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Email has turned office workers into 'hi-tech lab rats', says expert | | A leading expert has claimed that email has turned
office workers into no more than lab rats desperately craving "pellets of social interaction". Increasing levels of information overload from computer and smart
phone screens cause a "bottleneck" in the brain and prevent any deep thought,
according to Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.
Carr, a former business of the Harvard Business Review, whose books include 'The
Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains', said email exploits a basic
human instinct to search for new information, causing us to become addicted to
our inboxes. The natural impulses that helped early humans find food and avoid
predators are causing us to regress to a state no more sophisticated than a rat
in a laboratory, he said. A recent study found that British office workers look
at their email inboxes at least 30 times an hour. For each bit of new information
we find our brain releases a dose of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical which
has been linked to addictive behaviour. "Our gadgets have turned us into hi-tech
lab rats, mindlessly pressing levers in the hope of receiving a pellet of social
or intellectual nourishment," the Telegraph quoted Carr as telling Esquire magazine.
"What makes digital messages all the more compelling is their uncertainty. There's
always the possibility that something important is waiting for us in our inbox
...[which] overwhelms our knowledge that most online missives are trivial," Carr
added. Scientists fear that divided attention could damage the thought process
and the ability to concentrate, and possibly lead to irrational behaviour. Carr
said the abundance of information we are exposed to through various screens "gets
in the way of deep thinking" and "obstructs understanding, impedes the formation
of memories and makes learning more difficult". He explained: "When we take in
too much data too quickly, as we do skipping between links, our working memory
gets swamped. We suffer from what brain scientists call cognitive overload." This
results in us retaining very little information and failing to connect what we
do remember to experiences stored in our long-term memory, meaning our thoughts
are "thin and scattered".
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