Dr Sadie Plant's latest foray into unravelling people's love affair with technology has revealed an interesting fact this week - that mobile phones and Gameboys (do they still sell these?) are causing the under-25s' thumbs to become their "new fingers." I once remarked that if man were to evolve that he'd look like a giant thumb, and here is Plant telling me the same thing. According to the noted founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University in London, six months of study on nine of the largest cities in the world concluded that young people use both their thumbs dexterously when accessing the hand-held's keypad, causing "physical alterations" that have surely happened generations before.
And I quote:
"The fact that our thumbs operate differently from our fingers is one of the main things that defines us as humans. Discovering that the younger generation has taken to using thumbs in a completely different way and are instinctively using it where the rest of us use our index fingers is particularly interesting."
Check out the Observer release here.