Susan Greenfield

In this highly engaging presentation for 5X15, Baroness Susan Greenfield ponders the effects of the screen on ‘mind change’. Stressing the minute-by-minute adaptability of the mind, Greenfield explains the processes in the personalisation of the brain through individual experience. As we get older and experience, feel and think, our brains adapt and evolve becoming ever more individual. Greenfield expresses concern over how young people today are in danger of hindering their brain-development via an unhealthy engagement with modern technology. How does a screen culture give us meaning? Teach us empathy? It might give us a higher IQ and a better short-term memory, but we are losing our sense of identity. Greenfield urges that we need to think of ways of transforming information into knowledge: knowledge, after all, is true understanding, and it does not come at the push of a button.