Diet of emails, texts, tweets and status updates can drain the brain: Study

A new study has shown that emails, texts, tweets and status updates could be detrimental to mental health. It suggested that modern technology could be damaging to the mind by bombarding it with too much information.

With the development of smart phones it is observed that users are becoming more adept at multi-tasking, as they switch between texts, emails and tweets. But evidence suggests that the constant demand to deal with multiple sources of information is weakening the ability to screen out irrelevant data and prioritise what is important, reported the Daily Mail.

Researchers at Stanford University in California have already discovered that persistent multi-tasking can impede long-term memory.Now a team from University of California (San Francisco) has concluded that multi-tasking can also hamper short-term memory performance, especially among older adults.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, scientists found that multi-taskers performed worse in tests where they had to jump from one task to another - suggesting that they were easily distracted by irrelevant information. There are also concerns of possible technology addiction - with frequent users unable to stop checking their messages or sending out updates at every opportunity.

The newspaper quoted other research that shows that users are spending more time connected to a keyboard. Youngsters nowspend an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes on entertainment media per day, but because they are often using more than one medium at any one time, they actually absorb about 10 hours and 45 minutes of content in 24 hours.

The lethal combination has forced some scientists to call for a 'technology diet' in a bid to prevent information overload.