Micah Allen er hjerneforsker og PhD studerende på Århus Universitet. Her fortæller han om sociale mediers indflydelse på hjernen til Headstart Morgenseminar d. 17. marts 2010.

1. ZOMBIES OR CYBORGS: Is Facebook eating your brain? Micah Allen PhD Student @

2. VS

5. NEUROSCIENCE: A DISCLAIMER

6. POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS Brain Plasticity in the Human Neocortex

8. MICROSTRUCTURAL PLASTICITY

10. STRUCTURAL PLASTICITY IN DEVELOPMENT Gogtay et al. Dynamic mapping of human cortical development during childhood through early adulthood. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (2004) vol. 101 (21) pp. 8174-9

11. BASIC METHODS IN VBM AND FMRI

15. BLOBS

20. ZOMBIES AND CYBORGS What are they? Micah Allen PhD Student @

22. BRAAAAIIINNSSS….. “ A study by the Broadcaster Audience Research Board found teenagers now spend seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen. Educational psychologist Jane Healy believes children should be kept away from computer games until they are seven. Most games only trigger the 'flight or fight' region of the brain, rather than the vital areas responsible for reasoning. Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, said: 'We are seeing children's brain development damaged because they don't engage in the activity they have engaged in for millennia.” -Daily Mail

23. ENTER THE CYBORGS

27. SOCIAL CYBORGS?

29. EXTENDING THEORY-OF-MIND

30. EXTENDING THEORY-OF-MIND

31. CYBERNETIC SOCIAL COGNITION? Micah Allen: [email_address] We now know that the brain is highly plastic, adapting to culture and environment in a dynamic fashion. Further, we can understand the unique 2-way relationship between tool use and cognition So what about Web 2.0?

32. SOCIAL COGNITION 2.0 Micah Allen: [email_address] Social media is "an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos, and audio." - http://wikipedia.org Facts: 3/4 of Americans use social technology -Forrester, 2008 2/3 of the global internet population use social networks -Nielsen, 2009 Visiting SNSs is the 4th most popular online activity- more than email! -Nielsen, 2009 As of 12/2/2009 350,000,000 people use Facebook worldwide -Facebook.com Time spent on SNS is growing 3X the overall internet rate, accounting for roughly 10% of all internet time -Nielsen, 2009 “ What the F**K is social media, Kagan 2009”

33. THE NEW SOCIAL BRAIN

34. Micah Allen: [email_address] The social web provides expanded opportunities to flex our cognitive muscles, through a unique medium of interaction.

35. SOCIAL COGNITION 2.0 Micah Allen: [email_address]

36. Micah Allen: [email_address] Dense streams of multi-modal data provide opportunities to enrich our mental representations, opening the window for prolonged social self-stimulation in ways that transcend traditional dogma and social normativity. The web is a social laboratory- a place rich in intersubjective data providing endlessly inter-layered surveys of the opinions, beliefs, motivations and desires that make up our collective social fabric

37. Micah Allen: [email_address] Not only does social media potentially strengthen our inner social mechanisms; social media reshapes knowledge itself, establishing a variety of collective, collaborative sense-making narratives. Further, Web 2.0 extends the traditional routines to this rich tapestry- like the notepad or calculator for arithmetic, I can now offload my sense-making of others, objects, and events to the digital intersubjective.

38. SOCIAL COGNITION 2.0 Micah Allen: [email_address] This offloading to the collective democratizes information sharing, contextualizing events in ways that defy cultural and political boundaries.

39. SOCIAL COGNITION 2.0 Micah Allen: [email_address]

40. Micah Allen: [email_address] This is true extended cognition- the cognitive loop is completed in digitally mediated worlds- social technology makes information social- lending it immediacy and accessibility

41. Micah Allen: [email_address] Social media extracts the meaningful from the noise, increasing interdependency between information Turning this:

43. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BRAIN? Micah Allen: [email_address] My hypothesis: Brain Culture Technology Mind

44. SOCIAL TOOLS

53. TRAIT-ADJECTIVE TASK

55. OTHER TASKS – TOM WORD PROBLEMS

59. THANK YOU! Thanks to: Supervisors: Andreas Roepstorff, Antoine Lutz, Peter Vestergaard Supporting Institutions : Interacting Minds and the Danish Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, London Knowledge Lab, ÅU Collaborators and Contributors: Yishay Mor, Shaun Gallagher Contact: [email_address] Twitter: @neuroconscience URL: neuroconscience.com Slides: http://bit.ly/b7uiA7