Twitter Boosts Your Memory…

…Not!

Tracy Alloway is a psychologist at Sterling University, Scotland, interested in how working memory impacts life, apparently told the British Science Festival that using Twitter can “hurt or harm working memory” because you’re receiving an endless stream of information when you’re a ‘tweeter’. Because it’s all “very succinct”, “there’s no need to process or manipulate that information”. She apparently added that “it’s not a dialogue unlike something like Facebook where you might be updating your status and so on.”

I’d be interested to see the data that support these assertions. I certainly plenty of people who use Twitter as a dialog, indeed a multilog, and certainly have indepth conversations on that system way beyond the often very limited status update approach of Facebook. And vice versa.

But, more importantly, I’d want to see her evidence that Twitter or Facebook have any effect on memory at all. I wonder if she has tested individuals’ memories before and after their using those services. How much Twitter or Facebook use does it take to have an effect on memory? What actual physiological effect does it have on the brain?

If anything, I suspect that activities like using Twitter, could boost brain activity, with such a fast-moving stream of information there is a lot more to process and retain, especially with all the tangents and sidestreams that one follows while working with such a tool.

Any of these pronouncements whether from psychologists or neurologists are invariably just hypothesising, with small samples of individuals (if we’re lucky) who may have briefly used whatever tool is being criticized and perhaps had an MRI scan while doing it. Personally (I know, non-random sample of n=1) I’d say that since getting more heavily involved in sites like Twitter, my memory has improved, I can certainly recall names, places, websites and other information much more readily than I could before.

I don’t think there is any real evidence either way for positive or negative effects on the brain of using any online tool and I doubt very much that anyone would be able to distinguish the brain activity of a Twitter versus a Facebook user.

In fact, Alloway told journalists at the Festival that her hypothesis was based on nothing more than a single small study of children using SMS text messaging and that no one has done any studies of the effects of Twitter or Facebook on memory at all.

Some of the news reports on Alloway’s “talk” at the British Science Festival will inevitably have been picked up by the press pack there. I’ve seen it in action at this unique science show several times. Thankfully, Mark Henderson of The Times puts things straight in his blog.

There are rarely any novel or full science results reported at the science festival, it’s more of a show for the public than a conference for science. Indeed, it’s almost always about getting the press pack to nibble at soundbites…you know like 140-character tweets that no one remembers…rather than anything indepth, although it is fun, it’s not serious science, at least as far as I remember.