PEOPLE assume that iPhones, laptops and Netflix are evidence of
progress. In some ways, that’s true. A moderate amount of Googling, for
instance, can be good for your brain, and there are apps that can boost
brain function and activity.
Yet tech advancements also come with some unintended consequences.
Our brains being “massively rewired” by tech, says neuroscientist
Michael Merzenich in The Shallows: What The internet Is Doing To Our Brains,
a Pulitzer-nominated 2011 book by Nicholas Carr. Merzenich warns that
the effect of technology on human intelligence could be “deadly.”That got us thinking. How exactly is technology messing up our brains?
1. Tech Is Screwing Up Your Sleep.
Losing sleep has a number of negative effects on your brain. If you’re not logging seven or more hours of sleep each night, you might suffer from increasingly bad moods, decreased focus at work and problems with memory, not to mention a loss of actual brain tissue — all of which makes you less than a joy to be around.
2. You’re Easily Distracted.
Teens in particular are more distracted than ever. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey of more than 2,400 teachers found that most educators feel students are more distracted than previous generations. Some 87 per cent of teachers agreed with the statement, “today’s digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans,” while 64 per cent agreed with the idea that “today’s digital technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically.” Yikes.
3. You Can’t Remember Much...
Technology’s tendency to butt into whatever else you’re doing makes it more difficult to form new memories. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows, memory comes in two types: transient working memory and long-term memory, which is more permanent. Information needs to pass from working memory into long-term memory in order to be stored. Any break in the processes of working memory — like, say, stopping to check your email or send a text message in the middle of reading an article — can erase information from your mind before that transfer occurs.
There’s also a limit to how much information your working memory can take in at once. Taking in too much information — which happens a lot online — is like “having water poured into a glass continuously all day long, so whatever was there at the top has to spill out as the new water comes down,” productivity expert Tony Schwartz told The Huffington Post last year.
4. You’re Much More Forgetful Than You Used To Be.
Millennials are actually more likely to forget what day it is or where they put their keys than people over the age of 55, according to a 2013 Trending Machine survey. In a press release for the survey, family and occupational therapist Patricia Gutentag called out technology as one of the main culprits: “This is a population that has grown up multi-tasking using technology, often compounded by lack of sleep, all of which results in high levels of forgetfulness,” she said.
5. You Can’t Concentrate On What You’re Reading.
Research has shown that reading linked text “entails a lot of mental callisthenics — evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats — that are extraneous to the process of reading,” Carr wrote in “The Shallows.” And giving your brain more work to do makes it harder to absorb information. Text that’s peppered with photos, videos and ads is even worse.
6. You Can’t Find Your Way Around Without GPS.
A 2008 study from the University of London even found that taxi drivers had more developed hippocampi than non-taxi drivers — perhaps because they are so accustomed to navigating cities using spatial memory, rather than relying on GPS (though that may no longer be true of smartphone-equipped taxi drivers).
7. You Have The Brain Of A Drug Addict.
No, “internet addiction” isn’t just some BS term parents throw around to terrify youngsters who spend too much time playing Candy Crush. Spending too much time on the internet can actually cause changes in the brain that mimic those caused by drug and alcohol dependence, according to a 2012 study.
Internet addicts — most notably gamers who shun food, school and sleep to play for days on end — have abnormal white and grey matter in their brains, which disrupts and cripples the regions involved in processing emotion and regulating attention and decision-making. Alcoholics and drug addicts have strikingly similar brain abnormalities, the study found.
“I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down” because of internet gaming addiction, Dr. Henriette Bowden Jones, who runs a British clinic for internet addicts, told The Independent.
Now that you’re properly terrified of the effects of technology on the old noggin, let us remind you that you do have the power to prevent brain drain and time-suck. Just log off every once in a while!
news.com.au 28 July 2014
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