Touch-screen phones and other touch-screen devices have been proven to enhance the plasticity of the human brain for the first time. Plasticity is considered to be the amount of communication that occurs between different regions of the brain. Arko Ghosh of the University of Zurich and colleagues are the first to prove that using touch-screen devices improves the human brain.
The researchers found that brain activity increased rapidly when a person used their thumb, index finger, and middle finger to text, click, or interact with a smart phone or other device that had a touch-screen. The tests used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain activity in the brains of participants that used touch-screen devices. The study found that using a touch-screen device regularly with three fingers on each hand had a tremendous influence on the connectivity between regions of the brain that communicated touch and other regions of the brain that were not involved with the sense of touch.
The electrical activity in the cortex of the brain that is associated with the sense of touch in a person’s fingers was greatly enhanced by frequent use of a touch-screen device. The more often a person used a touch-screen device the more brain connections developed. The thumb was found to be the most sensitive region of the sense of touch and generated the majority of the increase in brain interconnections.
This is the first study that shows that the human brain is improved by the use of touch-screen devices. The study shows that the more often a person uses the touch-screen device the more rapidly the brain is upgraded by the use of the device. This study is the first to indicate that smart phones and other touch-screen devices actually improve human brain capabilities.
