How Devices Affect Your Memory | Dr. Charan Ranganath

What is the memory research saying about using devices, cell phones and watches that have constant notifications or reminders? It definitely reduces memory performance for whatever it is you're doing. It also can, I mean, I wanted people to take this with a grain of salt because I think there's a lot more research that needs to be done on this. But there's even work suggesting that heavy media multitaskers, like people who switch back and forth between looking at my phone and looking at the iPad. Yeah, yeah. Like they're doing multiple things at the same time. They actually even have some thinning in parts of the brain, including parts of the prefrontal cortex. Thinning. Yeah. So is this like, if you multitask every day, this could cause some thinning in the brain or it just maybe people who have a thinner prefrontal cortex multitask more. Right, right, right. Because they're more easily distracted. It could go either way. Yeah, yeah. But it's not something I think we want for ourselves either way. And it definitely reduces, it changes brain activity in bad ways.