Futurewatch Jennifer Coote New Zealand Futures Trust New Zealand

es some significant research into brain functioning. The mental habits we are learning as we use the Internet are altering our capabilities to read, and for thinking. New habits create new brain connections , while older established ones wither or fail to form. This brain plasticity is a great quality, but it also favours "primitive" mental functions, such as quick decision making, over intellectual ones associated with reading, such as language, memory and visual processing. Psychologists have found that people who read old-fashioned text understand it better and more profoundly than those who read the same material enhanced with links. Several academics, psychiatrists, writers and cognitive neuroscientists comment briefly in response to issues above, Headlines, (Newsletter of NZ Neurological Foundation), Summer, 2010. While the access to raw information via the Internet is unparalleled, how we utilise it is up to us. We could simply endeavour to make more time to read, in order to keep those brain connections intact. The impact of the Internet has helped us to learn more ways of measuring its organisation as a network, since, like the brain, it is a non-random network. The revolutionary advances in human ability to read and write, and to develop science have arisen over the millennia because of the plasticity of the brain. The Internet is another liberating extension even though it may be put to bad usages. Understanding the design principles of the plastic reading brain highlights the dilemma we face with our children. We humans were never born to read. We have no reading template, and the reading brain can be short-circuited with little time or attention to the deep reading processes that contribute to the reader's cognitive development. A cognitive neuroscientist explains how our brain empowers us to read. A particular factor involves the balance between evoking the sound of word in spoken language and rapidly translating print to meaning, which create two major interactive brain pathways. There are marked differences between the world's languages for such a development. There is much for teachers, educational policy developers and the interested layperson to learn from this well-presented study.