Do you ever joke about being addicted to Facebook or your iPhone? Unfortunately, this is no laughing matter according to numerous studies demonstrating dramatic changes in the brains of heavy Internet and smart phone users. And by “heavy” they mean more than 38 hours per week—and how long are you plugged in every day, exactly?
If you care about your brain—and, I would argue, the very future of humanity—I encourage you to read the following article in hopes that it will motivate you to begin wresting control of your brain from our oh-so-sexy digital technologies.
Excerpt: The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts…Studies link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of “atrophy.”