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"Brain scans, however, are quite telling, especially when analyzed with an algorithm, Brent and his colleagues discovered. "We're trying to figure out what's going on in somebody's brain when they're thinking about suicide," says Brent.  These scans, taken using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, show that strong words such as 'death,' 'trouble,' 'carefree,' and 'praise,' trigger different patterns of brain activity in people who are suicidal, compared with people who are not. That means that people at risk of suicide think about those concepts differently than everyone else-evidenced by the levels and patterns of brain activity, or neural signatures."

"Part of this is due to misinterpretation of a much-publicized paper out of the MIT Media Lab (with authors from other institutions as well), titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT." The actual study is much less dramatic than the press coverage. It involved a small group of college students who were assigned to write essays alone, with Google, or with ChatGPT (and no other tools). The students who used ChatGPT were less engaged and remembered less about their essays than the group without AI. Four months later, nine of the ChatGPT users were asked to write the essay again without ChatGPT, and they performed worse than those who had not used AI initially (though were required to use AI in the new experiment) and showed less EEG activity when writing. There was, of course, no brain damage. Yet the more dramatic interpretation has captured our imagination because we have always feared that new technologies would ruin our ability to think: Plato thought writing would undermine our wisdom, and when cellphones came out, some people worried that not having to remember telephone numbers would make us dumber."

"The internet and its progeny, like smart car dashboards and buzzing smartphones, are built to make it seem like they can help us multitask, but our brains just aren't cut out for it. "It leads us to try to engage in multiple information-demanding activities simultaneously, and that is what our brains just do not do very well. They weren't evolved for that very type of demand," said Gazzaley, who also wrote The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World."

""The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," said researcher Andrea Stocco, assistant professor in psychology at the University of Washington."

"Could we soon send emails 'telepathically'? Scientist transmits message into the mind of a colleague 5,000 miles away using brain waves"

"Although we think we're doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are "not wired to multitask well… When people think they're multitasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. "

"Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric is just one example of the large-scale application of brain surveillance devices to monitor people's emotions and other mental activities in the workplace, according to scientists and companies involved in the government-backed projects. Concealed in regular safety helmets or uniform hats, these lightweight, wireless sensors constantly monitor the wearer's brainwaves and stream the data to computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms to detect emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage."

"Research suggests more than half of adolescents are on screens right before bedtime, and that can keep them from getting the sleep they need. Not only is poor sleep linked to all sorts of downsides, including poor mental health symptoms, poor performance in school and trouble regulating stress, Prinstein said, but "inconsistent sleep schedules are associated with changes in structural brain development in adolescent years. In other words, youths' preoccupation with technology and social media may deleteriously affect the size of their brains.""

"There has also been, he says, "a real push in opinion pieces and popular-press books that are sloppy scientifically but stated so confidently. The ideas in these books are not peer-reviewed." The published studies they cite tend to have small samples and no control groups, and to be based on associations rather than proving cause. "People will say: 'The iPhone was invented in 2007 and Instagram became popular in 2012 and, oh my God, look, tech use has gone up at the same time mental health has gone down!' It seems like common sense - that's why you have this kind of consensus. But it just isn't scientific." In 2023, Przybylski and his colleagues looked at data from almost 12,000 children in the US aged between nine and 12 and found no impact from screen time on functional connectivity ("how different parts of the brain kind of talk to each other", he explains), as measured with fMRI scans while the children completed tasks. They also found no negative impact on the children's self-reported wellbeing. "If you publish a study like we do, where we cross our Ts, we dot our Is, we state our hypotheses before we see the data, we share the data and the code, those types of studies don't show the negative effects that we expect to see.""

Although companies have tried to interest more people with brain training games, it turns out they do not work.

"What if technology provided the ultimate resolution of this existential crisis by allowing you to plug your brain into a boundless, cognitive melting pot with other humans?"

"Eric Leuthardt believes that in the near future we will allow doctors to insert electrodes into our brains so we can communicate directly with computers and each other."

"Instead, the new work shows our brains rely on the kind of maths that an algorithm might use to perform the task. In fact, Tsao and her colleague, Steven Le Chang, stumbled on their discovery while working on computer vision. The pair had initially set themselves the challenge of coming up with a way of reliably converting facial images into a numerical representation."

"It is the first time scientists have created sentences from brain activity linked to handwriting and paves the way for more sophisticated devices to help paralysed people communicate faster and more clearly. The man, known as T5, who is in his 60s and lost practically all movement below his neck after a spinal cord injury in 2007, was able to write 18 words a minute when connected to the system. On individual letters, his "mindwriting" was more than 94% accurate."

"A natural alternative to symbolic AI came to prominence: Instead of modeling high-level reasoning processes, why not instead model the brain? After all, brains are the only things that we know for certain can produce intelligent behavior. Why not start with them?"

"Iam not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a "feeling brain". "

"The difference between skimming and reading with all our intelligence is the difference between fully activated reading brains and their short-circuited, screen-dulled versions."

"But Leuthardt, for one, expects he will live to see it. "At the pace at which technology changes, it's not inconceivable to think that in a 20-year time frame everything in a cell phone could be put into a grain of rice," he says. "That could be put into your head in a minimally invasive way, and would be able to perform the computations necessary to be a really effective brain-computer interface.""

"Brain scans predict students' learning better than exam results and show the underlying structure of thinking. According to recent research published in Science Advances, the conventional exams and grades that schools have long employed may evaluate learning less accurately than brain scans."

"To start we need a new human right to "cognitive liberty", which would come with an update to other existing human rights to privacy, freedom of thought and self-determination. All told it would protect our freedom of thought and rumination, mental privacy, and self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. It would change the default rules so we have rights around the commodification of our brain data. "