Yesterday, I was at lunch with some German colleagues and we were filling the time as we ate with casual chat, as colleagues who are little more than acquaintances do, about things like upcoming Halloween, opinions on Bladerunner, and emerging technology. As I was the only English mother-tongue speaker at the table, my colleagues graciously conducted this conversation in English. This, despite the fact that I live in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and really ought to have a better grasp of German than I do.
I have been valiantly trying for some time now to improve my grasp of German and use DuoLingo daily. I also travel a lot for pleasure to Italy so, in addition to German, I have been attempting to get my Italian upgraded to tourist class. And I am about to work in the Netherlands, so Dutch has also recently been added to the DuoLingo daily-do list. What is fascinating for me is that I can actually feel something in my brain grinding away as I try to learn these languages, remember words, and differentiate them from one another. A physical feeling in my brain. I have no idea what it’s doing, but I can feel it working.
I relayed this to my fluent English-speaking colleagues and, being technology folks, there was a quick speculation about the point in time in which we all wore an earpiece and could understand one another without having to bother with learning the foreign language at all. And a little bit of me was saddened by the idea that our brains would cease ploughing little furrows deeper so that we might become better at a skill, and that others may not know the quiet satisfaction of actually feeling your brain working. If we do, as I suspect we will, have aides like an earpiece, augmented reality, robotic assistants and other such useful technology, it’s quite possible we will change our evolutionary direction in time. I am no Luddite, and I know the children of today will interact with technology quite differently to the, frankly, quite clunky ways we do now (see the head gestures, for instance, on these headphones that are also trying to become that in-ear translator I spoke about earlier) but it seems a shame that the evolution of technology will change the human brain in this particular way.
There was a piece in The Independent recently about how the inventor of the Like button has taken Facebook off his phone for fear of its effects. It echoes an article in the Guardian from 2010 in its concern for our lack of understanding of the true impact of our (over?)use of technology upon our brains. We don’t know yet what the impact on your brains will be over time, and much may well be positive, rather than the doomsday scenarios many writers like to depict. But I think increasing our awareness of our use of technology and where we use apps that might just be exploiting your little desire for the dopamine reaction can be no bad thing.
I know if I could just put a little earbud in my ear, instead of torturing myself with German adjectival conjugations, my German colleagues would not have to converse in English around me. But I also somehow think my brain would be the worse off for the exercise. Here’s a little piece of research that backs this up.