Is Social Media Damaging Your Short Term Memory?

A recent study by Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology has shown that social media can overload the area of our brain that deals with short term memory.

This part of the brain needs regular “downtime” in order to efficiently process information, and the study highlighted that this is one time when the adage of “use it or lose it” isn’t true when taken to excess.

In fact, when we try and cram too much into our short term memory it can suffer from information overload.  By trying to take in the huge amount of information flowing through sites like Facebook and Twitter each minute we can degrade our mind’s ability to actually process it.

Too much incoming information can also result in an inability to store it.

“When you try to store many things in your working memory, you get less good at processing information,” says researcher Erik Fransen. “The brain is made to go into a less active state, which we might think is wasteful; but probably memory consolidation, and transferring information into memory takes place in this state. “