What your phone is doing to your brain — and it isn’t good
Scientists aren’t sure if technology is destroying our brains, but they’re pretty confident it’s addictive, and can lead to depression. Excessive use is also slowing down our thinking processes, researchers have found
ll day long, we are inundated by interruptions and alerts from our devices. Smartphones buzz to wake us up, emails stream into our inboxes, notifications from coworkers and far away friends bubble up on our screens, and ‘assistants’ chime in with their own soulless voices. Such interruptions seem logical to our minds — we want technology to help with our busy lives, ensuring we don’t miss important appointments and communications. But our bodies have a different view: These constant alerts jolt our stress hormones into action, igniting our fight or flight response; our heartbeats quicken, our breathing tightens, our sweat glands burst open, and our muscles contract. That response is intended to help us outrun danger, not answer a call or text from a colleague.More phone time, lazier brain
Our brains can only process so much information at a time, about 60 bits per second. The more tasks we have to do, the more we have to choose how we want to use our precious brain power. So it’s understandable that we might want to pass some of our extra workload to our phones or digital assistants. But there is some evidence that delegating thinking tasks to our devices could not only be making our brains sicker, but lazier too.
The combination of socialising and using our smartphones could be putting a huge tax on our brains. Researchers have found smarter, more analytical thinkers are less active on their smartphone search engines than other people. That doesn’t mean that using your phone for searching causes you to be ‘dumber.’ It could just be that these smarties are searching less because they know more. But the link between less analytical thinking and more smartphone scrolling is there. We also know that reading up on new information on your phone can be a terrible way to learn. Researchers have shown that people who take in complex information from a book, instead of on a screen, develop deeper comprehension, and engage in more conceptual thinking, too.
It makes you jittery
Brand new research on dozens of smartphone users in Switzerland also suggests that staring at our screens could be making both our brains and our fingers more jittery. In research published in March, psychologists and computer scientists have found an unusual and potentially troubling connection: the more tapping, clicking and social media posting and scrolling people do, the ‘noisier’ their brain signals become.
Source | Times of India |
25th March 2018
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