Does Too Much Time Online Turn Your Brain to Mush?
I recently read an interesting article on CNN about all of the ways that spending too much time online can affect the brain. As a webmaster by trade, I certainly spend a lot of my days and nights on the internet. Is it all turning my brain to mush?
Some interesting findings reported in the article include:
Clifford Nass, a social psychologist at Stanford, says studies show multitasking on the Internet can make you forget how to read human emotions. When he showed online multitaskers pictures of faces, they had a hard time identifying the emotions they were showing.
Uh oh. That doesn’t sound too good. I would definitely like to be able to read the emotions of my friends and family.
Over time, and with enough Internet usage, the structure of our brains can actually physically change, according to a new study. Researchers in China did MRIs on the brains of 18 college students who spent about 10 hours a day online. Compared with a control group who spent less than two hours a day online, these students had less gray matter, the thinking part of the brain.
Less gray matter? Also a little scary. Luckily I do the Brain Fitness Program, which has been shown to grow my gray matter. So hopefully that will even things out a bit.
The article also provides a few tips for moving back to normalcy offline–by limiting internet use between certain hours, going device-free for some amount of time, and even just staring out the window from time to time. Maybe I’ll get off the computer and take a walk around the block… although it will be hard to leave my iPhone at the office, of course.
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Posted: Benefits of Brain Fitness, Neuroscience, Research studies
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