FollowThe trend of social networking, chatting, tweating is growing among internet users especially teens. But scientists recommend you to take a break.
According to a new study, people who spend too much time browsing social media could be squandering their memories or losing important information.
The researchers from Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology say, an idle brain is in fact doing important work – and in the age of constant information overload, it’s a good idea to go offline on a regular basis.
Erik Fransen, whose research focuses on short-term memory and ways to treat diseased neurons, finds too much social networking not good for your brain as it leads to overload. He said that a brain exposed to a typical session of social media browsing can easily become hobbled by information overload. The result is that less information gets filed away in your memory.
“Working memory enables us to filter out information and find what we need in the communication. It enables us to work online and store what we find online, but it’s also a limited resource,” he said.
“When you are on Facebook, you are making it harder to keep the things that are ‘online’ in your brain that you need. So you are reducing your own working memory capacity,” Fransen said.
He further said, “The brain is made to go into a less active state, which we might think is wasteful; but probably memory consolidation, and transferring information into memory takes place in this state. Theories of how memory works explain why these two different states are needed. When we max out our active states with technology equipment, just because we can, we remove from the brain part of the processing, and it can’t work.”
