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When neurologist William Tatum and his team stuck scalp electrodes on people undergoing video EEG monitoring for epilepsy, they stumbled upon what might be the first biological evidence that texting physically messes with the brain. Tatum’s chief technician at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., noticed odd brain waveforms when some people texted. The brain patterns caught her attention because they were weirdly similar to what she was looking for: potential seizure activity. The findings, reproduced in a recently published study involving 129 people, monitored 24 hours a day over 16 months, add tantalizing new insights into smartphone-brain “interfaces,” Tatum says. A look at the brain-on-texting phenomenon