Baroness Greenfield highlights dangers of technology to youngsters at Sixth Arnold Barks Lecture

Monday 12th December 2011 saw Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield speaking to an audience of pre-GCSE students from Bishop Wordsworth’s and Wyvern Schools at the annual Arnold Barks lecture. Taking place at the Institution’s Salisbury area, the event highlighted the way that youngsters have seemingly become reliant on social networking sites and video games. While on the evening she gave a similar lecture, tailored for an adult audience at the Salisbury Arts Centre.

The Arnold Barks Memorial Christmas lectures have been a prestigious event for this area for the past six years. The recent series of lectures are a revival of the old series which were organised by the late Arnold Barks, first originating in 1965 with there being 27 consecutive ones thereafter. They set out to introduce engineering and science to youngsters and encourage these subjects as a career choice and the uptake of engineering at university. Among the most famous lectures in the original series was engineering maverick Professor Eric Laithwaite’s lecture on gyroscopes, which he also delivered at the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture and for the BBC.

Professor Greenfield highlighted the fact that young people could risk having poorer social skills and less empathy with other humans if they carried on with their current lifestyle, with over 1,900 hours of their time spent in front of a screen.

She also pointed out that interacting with 150 ‘friends’ via a screen means nothing compared with the ten friends that you may have in real life, where you can use the normal social networking skills such as eye contact, body language, voice and physical contact.

The high-profile neuroscientist from Oxford University also explained how gaming could see individuals develop fragmented attention and a shorter attention span, together with increasing recklessness and aggression. This is particularly an issue in teenagers as the prefrontal processing capacity of the brains of healthy humans is not fully developed under the age of 20. While the impersonal nature of games also leads to a potential lack of empathy with other humans as characters in games have a less meaningful identity than in a book or real life.

Hon Secretary of the Institution’s Salisbury area, Nick Schulkins commented on the event: “Susan Greenfield was considered by many of the audience to be the best speaker that we’ve had during the history of these lectures, with many of the ladies in the audience finding her very inspirational.”

2012’s lectures are set to focus on the interesting Bloodhound project with a key member of the team set to speak to students and other invited guests. This is set to take place on Wednesday 5 December with tickets due to be on sale from September. If you are interested in learning more about the event then please contact Nick Schulkins on either SalisburySec@imechenetwork.org or by calling him on 07768632234.