24-HOUR NEWS STREAMS AND CONSTANT TWITTER UPDATES CAUSING BRAIN OVERLOAD
By Emma Barnett
The Telegraph
June 2, 2009

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Digital advancements feeding a 24-hour news culture could be starting to move too quickly for the human brain and causing it to overload, according to some new research.

Twitter may cause brain overload: Twitter may cause brain overload
The constant burst of news about terrible occurrences such as stabbings or bomb attacks, is overloading our brains and making our responses dismissive. Photo: Alamy

Constant emails, news alerts, and Twitter updates are contributing to numbing our brains and outpacing our neurons’ processing capabilities. These pieces of research show our reactions to traumatic news stories are becoming increasingly flippant as our minds are trying to seek comfort in the simpler things that cause no stress or provoke a need for analysis.

According to two newly published scientific studies, the streaming of 24-hour digital news could be running faster than the brain’s ability to make moral decisions. The constant burst of news about terrible occurrences such as stabbings or bomb attacks, is overloading our brains and making our responses dismissive – which ultimately is not a humane reaction. The research has found this overload may also be causing increasing levels of depression and the quicker we know about events, the less it seems to be sinking in and having the expected effect.

According to the Archives of General Psychiatry, Professor Dilip Jeste says that the neurones associated with traits such as human wisdom or empathy, are sited in the slower acting, recently evolved regions of our brain, that are bypassed when the world feels stressful. The tendency is for our primitive survival instinct to take over and dictate behaviour.

This study has found that with a constant bombardment of news, our brains don’t have time to digest the facts, match it with appropriate reactions and then behave accordingly.

Scientists at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute reflect similar concerns in their latest study: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. Their brain scans showed people needed longer to react fully to stories of social pain with emotions like compassion, than to react at an unemotive level. Volunteers needed six to eight seconds to respond fully to stories of virtue or social pain.