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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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MIND CHANGE

Susan Greenfield

How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark On Our Brains

A bold new work by leading neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, a riveting and timely look at how our ever-increasing embrace of digital technologies is changing our brains. As eye-opening as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, MIND CHANGE addresses a problem as pervasive and wide-spread as climate change -- and will forever affect how we think about our screens and our minds.
We live in a world unimaginable even a few decades ago. It's a parallel world where we can be on the move in the real world, yet always hooked into an alternative time and place. And although it's a two-dimensional world of sight and sound, it offers instant information, connected identities, and constant novelty. In this world, our screen technologies are increasingly where we work, where we unwind, where we relieve our boredom and where we learn. The subsequent transformation in how we live and think is a vitally important issue. When toddlers are given iPads, and adults spend ten hours a day staring at a screen, can we afford to assume that our brave new screen technologies are harmless tools?

Blending a wide range of scientific studies, news events, and cultural criticism with brio and verve, MIND CHANGE presents an incisive snapshot of the global ‘now.’ Greenfield examines how the dawn of the Digital Age has already altered our cultural landscape, fueled an epidemic of oversharing, and transformed how we learn, remember and spread information -- and how these innovations are changing our physical brains. The human brain is remarkably adaptive - it changes and rewires itself on a daily basis. This ability of the brain to respond to the environment it inhabits has long given us an evolutionary edge - but what happens when the environment in question rewards short-term memory, but not linear thought? No one can deny that the Digital Age has transformed our lives. In effect, we have already created a new environment. And as Greenfield shows, the human brain will adapt to this one, too - just as it has done with every other historical environment.

A warning cry, a shot across the bow, and a call to action, MIND CHANGE explores the social, cultural and physiological ramifications of our new digital lifestyle.

Baroness Susan Greenfield, CBE is a British scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords. An accomplished neuroscientist, she has a substantial - as well as controversial - profile in the UK, where she frequently crosses swords with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Ben Goldacre. She has published articles in The Daily Mail and The New Statesman, she appears regularly on radio and television, and she frequently gives talks to the public and private sector. Her research focuses on the impact of 21st century technologies on the mind, how the brain generates consciousness and novel approaches to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. She is the best-selling author of The Private Life of the Brain, Tomorrow's People, ID: A Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century and the novel 2121: A Tale From The Next Century. She is Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and a former Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
Available products
Book

Published 2015-01-01 by Random House

Book

Published 2015-01-01 by Random House

Comments

Greenfield is] often described as the foremost female scientist in Britain, but is one of the best of any gender, anywhere, at getting complicated ideas across.

While Greenfield is cautious about making definitive statements, she is determined to persuade readers to think about how all our texting, e-mailing, and social networking may be affecting our very brains. Although densely written at times, Mind Change is exceedingly well organized and hits the right balance between academic and provocative. There is no question about the need for us to think more deeply about this topic.

Britain’s best-known neuroscientist, a fantastic popularizer of ideas about consciousness and identity.

Startling statistics...The importance of Mind Change's subject is clear.

Susan Greenfield is the David Suzuki of the digital moment. She is a wise and conscientious scientist intent on waking up a complacent world. While others demure that “the jury is still out” about the effects of screen time on our minds, Greenfield is emphatic: we are changed in very real ways by our digital lives--and not always for the better. That old injunction from Apple to ‘Think Different’ is recast here in a rather harrowing new light. Our technologies do indeed encourage us to think differently, as Marshal McLuhan foretold. I was thrilled and fascinated to read this brave new work.

A comprehensive overview of the scientific research—albeit in its infancy—into the effects of cybertechnology on our brains. Considering the advances in neurology over the past decade or so, neuroscientist Greenfield raises questions with startling implications. How does our screen-oriented daily existence affect how we think, feel, live our lives and shape our identities? What are the consequences of connecting digitally rather than in person or collapsing the frameworks and timetables that have given skeletal stability to our daily lives? [A] challenging, stimulating perspective from an informed neuroscientist on a complex, fast-moving, hugely consequential field.

his is just the book we need now as we proceed to absorb fresh digital innovations: a scientific review of effects on the brain and what they mean for our minds. We have the latest experimental findings presented clearly to lay readers as Greenfield brings just the right level of skepticism and curiosity to the digital revolution. Neither a naysayer nor an enthusiasts, she is a sober, reliable, and engaging voice on screen experience, telling us what happens inside our heads each time we log on, connect, play, and emote.

Greenfield's admirable goal to provide an empirical basis for discussion is...an important one.

Many trees have been chopped down to produce the paper on which jeremiads or scholarly treatises on the dangers of digital technology have been published. Susan Greenfield has produced a gem of a book – written with both verve and impressive clarity – warning not of the obvious dangers like a loss of privacy, but of what technology might do to our brains and social relations, to how we learn and teach, to the narcissism exemplified by “selfies.” While the author is a scholar, she is never obscure. Nor is she a Luddite, hitting readers over the head with a two-by-four, expressing certitude about our dour future. Rather, she adds a fresh voice, vividly connecting the dots to reveal that “mind change,” as she calls it, is as vital to grapple with as is climate change.

Greenfield is not just an engaging communicator but a thoughtful, responsible scientist, and the arguments she makes are well supported and persuasive.

Susan Greenfield enthralls and intrigues her readers in equal measure…a force of intellect and a force of nature.

Ebury/ Random House (UK), NTV Dogus (Turkey), Kadokawa (Japan), Business Books (Korea), China Machine Press (China- simplified script)