[Reader: if you don't think Screens = Distraction, here's a test: how many times in the course of reading this article do you look away from the text? And how much information do you retain?]

TMI – Too Much Information – can be embarrassing. It can also be destructive.

That’s the conclusion reached by researchers in studies of media use. “We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” a neuroscientist is quoted by Matt Richtel in a major in in-depth article in the New York Times, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price. “While many people say multitasking makes them more productive,” Richtel writes, “research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress… Even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

These findings reinforce concerns we’ve expressed here (See The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction and More Evidence that Screens=Distraction) about potentially negative effects of screen-learning on young minds. Experiments demonstrate that children using computers were far more easily distracted and unable to retain information than their paper-reading counterparts.

Now, however, the same effects are manifesting themselves in adults. Richtel’s must-read examination of the impact of technology on mental processes, reveals that we consume 12 hours of media daily, compared to five hours fifty years ago. But it’s not just the amount of time we spend in front of a screen, it’s the quality of that time that is taking its toll on every aspect of daily life. Though the analogy of addiction has frequently been used to describe media technology fixation, the addiction is closer to food and sex than to drugs and alcohol, says a leading brain scientist, because too much of a good thing – food, sex, information – is inimical to health, safety, and human relationships. What Richtel calls information bursts “play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive”

Infatuation with computers, e-books and tablets can blind us to the downside of the technology, and it’s good that revelations such as those Richtel reports have begun to come out now when we need to achieve a balance between benefits and liabilities.

If you think these conclusions don’t apply to you, click here for a test.

Richard Curtis