John Mullen has a brief piece in Harvard Business Review about how “Digital Natives Are Slow to Pick Up Nonverbal Cues:”

If you’re a digital native, you should be aware that the internet may have partially rewired your brain in such a way that when you meet people face to face, you’re less capable of figuring out what they’re thinking.

No, I’m not joking. There’s a significant amount of scientific literature on this. Compared with people who didn’t grow up using computers and the internet, you may be slower to pick up on nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, tones of voice, and body language.

Mullen has a recent article in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology [sub. req.] that fleshes out this claim:

Exposure to digital media is reconfiguring the neural networks of young people, possibly at the expense of empathy and social skills. Extraverts with high self-esteem and certain personality traits tend to initiate face-to-face (FtF) contact with strangers; introverts lower in self-esteem use computer-mediated communication (CMC). Those who are overreliant on CMC miss nonverbal cues indicating deception and insincerity. This research suggests that many who have been raised in the Internet Age may be ill suited for high-trust professions involving the establishment of FtF relationships. Greater use of psychological tests and observations of applicants engaged in behaviors that reveal desired personality traits are in order.

It feels to me, though, that the piece conflates cause and effect. Is he arguing that people who are more introverted don’t develop the capacities for reading nonverbal cues because they choose CMC, or is the use of CMC laying waste to those parts of the brain that let us tell a smile from a frown? Later, though Mullen makes the stronger claim that [ed: long citations removed to improve readability]:

neural pathways necessary to hone interpersonal skills, empathic abilities, and effective personal instincts are often left unstimulated and underdeveloped in digital natives. Functional MRI scans indicate that their frontal lobes are relatively undeveloped. The altered neural networks of these individuals make them less capable of focusing their attention and listening. They crave instant gratification, and are weaker at abstract thinking and planning. Their underdeveloped frontal lobes and their anterior cingulates (the executive region of their brains) may result in impaired judgment and decision-making ability. Creativity may also suffer. Although excessive electronic exposure and overstimulation of young brains can and does affect both men and women, available evidence suggests that men are more severely impacted.

Research conducted thus far has suggested that the consequences of early and prolonged technological exposure of young brains may, in some cases, never be reversed.

It would be worth knowing, though, whether this is true for people who mainly use SMS and chat, or is it also true for Skype and video users as well? I assume that when he says CMC he means highly-mediated, text-based systems, rather than video; and that’s a non-trivial distinction.

I suspect my next book might be something along the lines of, Do Video Games Eat Kids’ Brains? And 99 Other Pressing Questions Parents Have About Digital Natives. Of course it would have to be updated about every 6 months, but so long as it kept selling….