Tweeting Can Hurt Your Brain
Well, not really. It's not the tweeting that does it, but the distraction -- and disruption -- it brings to your day. And the Instagraming, Facebooking, iTubing, Pinteresting, etc. According to Bob Sullivan at The New York Times, each time our cell phone rings, or a text tings, or an email pops up on the screen, it interrupts the task we're working on. He noted that Gloria Mark, of the University of California, Irvine, found that "it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption." But worse, no one really knows the quality of work "done during these periods of rapid toggling." And what's been found to have an even bigger effect on disruption is the anticipation that a call or email or text might come in. Sullivan and his staff conducted three tests on volunteers sitting in labs to perform a cognitive skills test. One group simply completed the test but the second group was interrupted while the third was ...