Are you suffering from BTS? If you regularly use your thumbs for typing on the iPhone (who doesn’t?) you’d better watch out. Big Thumb Syndrome could be about to strike. The humble thumb has always been a pretty useful digit but it has assumed a major rôle in our lives since the advent of the virtual smartphone keyboard. So much so, in fact, that the bit of our brain that overlords the thumbs in growing. The delightfully named Dr. Ghosh at the University of Zurich says so: “The digital technology we use on a daily basis shapes the sensory processing in our brains.”
It’s the somatosensory cortex he’s talking about here. It’s just plain getting bigger. And who’s to say that our thumbs won’t start to balloon in size as they become more central to our daily communications. This phenomenon is likely to be called Big Thumb Syndrome, so hold off buying those winter gloves, you might need a size larger.