How Tech Is Impacting Our Brains

Over the last few decades we have experienced so many amazing advances in technology. And with that comes access to communication, information and entertainment. While this can be great in some ways, there have been some hidden and some not-so-hidden consequences of what is increasingly becoming an instant gratification society and culture.

If you need an answer to a question, you can simply engage your phone’s Artificial Intelligence or your Alexa, Siri, or whichever other name you use for a virtual assistant, with a simple query and have an answer in seconds. It’s great, right? Well, in some ways maybe not so much.

It used to be that people memorized phone numbers, names, locations and details. Today, we don’t have to do any of that. And as a result, it is literally having a negative impact on our brains. As devices and our homes get “smarter” in some ways, people are getting dumber.

If not dumber, we can certainly say that the population is getting lazier. We do not want to take the time or make the effort to research things for ourselves. Before the Internet was a household feature, people had to go to libraries or open up an encyclopedia in order to find the answers to their questions. They had to put in real effort. And in my opinion, this produced the real reward of knowing you “learned something” rather than simply was told.

Fast forward a little to the early 2000's, prior to the common usage of AI virtual assistants. While access to information had become easier, people still had to search the Internet for themselves to get answers. We literally had to put our fingers on a keyboard, type our queries and read through the possible useful information for our needs. We had to do the work.

It is truly sad that that our attention spans and need for instant gratification have become so obvious that, yes, we even have a text-speak acronym for it - TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read), a massive admission of laziness and lack of attention span. It literally means that people won’t read an entire article, email, essay…simply because they deem it to be too long. To long for what? To hold their attention or require their effort to read, presumably.

This has also become a problem in how we get our news and stay informed as well as our entertainment. People read blurbs and headlines, neglecting to check out the full story. The 24-hour news cycle has us moving on from important events in just days. In entertainment, it has even changed how videos and movies are made, limiting scenes to shorter periods so they don’t lose our attention. You need look no further than the fact that “shorts,” short video content never longer than a minute or two and often less, have become so popular on social platforms.

Studies have shown that these negative effects are real and vast. In a report for the University of Pennsylvania entitled “Generative AI Can Harm Learning,” researchers found students relying on AI for studies performed worse on tests. A study conducted by the journal Societies indicates a problem with those who depend heavily on AI and their ability for critical thinking. Gloria Mark, PhD, of the University of California Irvine, has researched and discussed the ways in which our collective attention spans have been diminishing in this era of easy access.

I, for one, still like to do my own research most of the time, at least for anything important. I think that’s best for our brains, our work ethic and our overall well-being, both physically and emotionally.