Social media and the human condition
With social media sites getting used by ⅓ of the whole world, they’ve clearly had an major influence on society. But what about our bodies? Here are 5 crazy ways in which social media and therefore the internet are affecting your brain right now! 
Can’t log off?
Surprisingly, 5-10% of internet users are literally unable to regulate what proportion time they spend online. Though it’s a psychological addiction as against a substance addiction, brain scans of those people actually show an identical impairment of regions that those with drug dependence have.
Specifically, there's a transparent degradation of substantia alba within the regions that control emotional processing, attention and deciding . Because social media provides immediate rewards with little or no effort required, your brain begin to rewire itself, making you desire these stimulations. And you start to crave more of this neurological excitement after each interaction. Sounds a touch sort of a drug, right? We also see a shift when watching multi-tasking.
you would possibly think that those that use social media or constantly switch between work and websites are better at multitasking, but studies have found that when comparing heavy mediausers to others, they perform much worse during task switching tests. Increased multi-taskingonline reduces your brains ability to filter interferences, and may even make it harderfor your brain to commit information to memory.
Like when your phone buzzes within the middleof productive work. Or wait...did it even buzz? Phantom Vibration Syndrome may be a relativelynew psychological phenomenon where you think that you felt your phone explode , but it didn’t.In one study, 89% of test subjects said they experienced this a minimum of once every fortnight .It would seem that our brains now perceive an itch as an actual vibration from our phone.As crazy because it seems, technology has begun to rewire our nervous systems - and our brainsare being triggered during a way they never are before in history. Social Media also triggers a release of dopamine- the texture good chemical.
Using MRI scans, scientist found that the reward centres inpeople’s brains are far more active once they are talking about their own views, asopposed to taking note of others. Not so surprising - we all love talking about ourselves right?But it seems that while 30-40% of face-to-face conversations involve communicating our ownexperiences, around 80% of social media communication is self involved. an equivalent a part of your brainrelated to orgasms, motivation and love are stimulated by your social media use - andeven more so once you know you've got an audience.
Our body is physiologically rewarding us fortalking about ourselves online! But it’s not all so self involved. In fact,studies on relationships have found that partners tend to love one another more if they meetfor the primary time online instead of with a face to face interaction. Whether it’sbecause people are more anonymous or perhaps more clear about their future goals, thereis a statistical increase in successful partnerships that started online. So while the internethas changed our verbal communication with increased physical separation, perhaps theones that matter most find yourself even closer. Speaking of social media, we had you ask usquestions on twitter, instagram, facebook, tumblr, google+ and each other social platformwe could find and did a Q&A Video over on AsapTHOUGHT!
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