In recent years there have been a spate of stories about the impact of the internet, high-tech gizmos, and the orgiastic deluge of multimedia on our brains. Basically, the human brain is an incredibly-flexible, ever-malleable tool that can alter its capabilities depending on your lifestyle. Someone who does a lot of physical work might have a larger parietal lobe, while a philosopher or writer might literally have a bulging frontal lobe. If you use the internet a lot — if you spend most of your life inside a web browser — your brain changes. Your short term memory might decrease — you are effectively offloading your memory to your computer’s RAM, and your brain reacts accordingly — but in exchange, your cranial capacity for other task will improve.

In short, we might appear dumbed down or stupid in the eyes of our parents, but our brains are simply not built to excel at the same tasks that they’re good at. Your dad might be able to cut down a tree, but does he know Google-fu?

Unfortunately, though, a new study shines a light on a different but inexorably linked problem: Our brains might be the masters of parsing the latest lolcat image or sneezing panda video, but we lack the training to actually make logical, intelligent, and competent inferences from the multimedia that we consume. In other words, modern technology has enabled near-real-time news reporting and beautiful, CGI-rendered movies and commercials, but we’re very poorly equipped to actually analyze the meaning of what we’re experiencing.

The study was conducted in Spain, and so there will be some societal differences between the paella-gobbling siesta lovers and Americans, but the findings are still significant. In essence, people lack the necessary knowledge to critically reflect on what they’ve just seen or heard. People don’t know enough about the production methods and technologies used to create an advert or game (green screens, CGI, Photoshop touch-up), or how they are being specifically targeted by tracking cookies, advertising stereotypes, and so on. Without the correct faculties to break down how the message was created, we are simply prey for broadcasters.

Furthermore, on a more subjective level, the study identified an extreme inability to evaluate the message of the multimedia. “We found that people have serious difficulties defending their opinions regarding the media universe and to discern that media messages are carriers of values and contents,” says Alejandra Walzer, one of the study’s researchers. In other words, the study has put its finger squarely on the reason why people vehemently stand by their political or ideological stance, but usually um, ah, spit, and splutter when actually asked to defend that point of view: They’re just parroting the alluring multimedia that they consume. This observation also neatly explains why a lot of people, when challenged on a topic they feel passionately about, resort to throwing around meaningless phrases like “fanboy” in the hope that their lack of critical reasoning ability won’t be noticed.

What can we do to fix this problem, then? The obvious solution is to bring schooling kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The fact is, education reform is one of the slowest and cumbersome wings of government — you don’t want to mess up an entire crop of kiddies, after all — and schools, at the moment, just don’t produce adults that are properly tech savvy. It isn’t enough to be able to use a smartphone to look up the best candy store in town or check the balance of your bank account — we need to know how the underlying technology actually works. Schooling isn’t going to be fixed any time soon, though, so the best bet is a grassroots movement. As a bona fide tech geek, you are perfectly positioned to teach your friends and family about the technology behind the modern, multimediated society — so get to it!

Read more at ScienceDaily