By Richard Restak, MD, The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health SciencesEdited by Kate Findley and proofread byAngelaShoemaker, The Great Courses DailyDue to multiple electronic devices bringing information to us to view, we are giving our brains information overload and finding it hard to keep focused attention. Photo By Who is Danny / ShutterstockReshaping Reality with Technology

The experiential aspects of technology are changing our perception of reality and how our brains process information.

I recently watched Pablo Casals on YouTube playing Suite No. 1 of the Cello Suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, Dr. Restak said. Prior to watching this, my knowledge of Casals depended on historical accounts and his recordings. Watching his performance augmented my understanding and appreciation in a very deep way this immediately led me to watch performances of the Suites by Jacqueline du Pr.

Thanks to this on YouTube, I was able to experientially connect in ways that would have been impossible a few years ago. Technology here provides a form of immortality: I can see, hear, and connect with an artist who died in 1973.

Technology also makes it possible to re-experience an event through multiple sensory channels.

I photographed the previous winters three blizzards here in Washington, where blizzards are rare, Dr. Restak said. Nothing like it had occurred since 1899. A few months later, I looked at those pictures on a warm sunny daysame terrain, different world.

Technology made that possible. You can do the same thing yourself by looking at pictures and videos youve made and comparing them to your present situation.

Theres also a dark side to technology and its influence on the brain. In fact, we are now, as a New York Times article put it, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price. By juggling e-mail, cell phones, laptop computers, and e-books, were bringing about changes in how our brains operate.

Were in the age of distraction, where attention and focus are becoming endangered species. Concentration is decreased, and distraction increases. We simply have too many sources of information, which Marshall McLuhn referred to as information overload.

The top-down processing by the frontal lobes is interfered with by excessive bottom-up informational processing coming up from the sensory channels. As a result, the deep processing of information is replaced by skimming and surfing.

Memory is also interfered with because mental focusing is difficult thanks to scattered attention and distraction. Finally, the technology of the internet, cell phone, and texting encourages multitasking, which impairs our ability to focus our attention on a single task.

Multitasking is in fact a myth because the brain works sequentially, and thus you are only under the illusion that you are working on multiple tasks simultaneously while in fact you have to divert attention away from one task to focus on another. Theres also an interference effect with use of the same channel, like when you try to listen to something and write something at the same time.

Its better to deal with everything separately. Mental channels can also interfere with physical channels.

You can be imagining one scene while looking at another, like when youre on a cell phone talking about something at home and youre trying to envision it while youre supposed to be watching whats happening in front of you on the highway. This creates a bottleneck effect. Every part of the brain is specialized for something; therefore, you dont want to overload it.

Hypertext is another example of multitasking. You see the linked text, and you need to evaluate whether or not to leave the main article that youre reading.

If you decide to click on the hyperlink, then you have to decide when youre going to return to the original text. Thats sometimes hard to remember after youve clicked on many hyperlinks.

Although internet reading is convenient and exposes us to a wealth of ideas we might not have discovered otherwise, it has its downsides. One study from Educational Research Review shows that shifting from one document to another interferes with understanding.

We really do better when we focus on one thing at a time. The cognitive load, which is the information entering working memory, can be exceeded when we try to do too many things due to the bottleneck in the frontal lobes.

The internet can function as an interrupter as well. These online interruptions can be e-mail, advertisements, and pop-ups.

We may be focused on a task, but naturally, our curiosity about what were missing drives us to check our email, instant messages, and automatic alertswhich in some cases occur 30 or more times an hour. Overall, theres a decrease in efficiency due to switching cost, which increases cognitive load.

The bottom line is that depth, clarity, and cohesion of thought take timetime that you simply have to find. They also require focused attention. All of these are impaired by the multitasking that the internet encourages.

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