Is Social Media Harming Our Memory? There’s Reason To Believe So.

Chances are at this time, you’ve already logged into your social media accounts repeatedly. It might also have happened that even while having your breakfast and while last night’s dinner, you were mumbling something whilst looking at a new update by a friend. At all this time, the food on your plate was lying as it is.

It’s not too surprising, truth be told, to hear cases about an obsession with social media. We have peculiarities that go a long way to define us. Some people are habitual of checking their phone for messages or calls. Others are particular about their hairstyle and can be constantly seen adjusting their hairdo.

One of the common lapses of this modern age is the frequent habit of fiddling with the phone to check for social media updates. And if it could be said, this obsession has rather irritating repercussions for those lives that are connected to ours. In fact, the lop-side of social media isn’t just the addiction part alone which eventually eats up the vital time we could have attributed to other activities. There’s more.

A recent research suggests that social media updates can actually lead to hampering our memory. In a fast-paced world where we are constantly jostling with too much information, meeting deadlines, running about, completing varied tasks and for the lack of better word, engaged in micro-management- this finding isn’t that inspiring.

Here’s a simple reason to understand why this might be happening. At all the times where we entrust a Facebook or Instagram to play a memory keeper, stocking our precious memories that are posted in form of social media updates- we are compromising our own memory function. The lack of utilisation of one’s own memory is indirectly harming by putting to good measure the use of a Facebook, Instagram and other channels.

The Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that more dependence on social media to store our records is actually lessening the capacity of our minds to register and record memories. The institute is of the view that at this time, a common phenomenon is that the social media is doing all the memory-keeping or memory-storage work for us. Given the current scheme of things (the way they are), it appears that the more we use social media and depend on it to store memories for us, the lesser will be our ability to remember the memories and recount them.