24-hour news streams, emails, Twitter updates 'making us less compassionate'

London, June 3 (ANI): Constant emails, news alerts, and Twitter updates are overloading the human brain and making people's responses dismissive, says new research.

The deluge of information from 24-hour news, mobile phones and social networking sites moves too fast for the brain's 'moral compass' to process.

According to two newly published scientific studies, people's reactions to traumatic news stories are becoming increasingly dismissive as their minds are trying to seek comfort in the simpler things.

The research claims that this overload may also be causing increasing levels of depression, reports The Telegraph.

Professor Dilip Jeste said that the neurones linked to traits such as human wisdom or empathy, are sited in the slower acting, recently evolved regions of our brain, that are bypassed when the world feels stressful, the Archives of General Psychiatry reports.

On the same lines, scientists at the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute have aired concerns in their latest study: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Their study's volunteers showed people needed longer to react fully to stories of social pain with emotions like compassion, than to react at an unemotive level. (ANI)