Too much use of your smartphone or other electronic devices could have an impact on certain areas of the brain, in particular those related to the understanding of scientific texts.
For this back to school, it might be wise to control the use of the smartphone or the tablet in your teenager! According to a recent studypublished in the journal Scientific Reports, excessive interaction with electronic devices could weaken the activity of certain areas of the brain, central to the understanding of scientific texts.
More precisely, the researchers noticed that sending text messages or reading on a tablet frequently was negatively correlated with the activity of areas of the brain that allow the understanding of several sources of information, such as scientific articles or other informative texts.
A causality that remains to be verified
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity to look for patterns associated with the integration of information during reading.
The 51 participants in the study read scientific articles covering a variety of topics related to mathematics, electrical circuits or the environment. The team of researchers then noticed that there was a negative correlation between the frequency of use of electronic devices and the activity of regions of the brain such as the left insular cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus, central in particular in understanding of language.
Another study, published in 2017, had already suggested that people who use their smartphone or other electronic device too frequently are less likely to correctly understand a scientific text.
Ping Li, associate research director at PennState University and author of the study, however, wants to qualify. “It is important to emphasize that what we are showing here is not causality, he explains. For the moment, we are simply showing a correlation between these areas of the brain and excessive use of electronic devices.
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