April 09, 2012

Could TVs, Video Games, Computers be altering the DNA of our offspring?

Apparently in Einstein's brain, known for being speech delayed, his visual processing system had subsumed his speech processing subsystem and then later his brain rewired around the subsumed system.  This makes sense... as his brain naturally developed, it co-opted an important neural structure for visual processing and it took longer to recreate those pathways as he aged. 

Lately we run into more and more people who also have or had a speech-delayed child.  I haven't found good statistics on the rate of this delay in the general population or whether its changing over time.  But, if I extend my hypothesis that our reproductive processes are designed to enable rapid, guided evolution based on environmental change (a la Lamarck or Darwin's Pangenesis theory)... then I wonder if the environmental change is the introduction of the television and computers.  A study of the brains of people before TV, video games, computers, iPads might show different brain development.  If that difference in brain development could somehow lead to differences in genetic expression in offspring, that might explain some of the increase in speech-motor delays and in turn mean as a species we're adapting to our new visually-rich environment. 

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