Internet addiction changes brain structure: language function is affected, making people speechless

I often hold my phone or tablet uncontrollably, swipe Weibo aimlessly, browse Taobao…

If there is, then you need to pay attention, this kind of uncontrollable Internet addiction,is a health problem called Internet Use Disorder (IUD)and this kind of problem will affect your speaking ability.

Internet use disorder,Specifically, Internet browsing that is often uncontrolled, but the information you browse does not point tojust out of an uncontrollable habitual action.

A recent medical study published in the academic journal PLoS ONE: Omnibus shows that mutualInternet use disorder affects the brain, altering the structure of areas of the brain that control the language system.

Simply put, it is:

Too many Weibo swipes make it difficult to speak.

I was so frightened that I quickly put down the phone in my hand.

Experiment on 60 volunteers

The research results come from an academic team at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Pecs, Hungary.

The team’s latest experiments show that,Internet Use Disorder (IUD) alters the structure of the language region of the brain, which affects the ability to speak.

The experiment was designed like this:

The Internet use questionnaire (PIUQ) was used to index the level of Internet addiction among 60 subjects, and then all participants were subjected to language experiments, and MRI scans of the subjects’ brains were performed in the process.

In the process, a correlation between Internet use disorder and changes in brain structure was derived.

The entire experiment was paid to recruit 60 volunteers, aged 18-30 years old, half male and half male. Also, make sure that all volunteers are ignorant of the purpose of the experiment.

In this experiment, the research team used a total of 2 experimental tools:

The first is the design of the Internet use questionnaire.

The questionnaire consists of 3 major parts of 18 items, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (obsession), neglect disorder and control disorder. There are 6 questions in each of the 3 major components, which respectively measure the subjects’ obsession with the Internet and their lack of real life due to Internet access. level, and self-control.

All questions answered on a five-point Likert scalecompare and assign points to different answers, the higher the score, the higher the degree of addiction.

In addition, the questionnaire also introduced two subjective questions, and assessed psychological factors such as personal depression and anxiety that affect the online behavior of the experimental subjects.

The specific scores and questionnaire details are as follows:

followed by language experiments.

The experimental team did not use the semantic experiment of the verbal fluency task commonly used in similar experiments, but conducted it with the phonemic experiment.

The so-called verbal fluency task is a common tool for evaluating language performance, including lexical knowledge, lexical retrieval ability, and executive control, usually including semantic and phonemic components. The difference between the two is that semantics requires the experimenter to say category-related words, and phonemic requires the experimenter to say words that begin with a specific letter.

As for the reasons, the research team believes that,Phoneme experiments better reflect behavioral control and activation of frontal lobesand the above two factors can better reflect the connection between Internet use disorder and brain structure.

The specific language experimental design consisted of 7 cycles of 30-second long rest and 30-second active periods.

During the activity period, the experimenter needed to speak as many Hungarian words as possible using S, K, E, T, L, A, N as the initial letters in sequence in 7 cycles.

Internet Addiction Really Affects Speech

Next is the experimental results, which show that the correlation between Internet questionnaire scores and brain BOLD fMRI is as follows:

The subscales of the Internet use questionnaire were inversely associated with inactivation of the bilateral precuneus, bilateral cingulate (PCC), left subcallosal cortex, and left orbitofrontal cortex of the brain when the language experiment was conducted.

Total questionnaire scores were negatively correlated with inactivation of the bilateral precuneus and bilateral PCC, and subjective question 2 scores were negatively correlated with inactivation of the right thalamus, right parahippocampal gyrus, and right bilateral cingulate gyrus.

Subjective question 1 did not show a clear correlation.

In Broca’s area of ​​the brain, which is closely related to human language ability, experiments have found that there is a negative correlation between the neglected component of PIUQ and the PPI of the left occipital pole, left lateral occipital cortex (LOC) and left calvarial cortex.

PIUQ fascination was negatively correlated with PPI in the left LOC, left intracortical Arkansas, and caudate nucleus, while total PIUQ was also negatively correlated with left caudate nucleus, LOC, and left intracortical Arkansas.

The problem rate (Q1), which represents the subjective degree of addiction, was negatively correlated with the PPI of the left occipital pole, LOC, occipital gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, and anterior ventral gyrus.

That is,Experimental data confirms that Internet use disorder (IUD) reduces speaking fluency.

However, the author of the paper also explained in the study that the mechanism of IUD’s change in language ability,Is it in the process of language processing and cognitive control, or is it caused by the decline of general cognitive ability.

However, the mechanism by which IUD negatively affects personal language fluency may be due to altered two nervous systems:

One is DMNthe default network of the brain, which is closely related to the brain’s consciousness, emotions, and episodic memory.

Another is the interdependence of signaling between Broca’s area and occipital area.

While conclusions about the brain’s mechanism of action are still in the “possible” stage, one thing is certain:

Playing with mobile phones and tablets should be self-control, otherwise it will be unreasonable to say the truth. (manual dog head)

About the author of the paper

Darnai Gergely, the first author and corresponding author of the paper, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pécs, Hungary. His main research fields include brain science, neurology, and psychology.

Specific resume:

• In 2011, he obtained a master’s degree from the University of Pecs, mainly in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, neuropsychology, etc.;

• In 2016, obtained a doctorate of philosophy at the University of Pécs;

• After graduating from Ph.D., he stayed in school to engage in research work.

Reference link:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0269979#