This is your brain on texting: How smartphones affect your body

Smartphones have become an ubiquitous part of people’s lives, but we don’t really pause to analyze what effects these smartphones might have on us. While it’s been shown that there’s no proof of radiation-related health risks from using smartphones, a new study has shown that smartphone use does have an effect on the human brain.

Enhanced thumb sensory representation
 

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, said that smartphone users have an enhanced thumb sensory representation in the brain. Results also suggest that repetitive movements on the touchscreen—such as texting—”reshaped sensory processing” from the users’ hands and that the representation of the hand was updated daily, depending on how much smartphone use occurred during the day.

 

“I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones, ” said Arko Ghosh, lead author of the paper, in a press release. Ghosh is from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. “I was also struck by how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs.”

Brain activity proportional to phone use
 

The team studied the participants’ brains using EEG to record brain response when the the tips of their thumbs, index, and middle fingers were touched. They found that the electrical activity in the brain of the smartphone users was enhanced when the tips of all three fingers were touched. They also found that the brain’s activity level was directly proportional to the amount of someone’s phone use.

 

“I think first we must appreciate how common personal digital devices are and how densely people use them,” Ghosh said. “What this means for us neuroscientists is that the digital history we carry in our pockets has an enormous amount of information on how we use our fingertips (and more).”

 

In the Philippines, a country where almost half the population is online, smartphone penetration is expected to increase in the coming years as prices are expected to drop. — Bea Montenegro/TJD, GMA News