Frequent internet usage can damage your brain, research

“Excess of everything is bad.”

New research conducted by an international team of scientists has revealed that using the internet frequently can change how your brain works and cause serious damages to our attention capabilities, memory processes and social interactions. The research team displayed that the internet’s design is altering both the structure and abilities of the human brain.

According to Futurism, the team did experiment on hundreds of participants which included both frequent internet users and non-frequent ones. The participants went through memory and cognitive tasks as well as brain scans. After the experiments, researchers found out that heavy internet users performed worse at memory tasks as compared to low internet users and were generally more distracted during their workings.

Joseph Firth the lead researcher of this study said, “The key findings of this report are that high levels of Internet use could indeed impact on many functions of the brain. The limitless stream of prompts and notifications from the Internet encourages us towards constantly holding divided attention, which then, in turn, may decrease our capacity for maintaining concentration on a single task.”

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He further explained that the internet has drastically affected the user’s social interactions and have changed the way how the brain works while performing important tasks that require attention. He added, “It’s now critical to understand the potential for the online world to actually alter our social functioning, and determine which aspects of our social behavior will change, and which won’t”.

This fact is not new that too much usage of mobile phone or internet diverts our attention from what is important in our lives, but these studies are useless if we are not finding ways to change these trends and minimize the internet usage. We should make efforts to keep the necessary balance in our social as well as internet life to keep our brains healthy and work properly when needed.