Put down that phone! Turn off that tablet! Psychologist COLM O’CONNOR on the longterm dangers of today’s smart living

AT THIS time in human history, we are  participating in the most widespread, fast-paced, unplanned development in human psychology.
A big question facing us is what happens to the human brain when, within a few short decades, it is saturated in the instantaneous communications technology that links up
billions of people and expands access to huge quantities of information over the entire globe?
Does this revolution enhance or diminish human connection?  Does it make us smarter in some ways and dumber in others?
The simple truth is that you don’t need your brain to remember phone numbers in today’s world.  We did need to do that many years ago.  Therefore, digital devices can augment memory.
While neuroscientists suggest that we should not go overboard  with imagining that computers technologies damage the brain they have a concept called continued partial attention, which identifies habits that may be problematic for us.
This is the tendency to scan the immediate environment for something that is far more interesting or imminent than what is going on.  You see this in people who are always scanning their phones, or other devices.  It is actually a stressful thing that is not good for our brains or for our relationships.
For example, notice how you may easily interrupt a conversation at home because you got a text, or someone else got a text, or your phone buzzes with some new email.
We are now so used to being interrupted by technology that we hardly even notice it and just accept it.  How often do you say to someone you are with “you just got a text” or “whose phone is that?” or “just a second, I need to reply to this message.”
We frequently experience this in face-to-face conversations when we are talking to someone who is texting at the same time.  So you have a fleeting thought: ‘Is this person interested in me?’  This is having more and more of an impact on social connection and how we feel.
Our brains are sensitive to stimuli from moment to moment.  If you spend a lot of time with a repeated mental stimulus (like texts coming in constantly) the neural circuits that adapt to that stimulation will strengthen at the cost of weakening other brain circuits.
Basically, most people are logging too much technology time and we are paying a price.
We are not engaging our powerful brain in activities like looking people in the eye, noticing nonverbal cues, keeping attention focused on someone else in an uninterrupted way, etc.
So these small changes can, over decades, grow into substantial changes in the brain.  So though you may argue that these things don’t change you much, if you consider these habits being developed over generations you can imagine how humans might evolve into low attention, interpersonally detached, high information processing individuals.  Small habits developed by this generation might snowball into fundamental changes — 10
generations down the road.

We all need to know how to unplug for a while.  Technology is not good or bad.  The challenge is to learn to integrate it into our lives, rather than letting it become something that enslaves us.

See the full article in tonight’s WOW!