TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - More touchscreen use in the recent past translates directly into greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched, a research published on journal Current Biology concluded.

"I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones," says Arko Ghosh of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in Switzerland, as quoted by Science Daily.

"I was also struck by how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs."

The increasing human obsession toward the smart phones has triggered Ghosh’s experiment to study be the everyday plasticity of the human brain. To link digital footprints to brain activity in the new study, Ghosh and his team used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the brain response to mechanical touch on the thumb, index, and middle fingertips of touchscreen phone users in comparison to people who still haven't given up their old-school mobile phones.

The researchers found that the electrical activity in the brains of smartphone users was enhanced when all three fingertips were touched. The results suggest to the researchers that repetitive movements over the smooth touch-screen surface reshape sensory processing from the hand, with daily updates in the brain's representation of the fingertips.

"We propose that cortical sensory processing in the contemporary brain is continuously shaped by personal digital technology," Ghosh and his colleagues wrote.

Ghosh, however, reminded that there is also evidence linking excessive phone use with motor dysfunctions and pain.

SCIENCEDAILY | AMRI MAHBUB