Society may end up losing its mindEnter Susan Greenfield, a baroness. Toss out twin-set and pearl visions of a crusty old toff who only reads Country Life. The baroness is a widely published neuroscientist, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, researching Alzheimer's disease.
Now forget visions of a scruffy, absent-minded professor babbling about some esoteric science.
The 57-year-old baroness (she was appointed to the House of Lords under Tony Blair's reforms in 1998 for her eminence in science) is a thin, attractive blonde who has a knack for making connections between the highfalutin world of brain cells and the home, the classroom and youth culture. Not content with heading up the Royal Institution of Great Britain, whose mandate is to "diffuse science for the common purposes of life", Greenfield is one of the driving forces behind the new Royal Institution Australia, which will officially open its doors in Adelaide's grand old stock exchange building on October 9.
With the same mission in mind - of making science more central to Australian society - Greenfield was in Australia last week with plenty to say. Her fear is that our children's brains are being rewired in a way that has never happened before.
Given the plasticity of the human brain, Greenfield - whose latest book, ID - The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century is a must-read for parents - says we should be asking questions about the effects of hours in front of a computer screen playing games and engaging in two-dimensional relationships.
Computer games are full of Crash! Boom! Bang! sensations, a series of never-ending actions, reactions, actions and reactions. The games - often violent and without consequences - are full of sensory stimuli that deliver kids increased doses of dopamine. You kill someone, you play again. You get killed, you play again.
Greenfield says as a society we would be remiss not to ask whether a child's brain is being altered by spending hours immersed in that kind of sensory stimuli.
She refers to research from Harvard Medical School where three groups of adults were taken into three rooms each with a piano. None played the piano. The first group were given piano lessons for five days. The second group went into an identical room but did nothing. The third group, again in an identical room, were asked to imagine they were having piano lessons. Brain scans of the first group showed structural changes in their brain associated with finger movement. No surprise. The second group showed no changes. No surprise there either. But the third group, who had not touched the piano - only imagined they had - showed changes similar to those in the first group.
Writing in the British press, Greenfield said: "What worries me is that if something as innocuous as imagining a piano lesson can bring about a visible physical change in brain structure ... what changes might long stints playing violent computer games bring about?"
Her fear, as she told the House of Lords in February, is that the "mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short-term attention spans, sensationalism, inability to emphasise and a shaky sense of identity."