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Baroness Susan Greenfield claims use of computers and games changes the way the brain works, promoting excessive eating
Baroness Susan Greenfield has launched an attack on the IT industry, claiming it – along with the games industry – are fuelling the obesity crisis.
Speaking to a science seminar at the House of Lords, the peer said that use of computers and video games were 'infantilising', changing the way it work and promoting obesity in the process, reports the Telegraph.
She said that the nature of IT and games and the ability to just restart when a error was made, was changing the way the brain worked, claiming a child who fell out of a tree would not make the make the same mistake again, but a computer user or gamer would.
As a result, she claimed that people would continue to eat too much, or eat the wrong foods, due to a lower recognition of cause and consequence. She added this also had the impact of cutting attention spans and 'stifling empathy and imagination'.
She argued that it meant that the parts of the brain that promote those processes would not be able to develop properly. "You use it or lose it," she said. "And if you don't use it, you are infantilising the brain, it won't come on stream as much, that's the hypothesis."
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Much of the argument hinged on research that showed that damage to the pre-frontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for higher-thought – it becomes less active and makes people more likely to take risks. The fatter people are – she claimed – the less that part of the brain is active.
Some of the most creative people I've ever met spent their childhood with computers and playing games.
Sure, some of them aren't exactly on the thin side, but they'd be the first to admit that's down to not enough exercise and too much beer than anything else.
you cant blame the IT or Games industry for obesity or a lack of Imagination! for a start, PC games today are the most creative thing out there, creating whole worlds from a persons imagination. If it stifled a person's imagination then we would all still be playing Pong....
And i am an avid gamer, and work in IT Sales/Repairs, but i keep fit through regular exercise and sports. I eat properly, and have many other hobbies!
If you want to blame something or someone, then im my opinion you should look at the education system for one thing! if kids were taught how to eat properly in school, and they were taught the benefits of PE and exercise then we wouldnt have such a problem!
And then theres the Parents, dont get me started on them.....now decent parent should allow their child to sit in front of a computer game for hours on end. If they are alowed to do it, they think its ok to do it!!
IT and Gaming are not not to blame....
We went through all this last month with that misguided government ad campaign (the one with the kid on the sofa with a games controller).
Presumably if the kid was sitting on the sofa reading a book as opposed to playing outside it would be OK then, would it?
CROSSPOSTED FROM COUNTERPART MCV ARTICLE
This was originally brought up ages ago. There's a little more information in her an older Telegraph article and her column in Wired UK this month- which show up the flaws in her arguments about the effect games have on the brain which, entirely nonshockingly, are mostly to do with a lack of knowledge of videogames.
She particuarily cites a lack of narrative in games- that, in her own words(ish), games are a sequence of challenges that need to be overcome to save the princess- the princess is a 'goal' that nobody really empathises with, as opposed to a princess that actually needs saving, that you care about and want to discover more about.
This is flawed for a number of reasons- Greenfield has chosen the story from Super Mario Bros.- a NES game released in 1985- to demonstrate every single videogame, ever. The catch here is that the last videogame story that was that simplistic, that lacking in depth and character development was Super Mario Bros.- a NES game released in 1985, overlooking the much more developed Half Life 2 canon or GTA IV.
Hell, even Gears Of War is an order of magnitude better than SMB.
Secondly, even if, for a second, we assume Greenfield to be right, and that games are only seen as goals and has some detrimental effect or another, this is not something that is exclusive to games- I don't care about the guy stood behind the till in Tesco- dealing with him is merely a 'goal' that I have to achieve in order to get food- likewise, he doesn't care about me- serving me is merely a 'goal' he has to achieve to get paid. Is this really different?
Extending it to media- Greenfield previously citing books as an incredible, exempt-from-criticism artform of amazingness and polar opposite to gaming, a form where readers inherently empathise and want to find out more about the characters- that bored kid sat in a high school English classroom doesn't care about either Romeo or Juliet, he just sees getting to the end of the book as a 'goal' that shuts the teacher up for a bit. Is this really different?
At best, Susan Greenfield is simply misguided and making an innocent error. At worst, she's attacking an easy and popular target to get her name in the papers and sell a few books (or, having seen the way the games industry, Nintendo in particular, treats its detractors in the wake of Change4Life, threatening with outtretched palm), and in the middle, she's an old woman railing against a new world that she doesn't understand and scares her.
To be fair, I'm not a neuroscientist and I'm not in a position to call her out in that field. But the flaws in her connections between her neuroscience and the outside world are very visible for all to see.
I blame the wheel and the invention of fire... how can a so called 'scientist' also manage the diametrically opposed role of chief ludite!
We should have never left the trees, back to the jungle my simian brother WHOOOO WHOOOO!
I have seen Baroness Greenfield before on a television programme which, to be slightly reductive, claimed that reading any printed fiction would stimulate your imaginative abilities to great heights but that reading any text on a computer would destroy it; clearly factual books or fiction in a digital format should be considered anathema by anyone who wants to be at all creative. What I find interesting is the idleness behind Greenfield's assertions. She does not seem to be particularly forthcoming with references, as she does not once mention any in either the article linked above or the television programme I referred to earlier, in which she was given a sizeable amount of time to speak to camera about her hypothesis without being challenged. Further, if Greenfield undertook even rudimentary research into the subject it would be almost impossible to miss the work of James Gee, particularly his 2003 book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In the book, Gee details what he calls the “probe, hypothesize, reprobe, rethink” cycle:
The player must probe the virtual world (which involves looking around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action).
Based on reflection while probing and afterward, the player must form a hypothesis about what something (a text, object, artifact, event, or action) might mean in a usefully situated way.
The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets.
The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or rethinks his or her original hypothesis.
I would be curious to see Baroness Greenfield lay out her views properly, as opposed to hearing them in a documentary which may be subject to editing or reading them in an article written by someone else. I would also like to ask why, when she has done a lot of good work in terms of raising public understanding of science and has been successful in her research endeavours regarding diseases which affect the brain, she does not expend the same energy raising the issues of the strong links between poverty and obesity. Perhaps someone with some level of public profile could contact her about these issues.
David McClure
