Hello? Can You Hear Me? People who own smartphones often end up using their thumbs-a lot!-swipingthrough various touchscreens on an ongoing basis throughout the day. All that thumb action can create physical changes in the brain, researcherssay, leaving certain regions more active or even enlarged. Scientists suspected this might be the case, since something similar happensto violinists. Regions of the brain associated with dexterity are largerin musicians who have played the violin for some time. Would smartphonethumbers show similar changes in brain activity? Deciding to test the theory,researcher Arko Ghosh hooked 37 people-26 of whom frequently used touch-screensmartphones-to something called an electroencephalograph. Sure enough, people who had used their smartphones a lot in the previousten days showed increased activity in the part of the brain related totheir thumbs. The eleven subjects who used cellphones with regular keypadsdid not show that same increased activity. The moral of the story? We're not sure what it all means, yet, butGhosh did sum up his research by saying, "The digital technologywe use on a daily basis shapes the sensory processing in our brains, andon a scale that surprised us."