Smartphones affect brain process relating to touch

The use of smartphone touchscreens can alter brain activity in relation to fingertips, according to a new study.

A team of scientists from Switzerland conducted a study to find out if smartphones can make people smarter. While other studies have focused on video gamers and motor skills, none had analyzed whether smartphone touchscreens have an effect on the brain in terms of the fingers, writes CBC News.

"I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones," said Arko Ghosh of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in Switzerland, lead investigator of the study.

Researchers analyzed data from 37 right-handed volunteers over 10 days -- 26 of whom used touchscreen phones and 11 of whom used only old cellphones. The volunteers then had an electroencephalogram (EEG), which recorded voltage changes from brain activity, while their thumbs, index and middle fingers are being stimulated 1,250 times.

"By using electroencephalography, we measured the cortical potentials in response to mechanical touch on the thumb, index and middle fingertips of touchscreen phone users and non-users [owning only old-technology mobile phones]."

The findings indicated "that cortical sensory processing in the contemporary brain is continously shaped by the use of personal digital technology."

People who use smartphones have an enhanced somatosensory cortex, RT News reported. The significance of changes depended on how recent the exposure to screens was. The strongest response was seen on the thumb, followed by the index and middle fingers.

"The closer they were to peak usage, in time, the more brain activity they had associated with their thumb," Ghost said in a statement according to LA Times.

"The findings don't offer a major breakthrough for brain science, per se, but they do represent a clever way to track how the brain adapts during daily activity," Ghosh said, adding that scientists can now "start extracting which factors matter for the brain, which don't, what are the drivers of plasticity and what are not?"

"To do this, connecting our digital footprints to brain activity is what we need to do," he added.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.