The goldfish metric: how using the internet changes our brains and our behavior. From the article:

It appears that five days of connecting to the internet, for one hour a day, suffice to modify the neural circuits of the human brain by increasing cerebral activity. This is a finding of the lab of Gary Small, a researcher in Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at UCLA. “People,” Small maintains, “who are in the habit of searching for something online have increased activity in certain areas of the brain. But there is a cost: what stimulates certain circuits diminishes certain others. The new technologies are reformatting our brains, even if not in irreversible ways….”

Many studies have provided evidence of an erosion of attention or the increase in stress, not to mention the development of extreme behaviors…. [The journalist] Riccardo Iacona commented, “it concerns a force for transforming reality, similar to the way an economic phenomenon might change things. But just consider the fact that 71 percent of people have difficulty reading a newspaper article and that today the “attention span” is less than that of a goldfish (eight seconds; the goldfish nine).”

The decline in attention, the excess of stimuli, the speed with which we feel constrained to “switch,” namely to move from one activity to another, are not however just phenomena studied for their consequences on our health: but also…for those who steer these phenomena.

“One speaks of a society driven to extremes, that shouts, that is afraid,” [the author] Lisa Iotti explains…, “but the polarization of society is functional as a business model that attracts attention by leveraging the stronger emotions.”

published 14 October 2018, p. 33.