Baroness Susan Greenfield, a member of the Royal Institution and neuroscientist, has received a fair amount of attention recently for her comments over the last few months on how new waves of technology is changing people's brains.

In short, the human brain is a very flexible organ, and changes as it develops. Like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the better it gets at that particular task. This means that it is sensitive to your environment. So as the environment is changing- with more time being spent playing games, using social networks and so on- therefore the way our brains develop is changing.

This has naturally led to a number of scaremongering headlines...

As a call for greater understanding— for debate and research into what's happening, I think it's something to be welcomed and applauded. The debate is something that is already happening— an article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic last year ("Is Google making us stupid?") generated a considerable amount of discussion and debate about how the internet is shaping the way we think as we consume information.

The problem with research is that, when put through the filters of "PR-reviewed phindings", headline-friendly soundbytes and publicity-seeking journals, what actually comes out of the other end doesn't necessarily match up with the original science— as was clearly illustrated recently when headlines such as Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, scientists warn and Facebook and Twitter 'make us bad people' caught people's attention. With a bit of digging around, the Language Log blog joined the dots between the report and the headlines and found that the actual research had nothing at all to do with social networks or fast-paced media…

As I've said before, this is why I often tend to trust the amateurs… (Although there are professional journalists like Ben Goldacre who cross the line by writing some excellent blog posts in— I presume— their spare time. So maybe I trust the semi-professional too…)

Anyway, the problem as Greenfield puts it is actually slightly different to the real issue as I see it. The idea that "less time is spent socially because more time is spent alone playing computer games" (quote, unquote) seems to me to apply better to children of the 80s— my own generation who spent hours playing games when Atari and Sega were making consoles, Sinclair and Amstrad were making computers, and the hardware debate of the day was whether the Spectrum's higher resolution was worth the payoff of only being able to have 2 colours in an 8x8 pixel sprite. (Back then, you had to understand how computers worked to use them— graphical user interfaces were still some way from being mainstream, and hard drives were considered a luxury.) The point being that back then, we were playing games on our own because we didn't have the option of playing them online. If we were playing with friends, it usually meant taking turns with the controller.

What would we have been doing instead? Well, playing out in the street isn't necessarily an option today- especially if you live in an urban environment— because of different concerns (whether or not they are justified is a whole other debate.)

Would it be better to be alone with a book? Watching television? Neither of these really work on the social skills that Greenfield seems to think would be being developed if we (and our children) weren't using these new technologies.

How about talking on the phone? Something that is changing too— another technological throwback that my generation had to put up with in pre-mobile, pre-VOIP days; one phone number shared by 4 people in the house, billed by the minute, risking having to speak to a girl's dad every time you called… Tell that to kids today and they won't believe you! But is anyone worried about the impact that this changing social behaviour is having on future generations? I doubt it.

The point is that I don't believe that usage of things like the web, computer games and instant messenger have a direct relationship with the "face time" we spend with friends; they are a supplement, rather than a replacement. A study by BT last year found that two thirds of people prefer to speak face-to-face rather than using technology, compared to 52% ten years ago. In other words, while we are spending more time communicating online, we are placing more value on communicating offline. We might be able to fit more online communication into a 24 hour day, but as a result we appreciate the value of the limited amount of face-to-face time that we can get.

So, back to the changing brains; how do we research the changes that are happening? For starters, it would be difficult, if not impossible to find a suitable control group for any study; a group demographically identical to the Facebookers, texters and IM-ers, but who aren't using the internet, playing games etc. So I suspect that it's a non-starter. But what happens when you start to take a wider view than just the technological developments of the last decade?

The fact is, as "Getting Things Done" guru David Allen points out in Wired (UK), a natural environment provides a wider range of stimulation through sounds, smells and sights than any other environment- yet is considered the most soothing. On the other hand, sensory deprivation— the opposite— is a formula for madness. How many thousands of years did our brains develop in this natural, chaotic environment, before we were blocking out the outside world with a pair of white headphones on our way to work?

But there are other changes that are happening— changes which don't require an understanding of neuroscience to appreciate, because they are happening on a larger and more visible scale.

When something changes an individual's brain, the easiest way to see the change is to watch their behaviour. When the same thing happens to a lot of brains, the thing to watch is the wider changes in society.

There's a change I've seen in my own behaviour, and I'm interested to see if it will spread beyond smartphone-using early adopters. For example, not long ago, I found myself searching Google Maps for "Hope."

Rather than some sort of existential mission for spiritual guidance, I was searching on my mobile phone, looking for a nearby pub where I was meeting some friends. In London, there are a lot of pubs, and I often struggle to match a name, a location and my own memories of previous experiences that link the two.

While this might well be related to what I'm doing to my brain cells in those pubs while I'm there, it's a problem that's increasingly simple to address with a Google search on a mobile device. Which got me wondering about the implications that this could have— not just on the personal level as your mobile phone becomes a virtual limb, but on a cultural level.

Firstly, this seems to have the potential to massively change the property market for inner cities. The value of a high street property is far higher than a shop front just a few hundred yards away, off the main pedestrian traffic areas. Where people don't go, people don't see, and where people don't see, people don't shop. But if everyone with a mobile phone also has access to locational services like GPS and online maps, it becomes much easier to find a nearby shop that isn't necessarily somewhere that you would walk past. So the "premium" nature of a shop on the main high street would be diminished.

Potentially at least, this could mean that mobile phones wouldn't just change the way we navigate our cities, but the way our cities develop. Interestingly, a large old city like London could be the most affected by this kind of change. All those hidden away winding back streets suddenly become valuable commercial spaces- no easier to see but, if they have what you're looking for (and a decent online operation), much easier to find.

According to some 'research' from Nokia, looking at how people use maps and give directions, some unique facts about Britain emerged. London is apparently the most confusing city to navigate- thanks to hundreds of years of development and natural growth (as opposed to an ordered and planned grid system), punctuated by events like the Great Fire and World War 2 bombings, and a traffic system put into place to deal with the relatively recent rise of cars and buses on streets that simply weren't made with the volume or nature of traffic that has arrived.

The British are also apparently the nation most likely to deliberately give wrong directions when asked, complicating the matter further for lost pedestrians. More interestingly, the most frequently used landmarks used by the Brits when giving directions are pubs. (The Chinese typically use skyscrapers to give directions, India is the top nation for using shops as a point of reference when giving directions, while in Bengaluru, apparently nearly one in ten guide themselves by the stars— presumably their night skies are clearer than London's...)

This probably highlights the special place that pubs have in British culture as social hubs; meeting points or party venues, the "local" retreat, the pub near the office that becomes the traditional Friday lunchtime haunt. Would this change in naviation change the way we use them? It's difficult to say for sure, but it seems plausible.

More than a quarter (26%) of people surveyed rely on online and mobile navigation tools to find their way around. 13% of people already use a mobile phone as their primary navigation tool. These are numbers that I'm sure will significantly increase over the next few years as "smartphones" replace "feature phones" and the costs of mobile data comes down.

So, from the wiring of our brains to the layout of our cities— what else are these kinds of advances in communications technology going to change?

(Disclaimer: I am aware of the irony in talking about the laughability of "PR-reviewed phindings" and Nokia's "study" on how people use their mobile phones to lose and find themselves in the same post— please regard it as an ironic juxtaposition.)