Children's knowledge: Is Internet addiction harmful to the brain?

1, promoting the growth of nerve cells.

The University of California conducted a comparative study of three people unfamiliar with the Internet and three internet experts, and asked the subjects to complete two tasks in turn: using Google to search for information and reading books. The magnetic resonance scanning of the subjects' heads showed that there was no difference in reading books between the two groups. But when searching on Google, the area of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of Internet experts is very active, while the activation of beginners in this area is very small.

Subsequently, the researchers asked each subject to search 1 hour online every day for five days. The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to re-scan the two groups of subjects. The results showed that the area of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the brain of the novice surfers was also active. As long as you search online for a few days, the brain will trigger the formation of new neural circuits. This proves that surfing the internet more often is beneficial to enhance the function of the brain.

2. Improve people's skills

Paul from New Zealand Institute of Technology? Kearney's research shows that some computer games can actually improve people's cognitive ability and skills to accomplish multiple tasks. Volunteers who play games for 48 hours a week have improved their multitasking skills by 2.5 times. The research of the University of Rochester in the United States proves that video games can also improve peripheral vision, and the network can also speed up mental reaction time, making the brain more effective when performing multi-tasks.

3, make people look in all directions, and listen to it.

Research shows that the Internet may lead to people's distraction and inattention, but on the other hand, it is a positive advantage. Because you spend more time online, you can develop the ability to complete more than two tasks at the same time. Nowadays, "digital natives" (people who have been bathed in network technology since birth) can do their homework, chat with their classmates online and eat at the same time. You can do two or more things at the same time. But "digital immigrants" (refers to people who surf the Internet as adults) can hardly do these two things.

4. It is helpful to delay Alzheimer's disease.

Research conducted by a research team at UCLA shows that the Internet can stimulate the central area of the brain to control decision-making and complex reasoning. Simply searching online every day seems to increase the neural circuits of the elderly and help delay age-related dementia.

The researchers asked 24 volunteers aged between 55 and 76 to search and read books online and scan their brains. The results show that both surfing the Internet and reading can change the areas in the brain responsible for language, reading and memory, and the network is particularly beneficial to the areas in the brain responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning. Therefore, simple daily activities such as online search can improve the information exchange of brain neurons in the elderly, and middle-aged and elderly people can reduce the risk of dementia as long as they often participate in brain stimulation activities.

Negative influence theory:

1, brain-dead or "brain-dead"

Internet addiction obviously has negative effects on health and brain. Some studies have long found that Internet addiction can lead to anxiety, depression, fatigue, poor health and inattention. And new research is constantly providing evidence for these negative effects, and thinks that Internet addiction may even cause "brain damage".

A recent study by Hao Lei, a researcher at Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, shows that the nerve fibers in the white matter of teenagers with Internet addiction are not as healthy as ordinary people. This is the result of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning the brains of more than 30 teenagers with Internet addiction whose age is about 18.

White matter is an integral part of the brain and spinal cord, and it is a bridge between the brain and other parts of the body. The specific damage of internet addiction to teenagers' brains is mainly manifested in that it seems to consume myelin sheath on nerve fibers, which is the substance that protects nerve fibers. Although the degree of injury needs to be quantified, this finding shows that excessive use of the Internet is related to brain injury. At the same time, the researchers also found that the damage of white matter tissue is similar to other forms of addiction such as alcoholism, dependence or addiction. This damage may affect people's decision-making cognition and weaken people's control ability.

3. Emotional apathy and attention degradation

Hao Lei and others' research also found that compared with non-addicts, some nerve fibers in the brain of Internet addicts are interrupted, which is related to people's emotions and self-control, thus explaining why Internet addicts have emotional apathy.

At the same time, the attention and communication ability of internet addicts will gradually deteriorate. A survey of more than 5,800 children with Internet addiction found that 48% of them had attention deficit. Playing online games for more than 6 hours every day, after half a year, the glucose and oxygen metabolism in the frontal lobe decreased 15%. The prefrontal lobe is the main part of people's cognitive, decision-making and attention functions. The decline of glucose and oxygen metabolism in this area means that its function also declines, which will affect people's normal emotional expression and interpersonal communication.

3. Memory loss

Some studies show that network technology will lead to the degradation of some neural circuits and brain regions of "digital aborigines". It usually takes about 1 hour for memory to be fixed in the brain. If there is any interruption, even a simple distraction will erase the budding memory from the mind.

An Israeli "Click Report" company tracked 6.5438+0 million website visitors around the world and found that the average time for people to go to the next page after browsing the current page was 6.5438+09-27 seconds. Constantly reading "hypertext" increases readers' cognitive load, thus weakening their ability to understand and remember what they read.

A recent study in the United States shows that an American receives about 34G English words every day, 1 10000, which is equivalent to 1/5 of the computer hard disk storage. Psychologists believe that the human brain can only process173 billion bytes of information in a lifetime, which is about equivalent to173 g. According to this calculation, the amount of information received by Americans every day has reached 1/5 that can be processed in a lifetime. And a lot of this information is useless, which will affect people's memory. The human brain is like a running computer web page. The more clicks on a web page, the slower it runs.