Technology and screens are killing cognitive functioning: It’s death by 1,000 swipes, but we need to allow for downtime too – Too Much Tech?
Dr Fiona Kerr speaks to Dave Winterlich, chief strategy officer at Dentsu Ireland for the Irish Times about the impact that technology, and the lack of human interaction, is having on our brains in ‘Too Much Tech?’.
“Daydreaming, or abstraction, is our natural brain state. When we constantly reach for a phone, we distract ourselves with busy things on a screen, it gives us a quick dopamine hit which feels good, but it doesn’t feed our curiosity,” Kerr says.
“When we are abstracting we are allowing the brain to collate all the bits of information stored in different places, to connect everything, but when we revert to the phone we’re on task mode, pushing our brains down rabbit holes, stopping it from free forming and making neural connections needed to meaningfully store and process information.”
