Internet eats your brains!
Stuff is telling us “internet overuse could cause brain damage”, with even less than usual in the way of referencing: no journal, no researcher names, no university (no, “Chinese” is not sufficiently specific. There’s quite a few Chinese scientists out there). Fortunately, the Google is always there to help, and it turns out that the relevant paper is available online, free, in PLoS One.
The first thing to note is that the paper says nothing about the effects of amount of internet use. Nothing. It’s about internet addiction, which is at least trying to be a pathological condition distinct from just using the internet a lot. Secondly, although the paper does claim to find “changes” in brain structure, the participants had MRI brain imaging only once, so there is no data about changes. What the researchers found is differences in brain structure between people with and without internet addiction, similar to the differences in people addicted to other things.
This immediately raises the question of cause and effect. Is your brain different because you are addicted, or are you addicted because your brain is different?
Interestingly, the paper claims that ” the incidence rate of internet addiction among Chinese urban youths is about 14%“. This seems implausibly high, and it’s twice the prevalence found in a recent Hong Kong survey published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, but I suppose if the diagnostic criteria are still a bit fuzzy you would expect overdiagnosis in a large-scale survey.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »