009 debate about websites, Greenfield recounts, “I decided to offer a perspective through the prism of neuroscience... the human brain adapts to the environment and the environment is changing in an unprecedented way, so the brain may also be changing in an unprecedented way” (p. xiii). “Mind change” is Greenefield's umbrella term for digital technologies' effects, in a parallel to climate change. Greenfield's summary of the research is this: “social networking sites could worsen communication skills and reduce interpersonal empathy; personal identities might be constructed externally and refined to perfection with the approbation of an audience as priority, an approach more suggestive of performance art than of robust personal growth; obsessive gaming could lead to greater recklessness, a shorter attention span, and an increasingly aggressive disposition; heavy reliance on search engines and a preference for [Web] surfing rather than researching could result in agile mental processing at the expense of deep knowledge and understanding” (p. 265). To address these worries, she recommends that we all (1) deliberate about and decide “what kind of society we want, and what kind of individual traits we This is a preprint of Todd Davies' review of Susan Greenfield's book Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains, first published on June 6, 2016, doi:10.1177/1461444816652614. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in New Media & Society, 18(9): 2139-2141, October 2016 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © Todd Davies 1 value,” (2) “take the pulse of societies around the world” by doing formal surveys of stakeholders, (3) do more research on technology's effects, and (4) invent “completely novel software that attempts to compensate for and offset any possible deficiencies arising from excessive screen-based existence” (pp. 269-270). Greenfield's viewpoint is reflected, e.g., in studies showing that teachers have noticed declines in students' attention spans, and that they attribute this to digital technologies (p. 28). Her worries are shared by many media researchers and seem reasonable when she expresses them, in this book, as tentative and worthy of further study. But the book has attracted significant negative commentary in the British press and blogosphere, in part because of particular statements she made in the years prior to and surrounding its publication. While the book has flaws, it is valuable as a public appeal to attend to new media's possible effects. Much of the research Greenfield discusses is not widely appreciated. She mentions, for example, Seltzer et al.'s (2012) finding that while teenagers' phone calls with parents led to oxytocin and cortisol levels similar to those during in-person interactions, their hormonal responses to text messaging were similar to teens “who did not interact with their parents at all” (pp. 130-131). Greenfield's inclusion of neuroscience findings sets this book apart from popular works drawn mostly from behavioral research. Among the peer-reviewed findings she cites are: enlargement in video gamers of an area in the nucleus accumbens associated with compulsive gambling (p. 42), dopamine release while playing a video game that appears comparable to This is a preprint of Todd Davies' review of Susan Greenfield's book Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains, first published on June 6, 2016, doi:10.1177/1461444816652614. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in New Media & Society, 18(9): 2139-2141, October 2016 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © Todd Davies 2 using Ecstasy (pp. 157-158), and adolescent game addicts showing white matter abnormalities (p. 198). The most notable criticism of this book has come from Bell et al. (2015), who focus on Greenfield's claim that screen media may be causing autism, and on her allegedly misleading portrayal of the evidence for other effects. Greenfield has been careless in public with the terms “autism” and “Autistic Spectrum Disorder”.1 In this book, she attempts to distinguish between autism and “autistic-like traits, such as avoiding eye contact” (p. 136). But she maintains that early exposure to media might explain some of the rise in clinical autism (p. 137). On this latter point, she may be on shaky ground. The evidence does not appear to show technology effects early enough to cause autism. Greenfield's cr

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