This is your brain on social media

Whether they’re managing a Facebook page or scouring Twitter for news, PR and marketing professionals and journalists spend large portions of their day staring at a screen—big or small—consuming bite-size chunks of information.

Researchers say this is not good for us. Social media is rewiring our brains. Here are five examples (in easily consumable chunks):

We’re becoming dumber.

When your email is pinging and your Twitter stream is flowing, it’s easy to become distracted, and distracted workers are dumb. In fact, their brains are more numb than that of a pot smoker. A 2005 Hewlett-Packard study found that workers distracted by email and phone calls experience a temporary drop in IQ that is more than twice that seen in people who smoke marijuana.

We get bored more easily.