What is constant connectivity doing to our brains?
That, in a nutshell, is the question Newsweek writer Tony Dokoupil explores in his July 16 cover story for that magazine, “Tweets. Texts. Email. Posts. Is the Onslaught Making Us Crazy?”
The short answer? Maybe so.
Dokoupil launches into his subject matter with something of a cautionary tale—the sad, bizarre story of Jason Russell. If you can remember back to March (which, frankly, this article says you probably can’t because the Internet has likely fragmented your memory), you might recall a video that became a viral sensation. It was called “Kony 2012,” and in it, Jason Russell sought to bring attention to the genocidal actions of rogue African warlord Joseph Kony.
The video took off like a rocket, virally speaking, with 70 million views in its first week. Massive publicity ensued, with Russell fielding nonstop interviews, addressing criticism of the video’s message and going days without sleep. Then, Russell seemed to crack, undergoing a mental breakdown that found him becoming the subject of another video as he, naked, pounded the pavement with his hands near his San Diego home.
Russell’s breakdown, it turns out, had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. Instead, doctors labeled it “reactive psychosis,” a form of temporary insanity in response to feeling overloaded and unable to disconnect from the metaphorical online “monster” he’d created.
While Russell’s story is certainly extreme, scientists are increasingly discovering links between excessive digital stimuli and a raft of mental disorders and neuroses.
Dokoupil writes, “The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.”
Dokoupil begins to unpack the latest research by observing both the blinding speed with which the Internet age has come upon us and the extent to which it has taken root in our lives.
In less than the span of a single childhood, Americans have merged with their machines, staring at a screen for at least eight hours a day, more time than we spend on any other activity including sleeping. Teens fit some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you count time spent multitasking on several devices. When President Obama last ran for office, the iPhone had yet to be launched. Now smartphones outnumber the old models in America, and more than a third of users get online before getting out of bed. Meanwhile, texting has become like blinking: the average person, regardless of age, sends or receives about 400 texts a month, four times the 2007 number. The average teen processes an astounding 3,700 texts a month, double the 2007 figure.
Dokoupil goes on to quote Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, who says that “the computer is like electronic cocaine” that energizes cycles of mania and depression. Another study, also conducted by researchers at UCLA, found that Internet use begins to rewire the brain’s prefrontal cortex within a week of moderate usage.
Backing up those findings, Dokoupil references a Chinese study that investigated what happens to the brains of those who are addicted to the Internet:
The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found 'abnormal white matter'—essentially extra nerve cells built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and executive function. A parallel study found similar changes in the brains of videogame addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other Chinese results that link Internet addiction to 'structural abnormalities in gray matter,' namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of 'atrophy.'
I’ve experienced something like the atrophy they’re talking about in at least one significant area of my life. In the last 10 years or so, for instance, I find myself reading books much less than I used to. I once sat and read, joyfully, for hours, digging into stories and nonfiction tomes. But it’s much harder for me to do that today than it used to be. My ability to exercise a sustained attention span seems to have taken a hit, and I suspect that my own Internet use may very well be the culprit.
Likewise, when I’m working at a computer—and especially when I’m doing something fairly demanding, such as writing—I frequently struggle to suppress the impulse to see what’s happening online, whether it’s checking the news, the weather, my favorite websites or email.
Does that make me a bad employee? According to Larry Rosen, author of the new book iDisorder, I’m more likely representative of the new, distracted-and-compulsive digital normal. Rosen surveyed 750 people regarding their tech habits and how they felt about those habits. Among respondents under the age of 50, the majority said that they check email, text messages or social network updates “all the time” or “every 15 minutes. “More worrisome,” Dokoupil writes of Rosen’s findings, “he also found that those who spent more time online had more ‘compulsive personality traits.'”
The Internet and mobile communication, obviously, are here to stay. But the research into how these influential new media are shaping our lives and our society, perhaps even shaping and rewiring our very brains, serves as a sober warning we’d do well to take seriously.
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