24-hour news streams, emails, Twitter updates ‘making us less compassionate’
June 3rd, 2009 - 1:26 pm ICT by ANI ( Leave a comment )London, June 3 (ANI): Constant emails, news alerts, and Twitter updates are overloading the human brain and making people’s responses dismissive, says new research.
The deluge of information from 24-hour news, mobile phones and social networking sites moves too fast for the brain’s ‘moral compass’ to process.
According to two newly published scientific studies, people’s reactions to traumatic news stories are becoming increasingly dismissive as their minds are trying to seek comfort in the simpler things.
The research claims that this overload may also be causing increasing levels of depression, reports The Telegraph.
Professor Dilip Jeste said that the neurones linked to traits such as human wisdom or empathy, are sited in the slower acting, recently evolved regions of our brain, that are bypassed when the world feels stressful, the Archives of General Psychiatry reports.
On the same lines, scientists at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute have aired concerns in their latest study: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
Their study’s volunteers showed people needed longer to react fully to stories of social pain with emotions like compassion, than to react at an unemotive level. (ANI)
- Callous-unemotional traits help identify kids at risk of antisocial behavior - Feb 21, 2011
- Here's why you get wiser as you age - Jun 25, 2010
- Life of crime begins at 3 for some kids, say scientists - Feb 22, 2011
- Central, unifying characteristics of wisdom identified - May 08, 2010
- Does lack of fear drive psychopaths? - May 20, 2011
- Brain's stunted growth behind teen misbehaviour - Apr 01, 2011
- Psychopaths lack empathy just like patients with frontal head injury - Jan 26, 2011
- Scientists say that chickens are capable of empathy - Mar 09, 2011
- Brain's 'wisdom centre' found - Apr 05, 2009
- Little babies can make out when you're sad - Jul 01, 2011
- Just like us, Neanderthals too had feelings - Oct 06, 2010
- Brain quicker at registering others' physical pain than psychological - Apr 18, 2009
- Watching another being caressed acts as turn-on - Oct 18, 2011
- How does brain feel another's pain? - Jul 17, 2011
- Breastfeeding linked to stronger maternal response to infant's cry - Apr 21, 2011
Tags: academy of sciences, archives of general psychiatry, compassion, deluge, dilip, early edition, empathy, hour news, human brain, human wisdom, jeste, june 3, moral compass, national academy of sciences, neurones, news stories, proceedings of the national academy, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, social networking sites, university of southern california