Are you fed up with your children’s apparent deafness caused by their being glued to a screen?

If you can find a way to tear them away for a moment, you just might be able to frighten the hell out of them and break technology’s hold on their fragile minds.

“Do you want to end up looking like this?” is what you need to say while holding up this!

Is it far fetched that this is how we’ll look by the year 3000? Surely we’ll be worse by then.

This is the image of where human beings are possibly headed thanks to our being welded to screen technology.

It comes from a somewhat baffling but widely reported study (both the highbrow and low-rent UK press have eaten it up) that speculates on the tech-warped evolution of human beings.

‘Terrifying image of how humans will evolve’, decried The Mirror.

But really?

This was a “study” that wasn’t really a study.

Instead, TollFreeForwarding.com – a company sells toll-free and vanity numbers and therefore relies on telephones – “sourced scientific research and expert opinion” to investigate what a future human might look like under the accumulated physical changes wrought by “the consistent use of smartphones, laptops, and other tech”.

Not a bad idea – except the experts are a mixed bag. A few wellness experts selling essential oils and supplements, and some genuine spine and cognitive scientists.

What did they find?

These were their findings and predictions:

• Text claw. The cramped hand caused by permanently holding a smart phone. The idea has been around for at least a decade. See here for what doctors say about it.
• A hunched back. Many of us already suffer stooping from looming over our keyboards at work.
• The 90-degree fixed elbow. Presumably from holding up our phone as we lie back on our pillows at night and use and a mouse and keyboard during much of our daylight hours.
• The drooping neck. Again, as a result of poor posture borne from screen use.
• The thicker skull and smaller brain. The argument goes that we’re outsourcing our thinking to the internet.
• A third eyelid. We have two eyelids, the top and the bottom. But we might develop a third eyelid that sits in the corner of the eye and covers the eyeball when we’re exposed to excessive light.

So, is this how we will evolve?

Some people have a genetic predisposition to poor posture. Otherwise, we acquire it by poor habits – which might become common and be viewed as a consequence of social evolution.

For humans to be naturally selected for a text claw and hunched back, the environment would have to become hostile to people with naturally healthy posture – and favourable to the genetically afflicted, who would be the only humans left to breed.

The shrinking brain is a thing. Check out this interesting piece at 2011 piece from Discover magazine, which reported:

“Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.”

Whoa! So we are getting dumber!

The idea that at least some of us aren’t fulfilling our cognitive potential is a big conversation.

As far as the last 20,000 years are concerned, it’s more the case that our brains have become more efficient.

The reason why a budgerigar has such a large vocabulary and can engage in play behaviour – they each take a lot of brain power – is because of neurodensity. Their brains are small but more tightly packed with neurons.

Curiously, the third eyelid – on the face of it, the most ridiculous of the study’s predictions – is possible. Owls have a third eyelid, a membrane that protects the eye from debris as they descend from a tree to catch a mouse.

The owl evolved to have this third eyelid to meet a challenge of the environment.

If $2 plastic goggles or cheap sunglasses are somehow wiped out in a nuclear catastrophe, then maybe, just maybe, our bodies might require built-in protection.