Vidcast:  https://youtu.be/9VpiXVEBhHA

Using the internet can produce temporary but also permanent negative changes in your brain’s abilities to focus attention, create and sustain memories, and promote social bonding.  An international collaborative team from Australia’s Western Sydney University, Britain’s Universities of Oxford and Manchester, and Boston’s Harvard Medical School just released this groundbreaking study in the journal World Psychiatry.

Reviewing and summarizing the available literature, the scientists confirm that the internet has monumental impacts on our attention, memory, and social interactions.

The internet powerfully grabs our attention with an endless stream of information as well as unwanted interruptions in our lives.   It definitely fosters informational sophistication but also increases distractibility.  

While the internet places a huge amount of objective, social, and personal information at our fingertips, it is a crutch that dulls our abilities to recall such information “offline” from our own memories.  

The internet is a powerful tool for generating social networks.  The semi-anonymous and often artificial characteristics of many interactions within such networks can be psychologically harmful.  Real world acceptance and rejection can be in your face, but it can also be muted by your own interpretation of other’s actions.  In the online world, other’s opinions of you are concretely quantitated by likes, dislikes, following, friending, and trolling.

The internet is like a robot.  It can be a powerful servant, but, without caution, it becomes a cat and you could become its pet.

Joseph Firth, John Torous, Brendon Stubbs, Josh A. Firth, Genevieve Z. Steiner, Lee Smith, Mario Alvarez‐Jimenez, John Gleeson, Davy Vancampfort, Christopher J. Armitage, Jerome Sarris. The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry, 2019; 18 (2): 119 DOI: 10.1002/wps.20617

#internet #attention #distractability #memory #acceptance #rejection