Price You Pay for Spending too Much Time on Social Media

Those who spend a great deal of time browsing social media could be jeopardizing their memory and the ability to recall crucial information, a recent study has revealed. Though it might seem a bit surprising, the brain is doing a great deal of work even when idle. When you browse through information all the time, there could be an information overload; therefore it is a great idea to just go offline quite regularly.

Erik Fransen, from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology, whose research zeroed in on short-term memory found that a brain that is exposed to a typical session of social media browsing can get bogged down by too much information. This results in reduced storage of information in the memory.

Fransen said, "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. At any given time, the working memory can carry up to three or four items.”

When we are on social media sites like Facebook we try to stuff more information in the working memory and thus our capacity to process information fails. Further, the brain is not being given its time of relaxation. "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," Fransen said.



Source-Medindia