Don Tapscott Quotes

I was the first to advocate the Web. But I am very troubled by this thing that every kid must have a laptop computer. The kids are totally in the computer age. There's a whole new brain operation that's being moulded by the computer.

I'm not electronically geared at all; I'm really a 19th century cartoonist. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and what she's attracted to is of course iPod and this pod and that, I mean stuff I don't even begin to know - I never learned how to type for Christ's sake! I can't get in her head and find out what she would do if she had the kind of talent I had, I don't have a clue. Every generation comes up with its own quirkiness and its own culture which gets its inspiration from what's in the air at that time.

The whole selfie generation - it's just not my vibe.

I grew up in a physical world, and I speak English. The next generation is growing up in a digital world, and they speak social.

Obviously, our children, who have been playing with their computers since the age of five or six, don't have quite the same brain as those who were brought up on wooden or metal toys, whose brains are certainly atrophied by comparison.

Our children will outwit us if they want; for when it comes to technology, they hold the higher ground. Unlike other tools passed carefully and ceremonially from one generation to the next - the sharp scissors, the car keys - this is one they understand better than we do.

I am from the age of magazines, so the Internet is terrifying to me. But I am learning.

We don't really even know how the Internet and technology are changing us, or our brains and our attention span.

Kids today are smarter than we ever were. And they've got computers, too, which is awesome. They're scary to me.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

You can go to the Internet and know more than your mom in two seconds. It's crazy how fast teenagers have knowledge and information these days. So, I think it's harder to say, 'Your father and I know more than you.'

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

The vast majority of Americans perform sophisticated digital tasks on a daily basis. Grandmas and grandpas e-mail digital photos of their cruise trip and IM their kids in school. So a politician admitting that he or she can't bother to learn those things indicates a horse-and-buggy mentality.

I think that what computers have done is just disastrous to the language.

We are cyborgs already. If you learn to read, it causes permanent changes to the structure of your brain for your entire life.

Kids are growing up with a bombardment of information through technology.

When 60 - 70 percent of all interpersonal conversations and relationships exist through text messaging or social media, it's hard to get advice from a parent who didn't grow up in that world.

Like with MySpace and everything, my dad didn't even know what that was. And then all of a sudden, Twitter came around and he was taking pictures of my new tattoos and posting them and I was like, what's going on? I've never seen this happen before!

It's easy to look at kids sitting around a campfire looking at their phones and to think, 'What a shame.' But I think they're going to be more advanced in terms of communication than my generation.

By removing the obstacles that have built up over time, you can grow your brain from baseline to super brain.

As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we'll never again come close to achieving... we are learning about our world and its possibilities.

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.

One thing I am determined on is that by the time I die my brain shall weigh as much as a man's if study and learning can make it so.

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.

People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue.