How social media is changing our brains

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

A huge number of articles have already been written on the topic of the influence of social media on the human brain, but despite this, in almost every new post or video, among the old facts, interesting new ones come across. Tonight, we offer you some more interesting discoveries that may take you one step closer to freedom from this not so healthy addiction.

Recently I did a little experiment - I gave up reading news, Facebook and Twitter for a month (just before the New Year). As a result, it turned out that the completion of some tasks can take half the time, you can sleep much more and more soundly, even there is a little time left for your favorite hobbies, which you didn’t get your hands on before. There were many more pluses than minuses.

But the biggest plus, in my opinion, is the disappearance of this terrible "mental scabies" when you feel discomfort from not flipping through the social network feed for the hundredth time and even start to get angry that there are so few new posts. It really was already beginning to resemble a painful addiction, similar to addiction to cigarettes: the feeling of physical and psychological discomfort does not go away until you smoke a cigarette, until you scroll through the news feed.

The latest video from AsapSCIENCE provides a very compelling scientific explanation for all of these sensations and how social media is changing our brains.

1. From 5 to 10% of users are unable to control the amount of time they spend on social networks. This is not entirely psychological addiction, it also has signs of addiction to narcotic substances. Brain scans of these people showed a deterioration in the functioning of parts of the brain, which is observed in drug addicts. White matter, which is responsible for controlling emotional processes, attention and decision-making, is especially degraded. This is because on social media, the reward follows almost immediately after the post or photo is published, so the brain begins to rearrange itself so that you constantly want to receive these rewards. And you start to want more and more and more. And you are simply not able to give up this, as well as from drugs.

2. Problems with multitasking. We might think that those who are constantly on social media, or those who constantly switch between work and websites, are much better at coping with multiple tasks at the same time than those who are used to doing one thing at a time. However, the comparison of these two conditional groups of people turned out to be not in favor of the former. The constant switching between social media and work reduces the ability to filter out noise and also makes it harder to process and remember information.

3. "Ghost Call". Did you hear your phone vibrate? Oh, this is probably an SMS or a message in one of the social networks! Oh, no, it's empty! Seemed? Oh, here it vibrated again! Well, now something has definitely come! It seemed again … This condition is called phantom vibration syndrome and is considered a psychological phenomenon. In the course of the study, it turned out that about 89% of respondents experience similar feelings at least once every two weeks. Technology is beginning to rebuild our nervous system in such a way that the most common itching in the leg after a mosquito bite is interpreted as the vibration of a smartphone.

4. Social media are triggers for the release of dopamine, which is a harbinger of the desired reward. With the help of MRI, scientists have found that the reward centers in the brain in people begin to work much more actively when they begin to talk about their views or express their opinions than when they listen to someone else's. Basically nothing new, right? But it turns out that during a face-to-face conversation the opportunity to express one's opinion is about 30-40%, while in virtual conversations on social networks this opportunity increases to 80%. As a result, the part of the brain that is responsible for orgasm, love and motivation is turned on, which is fueled by just such virtual conversations. Especially if you know that a lot of people are reading you. It turns out that our bodies reward us for being on social networks.

5. Other studies have shown that partners who first met online, and then met in real life, like each other much more than those who met offline. Perhaps this is due to the fact that you already at least roughly know the preferences and goals of the other person.