Thaindian News

London, Dec 13 (ANI): With increasing exposure to media in modern times, an average person is every day exposed to information enough to overload a laptop, reveals a new study from University of San Diego, California.

According to the researchers, with email, the internet, television and other media, people are inundated with around 100,000 words a day - equivalent to 23 words per second.

They believe that the information overload may have detrimental effects on the brain.

They claim that the strain of processing so much data means we are becoming disconnected from other people and developing shorter attention spans.

The study showed that people are bombarded with 34 gigabytes of information a day.

“I think one thing is clear: our attention is being chopped into shorter intervals and that is probably not good for thinking deeper thoughts,” the Telegraph quoted Roger Bohn, co-author of the study called How Much Information, as telling Sunday Times.

“Never before in human history have our brains had to process as much information as they do today,” said Edward Hallowell, a New York psychiatrist and author specialising in attention deficit disorder.

“We have a generation of people who I call computer suckers because they are spending so much time in front of a computer screen or on their mobile phone or BlackBerry.

“They are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to think and to feel.

“Much of what they are exposed to is superficial. People are sacrificing depth and feeling and becoming cut off and disconnected from other people,” Hallowell added.

Experts believe that the information overload could prompt our brains to evolve in a new way.

“One of the things we have learnt over the past 20 years is that the brain does have a capacity to grow and increase in size depending on how it is used,” said Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick. (ANI)