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What your smartphone is really doing to your brain

Credits: Pixabay / terimakasih0

All day long, we are inundated with notifications from our various devices. Smartphones ring, beep, vibrate and light up, linking us endlessly to the rest of the world in real time. But what are the effects on our brains? 

Biologically speaking, our bodies don’t necessarily see this as a good thing. We are quite simply not made to live like this. These constant alerts set off our stress hormones, triggering the fight or flight response: our heart rate accelerates, our breathing becomes faster and more shallow, our sweat glands open and our muscles contract. This response evolved to allow us to overcome a potential threat, and not simply to respond to a call or a text.

According to endocrinologist Robert Lustig, smartphone notifications condition our brains to remain in a semi-permanent state of stress and fear. Such a state means that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain which is responsible for our higher cognitive functions, becomes completely derailed. Each time we switch tasks, we release a dose of cortisol, the stress hormone. The switch puts your thinking and reasoning brain (the prefrontal cortex) to sleep and stimulates the release of dopamine, a brain chemical. “You end up doing stupid things, the researcher explains. “And those stupid things tend to get you in trouble”.

Your brain can only do one thing at a time. Scientists have in fact known for a few years what many of us don’t want to admit: humans cannot actually accomplish several tasks at the same time. This is true for almost everybody -for around 97.5% of the population. Sure, you can drive and make a phone call at the same time, but be aware that you cannot do so without compromising your abilities. A mere mortal can only fully concentrate on one thing at a time.

This means that every time we stop to respond to a new notification, we interrupt what we were doing. And we pay the price for this interruption, which is referred to as a “switch cost”. Sometimes, moving from one task to another only ‘costs’ us a few tenths of a second, but over the course of a day, with switching between ideas, conversations and transactions on the phone or on the computer, our switch costs start to build up, and make us subject to making mistakes.

It has also been proven that Facebook notifications can lead to depression in young adults. Researchers who studied students’ emotional well-being in fact found a direct link: the more people check Facebook, the unhappier they are. And obviously this doesn’t only apply to Facebook, but to the internet in general. We tend to want more and more and more, and we tend to want it now. If these desires are not met, we can become dissatisfied.

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