Most of know that sit­ting in front of a com­put­er for pro­longed peri­ods is bad for your body. A new book titled Your Brain on Nature argues that com­put­ers may also be low­er­ing our IQ, mak­ing us less empa­thet­ic, and more narcissistic.

Authors Eva Sel­hub and Alan C. Logan argue the following:

• IQ may be low­er­ing. James Fly­nn dis­cov­ered that IQ rates were increas­ing about three to five IQ points per decade in the 20th cen­tu­ry, due to bet­ter nutri­tion, school­ing, health care, and oth­er social fac­tors. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, accord­ing to Sel­hub and Logan, stud­ies from dif­fer­ent devel­oped nations have report­ed a decline in IQ start­ing in the late 1990s. With the explo­sion of all things wireless—smartphones, com­put­ers, tablets, and video consoles—we’re inun­dat­ed and dis­tract­ed to the point that it affects our abil­i­ty to com­pre­hend infor­ma­tion. Here’s an excerpt from the book: “In the course of a 40-minute study peri­od, a sim­ple tex­ting exchange (less than three min­utes) will slash a student’s word recall in half.” Anoth­er exam­ple: a sin­gle e‑mail inter­rup­tion will con­sume about 24 min­utes for the aver­age worker.
• Nar­cis­sism is sky­rock­et­ing. A recent study com­pares nar­cis­sis­tic atti­tudes in stu­dents between 2009 and 1994. Based on the answers the stu­dents pro­vid­ed, 89 per­cent more stu­dents appear to be more nar­cis­sis­tic than in 1994. High lev­els of nar­cis­sism appear to be cor­re­lat­ed with fre­quent dai­ly vis­i­tors to Face­book. Nar­cis­sism is a psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tion char­ac­ter­ized by an inflat­ed sense of self-worth and decreased empathy.
• Empa­thy rates are decreas­ing. Many of us in North Amer­i­ca are using social media to con­nect with co-work­ers and friends. Yet for all this online con­nect­ed­ness, we’re appar­ent­ly not any more car­ing. In one study, the authors cite that “scores of empa­thet­ic concern…have dropped 49 per­cent since 1980.”
• More screen time may lead to high­er rates of death. In a 2011 study of more than 4,500 adults fol­lowed over sev­er­al years, total screen time was asso­ci­at­ed with a 52 per­cent high­er risk of death.

Talk about a wake up call. I fre­quent­ly spend more than eight hours per day in front of a com­put­er. To mit­i­gate this seden­tary time, I try to walk or run sev­er­al times a week. If this research is cor­rect, I may be fur­ther cur­tail­ing my time online.