Touchscreen Use Can Alter Our Brains Study Touchscreen Use Can Alter Our Brains: Study in Share Frequent chatting with friends over touchscreen smartphones can actually be brain altering, says a new research.According to Indian-origin scientist Arko Ghosh from University of Zurich, Switzerland, more touchscreen use in the recent past has translated directly into greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched. The news might not be so good, Ghosh and his colleagues say, noting the evidence linking excessive phone use with motor dysfunctions and pain. "I was really surprised by the scale of the changes introduced by the use of smartphones. I was also struck by how much of the inter-individual variations in the fingertip-associated brain signals could be simply explained by evaluating the smartphone logs," said Ghosh, also working with ETH Zurich in Switzerland. It all started when Ghosh and his colleagues realised that peoples obsession with smartphones...