The internet has come to redefine the way our society works, whether it’s in the office or at home.
But it also seems to be redefining the human brain, according to some new research from academics in the UK, US and Australia.
The international experts have put together a new review suggesting that increased internet time is limiting our ability to focus on one task at a time. It also means that we no longer store facts in our brains – we’re happy to turn to the omnipotent Google for information.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it. The review notes that the internet is now an ‘unavoidable, ubiquitous, and a highly functional aspect of modern living.’
Joseph Firth, a senior research fellow at Western Sydney University’s NICM Health Research Institute, said: ‘The limitless stream of prompts and notifications from the internet encourages us towards constantly holding a divided attention — which then, in turn, may decrease our capacity for maintaining concentration on a single task.’
Firth and his team were part of the combined effort to study the effects of the web on our brains, their results have been published in the journal World Psychiatry.
They looked specifically at three areas: attention spans, memory and social cognition.
Similarly, we are less likely to store facts in our brains, but are better able to know how to find out the information online. Although it means we’re more reliant on the web, it could potentially be a good thing – freeing up extra ‘brain power’ for more ambitious pursuits.
The authors of the paper say that while this evidence gives an outline, more research is needed as the internet continues to take over our lives.
‘Overall, the available evidence indicates that the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in each of these areas of cognition, which may be reflected in changes in the brain,’ they state.
‘However, an emerging priority for future research is to determine the effects of extensive online media usage on cognitive development in youth, and examine how this may differ from cognitive outcomes and brain impact of uses of Internet in the elderly.
‘We conclude by proposing how Internet research could be integrated into broader research settings to study how this unprecedented new facet of society can affect our cognition and the brain across the life course.’
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