Internet: Does it literally change the structure and function of our brain?

What are the transformations that the young man who has sprung from the age of the internet has undergone?

Μa new evolutionary era scientists suspect has been launched for the human species since a number of human needs, such as Communicate and partner search, are performed in the electronic world.

And so a plethora of brain regions responsible for coordinating these daily behaviors are increasingly adapting to the modern digital lifestyle.

And despite the fact that such evolutionary trends are still in their infancy, a team of scientists has gathered investigations and came up with an analysis of the changes that digital life has brought to the human mind.

In their study, published in World Psychiatry Magazine, international scientists from Oxford, Harvard and other universities analyzed a series of brain imaging and found that our online lifestyle has changed the brain areas related to attention, memory and social skills.

Those who, say, look frantically at their mobile phone so as not to miss a message and notification turns out to have reduced gray matter in certain areas of the prefrontal cortex responsible for maintaining attention in a project.

And of course our growing trust in search engines simply means that our memory abilities are diminishing. Why do you have to remember something if you can find it at any time on the Internet; Even online learning has been found to fail to activate those brain areas that have to do with storing long-term memory traces.

As for social networking, it has transformed how the brain centers that control social behavior work. Even the friends one has on Facebook now determine the amount of gray matter in the intranasal cortex, an area that science knows has to do with matching names and faces!

Before networking, people had fewer friends and stronger bonds with each other. While now that friends have become many but relationships are formal, the brain is forced to adapt to change…

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