According to Dr. Michael Merzenich, author of Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life, excessive screen time is physically changing your brain – for the worse. Because of neuroplasticity, the ability of your brain to change both form and function due to input, when a human focuses their vision on the area right in front of their nose repeatedly for hours a day, their brain makes adjustments accordingly.

The survival of the human species was dependent on the ability to see and respond quickly to events as they happened in the environment all around a person. For this reason, your brain is programmed to see from ear to ear. Information coming from your eyes gets interpreted and turned into action primarily in your brain’s frontal lobe.

The frontal lobe of the brain is basically your humanness. It controls your executive functioning and intelligence, as well as other capabilities, including speech, memory, some mobility, personality, and more. Unfortunately, it is your frontal lobe that is taking the biggest hit from staring at a screen.

Your View of the World Is Literally Shrinking

Visual activities where you continuously focus straight ahead, such as looking at a screen or even driving, narrow your field of vision to a small box-like zone right in front of your eyes. Your brain learns to categorize everything outside of this box as a distraction – not worthy of your attention. Your brain is a very efficient learner. It gets good at filtering out anything not right in front of you. By developing such sustained attention in the central view, your peripheral vision suffers, and your view of the world slowly gets smaller.

The field of view in humans decreases with age anyway. Over time, a person becomes more and more immune to noticing life’s visual details, and their eyes move less often. As a result of these natural and self-induced neurological changes, our brains and bodies get conditioned to not pay attention and not react to our environments. In other words, your brain learns to label most everything as uninteresting and unimportant.

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