 My name is Martin and I'm the program director of the conference and I'm very happy that you're all here. I'm here to introduce the session, The Brain and the Cell, and for this session we've invited two very prominent speakers. First we're going to hear Jens D. Mikkelsen. He's a brain scientist at the Rikshospitalet in Copenhagen and then we're going to hear Maria Åkerlund. She's a senior advisor of Consumer Insights at Ericsson Consumer Lab based here in Malmö. So welcome and Jens give it away. Thank you very much. Usually when I'm scientific conferences people don't give me an applause so I can feel that I'm in a different environment today and as you can see I'm a brain scientist and professor in neuroscience in Copenhagen and my interest is in working memory and sensory processing and apparently that has nothing to do with media or internet but I hope that after my talk that you will see that the brain is not only important for sensing but the brain has adapted to our new environment and technology and that's what I'm going to present. So the content of my talk is divided in three. First of all I'm going to talk a little bit about concepts and how we think and how we remember and I'm going to touch a little bit upon how Google is changing our long-term memory processes. Then I'm going into how the internet that's going to be the main part of my talk, how the internet is influence our concentration, attention and working memory and how we use working memory and what it actually is and in particular how the processing and multitasking that our internet is giving us extremely good conditions to work at, how multitasking is influencing our cognition and finally and that's maybe of more interest to me than maybe to you but is this changing somehow the the the society in way that there are certain diseases that seems to be promoted we see more certain attentional diseases in the society and that we actually losing something as individuals and as society and this is of course based of a number of literature I put up in the in the in the left corner a book written by Nicholas Carr that some of you may familiar with that is I think one of the best that describe what I'm going to describe here but let's start up with some concepts when you sense and you are attentive as I hope most of you are now that's going into a process where you're going to transform that information into something reasonable and here is working memory working memory is the kind of memory you have when you're going to find a telephone number you go to the internet or you go to a book pick up that telephone number you call the number you have the conversation for a minute or two and after that you forgot that number so that's information coming into your brain it's processed it makes real and then it's lost this is very much different from what we call short term memory short term memory is the kind of memory that you have when you come to a shopping center you park your car you go into shop for a couple of hours and then you come back on the parking lot and you should find your car that can sometime fail but this is not working memory this is short term memory and these two process are very much different they're different in the way that the brain is is processing it storing it and using it and then we have the long-term memory that I'm not going to talk a lot about that's what you remember years back maybe in childhood this is a completely different kind of new biology what's important when you're on the internet is working memory that's what you use here and now and that's what's in your brain here and now but working memory is also different things working memory is also essential for you to take decisions to decide what kind of values you want where you want to go here and now it's important for conversation it's important for social recognition and all that is taking place by our frontal lobe up here in the behind the skull here whereas other parts of memory is more deep into our brain and this is more it's illustrated in another way here working memory is here now short-term memory is within hours and long-term memory is days or years so when we are exposed to information we have to select and sort in that information and there are certain channels through which that occurs and there are certain parts where it's lost of course it's lost from what you see and what get into the brain if you really calculate how much information you have in this particular minute it's enormous all these people all these faces all these colors all these smells etc etc etc all that is information but it's some of that is more or less not sensed and what sense comes into the brain and some of that doesn't reach your attention and certainly very little of that is is processed in your working memory that's illustrated with these funnels where where things are lost the other part where things are lost is from your working memory into your short-term memory that telephone number that you already forgot has not been processed into your short-term memory and and that's extremely important when you're going to learn something maybe go back here because what's more or less is learning is to get things from your working memory into your short-term memory or to get certain aspects that you previously remembered into your working memory so the communication between working memory and short-term memory is essential for learning and you can guess that my point is that if you overload your working memory you don't remember that well so the first question and that's really something that's been debated over the years is have we changed our working and memory processes have we simply exported that to our computers are we depending on them and to make a very simple little experiment you can do it like this you have a text that could be a very simple text the butterfly can fly and the butterfly is red and you store that on the file name with a different texture that could be insect and when you done that then suddenly you say oh oops the file is lost and then you ask the test person can you remember the text or can you remember the file name this is a very simple task and it can be done in many different variations but the result is that the person remember the file name much better than the remember the text even though the text is not more complicated than the file name if you tell a person what's in the text and it's stored on the certain file name and you ask afterwards that remember the file name much better than the remember the text so we somehow already adapted our behavior to the computer another important result from this simple experiment is that as soon as you say that the file was deleted then the likelihood that the remember the text is better even though they didn't know it was deleted from the beginning this is part of the working memory so you somehow already is depending on your computer you know you can well you if you know where to find it if you can remember the file name or the or the libraries or where to search for it you only remember that you don't remember what's actually what's the information it's quite remarkable but maybe not a surprise the brain adapts the brain makes things simple so the conclusions from the memory test is three important two important points I think the the quality of decline in memory is detect detected how our quantity is lower that means you you you still remember the quality of the information you don't lose the information but you sort it a different way and the quantity goes down so the content of stores your memory has changed of course and and the consequences that recall is depending on the search machines that's pretty obvious okay let's go back here to the other point I'm going to make in this talk and that's the difference between working memory and more long-term memory forms what's very important is that if you remember the brain changes the brain is not one simple organ it change it's we call it has a potential plasticity this is a very well described phenomenon in neuroscience both when it comes to memory and other kind of learning processes that the way the brain remembers is by changing itself and what actually happens is that you can see that in small nerve cell up in the right corner that these individual green spots are context between nerve cells and what the nerve cells can do is that they can establish or de-establish contact to each other and this is a very active process I'm not saying that more context is better but more sufficient contacts are better and it's quite clear that some brains are better than others that's obvious if we are sick but it's also pretty obvious between individuals some people remember better than others some people process better than others but now we have been bombarded with the internet for the last 10 20 years and most of us in these countries are all using the internet even though I cannot come up with a proof by taking one of the brains from one that has been using the internet and some that are not using the internet and see the difference between the brains I would be surprised if they're not one experiment though that has indicated that the case has been done in UCLA in Los Angeles and the experiment is relatively simple you take internet naive and I tell you these have been hard to find most of them are above 60 years old and then you tend internet experienced individuals and they of course need to be eight match control eight match and you give them two tasks one task is to read a book you let them sit in the scanner then the magnetic resonance and the called an MR scanner where you can see activities in certain brain regions over time so you can see if the brain is active a certain areas then it will be show up on the screen and you for read the book and you compare the two groups of individuals then they use the part of the brain that is important for reading letters and understand letters that's two areas of the brain that's pretty well known that's been known for a long while and these seem to be more less the same but if you expose them to the internet and let them play on the internet or just simply open the computer then there's enormous difference between the two groups those that have been using the internet for years use much more of the brain capacity to do that than those that have not been exposed to the internet before they actually think it's like reading a book but after some time they know it can do much much more it seems to be good because you're probably using some part of the brain that's not for use anyway but that's not the case if you should solve such a simple task by looking into a screen and doing something stupid like being on Facebook or Twitter or something like that and you're spending so much of your brain that's waste of resources and that doesn't look pretty good from a new biological point of view I'm not saying anything what's come out of it so we can see the brains are different and that's probably because that some plasticity has gone as that has occurred there's certain context to those areas of the brain that but not in use from the beginning that's now come into use under those circumstances where we're working and since this is 99.9% of all of us it's interesting for society and it's certainly interesting for new scientists and the perspective is of course it's a changes part of a normal learning process or these changes different that we don't know it it could be a normal learning process adapting to what we what we what we see on the screens but it may not need to be because we're not learning that way or we have not been learning under those conditions before and that and that also tells us when you're reading a book picking up information from a book the brain does it differently than picking up information from the internet if and that's important if it's a multitasking phenomenon and that brings me to to a little last part of the talk and this is multitasking and I'm pretty sure if I'm asking somebody you think that multitasking is fine and you think that doing many things at the same time is good nobody asked if all these tasks are completed the right way I like to just put one important concept into this and that two types of multitasking process when it comes to the internet or cognition you can you can use different kind of programs if you for instance walk around you walk or you clean up or you dish and then you talk telephone at the same time that's true separated kinds of multitasking and then that different cognitive multitasking if you for instance hear something you talk and you see something and you have to think about something at the same time all these are individual cognitive programs and that's what I mean by multitasking okay and that's what's the internet is doing it's challenging us at different components in our cognitive space we don't walk around why we are usually sitting at our computer let's have a look if you sit on a computer and read the text and there's a pop-up or a mail coming in that's two separate multitasking processes that requires two intensive programs from our brain if there are three that three or four five etc. I'm usually saying when I've been asked some people are good at this some people are not that good at this and it's quite clear that the brain is challenged let me give you an example here we have a little square and I give you three or five seconds and where were the blue squares they were there so we go back and then after that you should identify the positions of the blue squares I'm pretty sure that simply putting in and replacing some of the red squares with some green squares made it more difficult to solve the problem amazing not more than a simple replacement of some red with green make it difficult more difficult to solve the task how do you think it is to solve a working memory task under the bombardment of other inputs on the screen it's probably important so the conclusion from the multitask test is individuals on some multitasking are significantly poor to solve a memory working memory task again that's pretty well known but we also have for instance new experiments coming up for the states that if you take a group of people coming to a talk like this and half of them just bring in their portable computer under the arm they're freely allowed to open it or whatever they want to do with it and then you ask after the after the lecture specific points that was mentioned they simply remember poor bike bearing carrying in portable computer and that brings me to to to what's so important it looks like like we think we are better than we actually are we think we get something out of it that we don't get and that may also have certain important consequences for our society and we have seen this before let me just come up with one example and this illustrated here where after the second world war many of the western countries the populations of western countries got more or less free access to calories they could eat as much as they wanted as they could get as much information as they wanted the whole metabolic status of a population changed dramatically so the environment and the adaptations have consequences another examples the number of people going to Mediterranean and have sunshine every summer changed dramatically over the 50s in the 60s and we saw at the same time an enormous rise in certain oncology is for instance melanoma and again if we go back to the to the calorie intake what you see here is a map of the United States with all this with all different states and the blue ones indicate 10% of the people with overweight 10% overweight is a BMI above 30 this brings you to another health state than lower BMIs this is 2006 30% of people in Louisiana are overweight with a BMI above 30 the only thing that's changed is now we get free access to calories maybe looking like this but are we here is that what's going to happen are we simply getting more stupid I'm saying that's something I haven't translated on but this is this is the amount of internet users in Denmark and it's now close to 100% and this is the amount of ADHD attentive deficit disorders in Denmark in the same period of time of course it can be debated now we've been more interested in this disease we see more and more doctors interested and that may also create more diagnosis but it may also illustrate that this is maybe the start of the big start of something that is changing our society and I just want in my conclusion to make sure that I'm not against the internet when I'm saying that the internet is a challenge for our society that will bring some people to be better to find the right information use their working memories and solve task but there's certainly also others that are not have that capacity and end up in a situation where they may say I should never have done it thank you very much