Thumb Typing Is Changing Our Brains

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According to researchers at the Institute of Neuroinformatics of the University of Zurich, " smartphones are changing us ". It seems that as we moved from phones with buttons and even feature phones the parts of our brain associated with the thumbs are changing thanks to increased screen typing activity.

In short, when we use smartphones our brains show more activity in the parts associated with the thumb, but this reaction only happened in users of touchscreen phones.

The scientists studied “37 right-handed people, of whom 26 were touchscreen Smartphone users and 11 users of old cellphones.” They found that cortical brain activity in the area associated with thumb control was higher in the touchscreen users. This actually points to similar findings in violinists whose brains change as they get better at the instrument.