While the World Health Organization (WHO) has cautioned gadgetheads worldwide that radiation levels emitted from cellphones could put them in the same category with other cancer-causing agents such as lead and chlorofoam — otherwise known as carcinogens — it could take years before the long-term effects are known. By then, most of us will be dead — by natural causes.
To summarize the 20,000 screaming headlines that made their way around the internet, WHO reported that "over the past few years there has been mounting concern over the possibillty of adverse health effects resulting from exposure to radiofrequency electromagnietic fields (REF), such as those emitted by wireless communication devices."
You remember, of course, power lawyer Johnnie Cochran of O.J. Simpson fame, who passed away in 2005 at the age of 67 from a brain tumor. His daughter in Atlanta is now telling reporters that she wasn't surprised to hear about the alleged WHO link between cellphones and cancer.
Noting that her father practically lived on his cellphone, Tiffany Cochran recently told 11 Alive News in Georgia that her father's neurosurgeon has always felt and still believes that Cochran's cellphone use might have caused the tumor. "[My father's doctor] has always believed it," she said. "And he's always said it may be one of those things where research needs to catch up to societal use of the cellphone."
There's another issue that society has so far not faced up to, according to some neuroscientists who study the brain differences between reading on paper surfaces — think newspapers, magazines, book! — and reading off the glass screens of Nooks, Kindles and iPads. What leading experts in the field such as Anne Mangen in Norway and Maryanne Wolf at Tufts University say is that the fundamental differences between paper-reading and screen-reading might be so huge as to light up different regions of the reading brain and that these differences need to be studied more, especially with (f)MRi and PET brain scan research.
It's my personal hunch, as a strictly amateur neuroscientist, but based on a lifetime of reading on paper and just a few years of reading off screens, that reading on paper surfaces is vastly superior for three important things: the brain's processing of the text being read, the brain's memory of the information and critical analysis of the inforrmation.
I'm not talking here about the existential joy or materialiality of flipping pages, or the smell of smelly book paper, or even the distractions of the screen's hot links and AV videos — or that movie you're watching on the side window while reading TheWrap. No, I'm saying that I believe, and that science might one day prove, that reading on paper is superior, brain-wise, to reading in a pixelated (or E Ink) world.
At the heart of all my argument here there is a luftmensch trying not only to understand reading, but also figure out the nuts and bolts that make up the human experience. Of course, I need to find out the real neural differences in brain chemistry regarding paper-reading and screen-reading. I'm on it.
I find them, and I get the Nobel Prize. Fat chance.
But Gary Small at UCLA knows what I am talking about. In a Los Angeles Times interview last year, Dr Small was asked about this very issue and if he felt that screen-reading might replace paper-reading in the future. The UCLA maverick said that more studies need to be done on all this, but added: "The technology train has already left the station and there is no coming back."
I once asked book industry maven Mike Shatzkin about my rather eccentric views on all this, and he told me in an ensuing email: "You may very well be right about the differences between paper-reading and screen-reading, in trerms of brain chemistry, but just as nobody in the past heeded the calls that radiation and cancer might impact cellphone use, do you think makers of device readers will listen to you or even care if you are right?"
I think Mike is right. Nobody's going to listen to me, and what's even worse, nobody cares. So goodbye, paper-reading; hello screen-reading.
In the future, one ''superPad'' will offer movies, music, newspapers and books.
Thankfully, I'll be as dead as a doornail in a Luddite's coffin……
