Current scientific research is highly focused on how technology affects young, developing minds.

Gary Small, author of the book iBrain, and director of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, states:

"My biggest concern is with young people, whose brains are still developing from birth through adolescence. There’s a process called pruning [the process of removing neurons that are damaged or degraded to improve the brain’s networking capacity]. This could be affected through all the time using tech. We don’t have data on that — but it certainly can raise a concern.

[The constant use of technology] does affect our brain health. It has an upside and a downside. The downside is that when people are using it all the time it interferes with their memory because they are not paying attention to what’s going on. They are distracted.

As far as I know, there are not systematic studies looking at that. You can only look indirectly at this. So we have studied the frequency of memory complaints according to age. You find about 15 percent of young adults complain about their memory, which suggests there might be things going on such as distraction.