How mobile phones have changed our brains (bbc.com)

Oh, I have no doubt smart phones are rewiring our brains bigtime. But different technologies have been rearranging our brains for countless eons now. Written language and the printing press would have been two huge ones too. I will accede that the process has speeded up lately. In the history of homo sapiens there were stretches of thousands of years where nothing much changed in hunter/gatherer societies. Even agriculture was a huge brain slapper that spawned specialization and defined the roles one played in a civilization.

One of the first things that struck me when I was married to my first wife, an Apache woman, was how her family was very centered on oral traditions. Everything was a story as we sat around a fire pit in the backyard. The written word did not hold much sway in her family. Almost 20 years later during the '89 Loma Prieta Earthquake in the Bay Area I was reminded of the oral traditions again. We had no power and were suffering aftershocks for days, where staying inside our homes was a very uncomfortable feeling. Our hood built a big communal bonfire in a common area, and all the neighbors talked for several nights in a row and shared food and stories until the power got turned back on. We learned more about each other, our life stories, and our various connections in those few days than in all the six years I had lived in that place. Once the electricity was restored, we all returned to our homes, turned on the TVs, and it was back to modern life as usual.