Your Brain On Tech...

Courtesy of www.topnews.in

All of the technologies we have are meant to make our lives much simpler. We can accomplish many tasks simultaneously, find information quickly, and communicate almost synchronically with a multitude of devices. This is all well and good, but did anyone consider that this could reshape how our brain operates?

There many people who claim that the advancement of technology, as much as it helps us, also makes us more dependent on it. Being dependent on a printer to print documents or that a computer turns on is not what I am getting at.  The fact that now we are so reliant on google to answer our questions, social networking sites to maintain our relationships, and our mobile devices to be in constant contact with people at all times, is changing the way our brain functions.

Take for instance how people store every email they receive, even though it is not necessary. Researchers claim that this is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. 

"Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse." -Dr. Aboujaoude

Courtesy of www.flikr.com

In the same context, when a person stores 500 photos on a site like Flikr instead of just having a few memorable, it takes away the highlights of a trip and replaces them with irrelevant candid images.

In contrast, let's take social networking sites. A person may have ,on average, 190 friends on Facebook. Of those 190 friends could that person pick every single one of those people in a crowd, I very much doubt it. I think that our reliance on Facebook to tell us who are friends are is affecting our ability to remember the the simplest social interactions we have. I know from personal experience, I have immediately added someone on Facebook just to make sure I didn't forget who they were later on.

"Oh don't worry, I'll Google it!" Everybody's favorite response to "I don't know." Yes I can attest to saying this on many occasions and I feel stupid every time. Google is making it so that our brains are tricked into changing how we remember things. Instead of actually retaining the information we sought after, our brain says, "Nah that's okay we can just look it up again another time..." There is a very good depiction of this phenomenon,  where the idea of brain plasticity is the reason for this. This concept, in a nutshell, means that our brain is constantly rewiring itself to adapt to our environment. In this case our brains are slowly reprogramming to not remember facts as well and limiting our storage capabilities.

We rely on technology to get through everyday life. It tells us where to go, what to do, and how to do it. The problem is that our brains are being tricked into limiting how much we actually need to remember day to day. This is your brain on tech.