It was only a matter of time before psychologists and psycho-analysts jumped on the barrage against Twitter. In an article which you can read below, published on NineMSN, the human brain is being damaged by Tweets, YouTube and SMS messaging. My interpretation of Dr Alloway's concern is as follows: Twitter is fast food - easily accessible for lazy people and bad for you. You get fat, you get slow metabolism and you body isn't working to it's original capacity. So with Twitter, your brain's memory function isn't being used properly, various nerves aren't making connections, and we run the long-term risk of impairing our working memory function.
So what then? We're part of this generation where social media is of the utmost importance, personally, and for business success. We want to engage and be engaged, and don't want to be left behind in the rat race.
Do you think that short-form messaging is bad for the memory? Is this even worth thinking about given the amount of other things that are bad for us? Let us know your thoughts...
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: (including image from here)
A Scottish psychologist has voiced her concern over the potential of Twitter to confound the healthy functioning of users' memories.
Dr Tracy Alloway, a psychologist at Scotland's Stirling University, told a British Science Festival audience last week that Twitter use might come with the long-term side effect of impairing the "working memory" — the part of our memories which helps us appropriately match the things we remember with the task at hand.
"On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it's also very succinct...You don't have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you're not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections," said Alloway, who also directed similar criticisms towards YouTube and SMS text messaging, according to the UK Telegraph.
Notably, her opinion of Facebook in all of this contrasted sharply; Alloway believes that Facebook helps engage and boost the working memory, likening the mental processes honed using service to those normally associated with more cerebral activities such as puzzle solving.
