In the digital age, why does the memory of young adults decline?
Related to operating multiple tasks simultaneously
Our reporter Zhang Mengran
When you open the cabinet, you forget what you want to take, and when you walk into the kitchen, you forget what you are looking for. If you just turn around and forget it without setting a reminder... this is not the “patent” of the elderly. It turns out that memory loss has gradually become younger Human invasion, but what is the reason?
At the same time, scientists have always wanted to figure out the root cause of human forgetfulness and why some people have particularly good memories.
With the rise of current digital culture, understanding the relationship between media multitasking and episodic memory (memory of events) has added new ideas to these long-term questions.
Daily life for young people: watching web pages, replying to messages, sending emails, and sending videos at the same time
This is an era of intelligent media. With the increase in the amount and convenience of people's access to information, two important changes have taken place in our traditional reading behavior: the increase in online activity time, and the tendency to multitask in media.
The so-called media multitasking, in short, is the simultaneous use of multiple forms of digital media.
For example, the behavior of sending messages and browsing the web while watching TV, or, with a report in hand, you have to process emails, reply to messages, and send a video...that is, you are doing media multitasking.
And this kind of behavior for a long time is common among contemporary young people.
In view of the increasingly prominent media multitasking behavior of young people, previous studies on media multitasking and reading and cognition have shown that this behavior will increase working hours, affect cognitive understanding, cause shallow reading, or easily lead to "distractions" ".
However, no research has shown that frequent conduct of this behavior may actually damage people's memory.
Attention "wrong", memory "lost"
A neuroscience research recently published in the British journal Nature found that the simultaneous use of multiple forms of digital media, that is, media multitasking, may have a negative impact on the memory of young adults.
The results of this study show that frequent media multitasking is significantly related to distraction and increased forgetting.
This research was carried out by Kevin Madley, Anthony Wagner and colleagues at Stanford University.
They used an experimental group of 80 young adults (ages 18 to 26) to study whether media multitasking is related to spontaneous distraction, and whether distraction is negatively correlated with memory.
The researchers first asked the subjects to quickly browse the pictures of objects on the computer screen, and after a 10-minute delay period, they showed them the second set of pictures and asked them to point out whether these pictures have become larger or smaller. People are happy or not, or have they seen this picture before.
The researchers assessed the subjects’ distractions through changes in their brainwave activity and pupil diameter.
Participants also filled out questionnaires to evaluate their weekly media multitasking, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms, impulsivity, playing games, concentration and mental mobility trends.
The results showed that the distraction at the moment before the memory is related to the decrease of the neural signal of the memory and forgetting.
Is not suitable for the brain
The research team pointed out that more frequent media multitasking may be related to the increase in the frequency of distraction, and this trend will lead to poor episodic memory.
Obviously, it seems to be very efficient to process more media tasks at the same time, but actual research shows that this is not suitable for our brains.
An earlier study from Stanford University also showed that media multitasking has an impact on human cognitive and information processing capabilities. The cognitive resources of our human brain are limited. When we try to do multiple tasks at once, the task completion speed will be Slow down.
Whether it's attention "wrong" or memory "running and losing", it's not worth the loss.
The results of this study play an important warning role in people's daily habits.
But in fact, the situation is difficult to improve. The way young people get information has changed. In this process, they often perform media multitasking, which may not be avoided.