Full transcript below:
What happens to your brain if you're staring at screens all day without taking a break?
From Rachel, the neuroscientist.
"Now, brain cells, or neurons, are hungry little creatures. They don't just work for nothing. They do expect a copious amount of oxygen and glucose in return. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking more screen time, more work, more oxygen and glucose.
But actually, the brain's total fuel requirements remain relatively stable, even after particularly cognitively demanding days.
That is because the brain can shuffle resources around to whichever structures and regions need it most.
Evolution really hooked us up with that one, because, thing number one, the brain is already the most energy-consumptive organ in the body by quite some distance. If it required yet more fuel every time we used it, then ancestral humans could have easily found themselves in a fatal paradox, where a particularly hard day of tracking and hunting a mammoth increased their requirements for mammoths to do more than when they had started out, right?
The thing is, for most of our evolution, our daily tasks were much more varied.
This system of shuffling resources to the structures and regions of the brain that need them most worked because we were using different structures and regions from one task to the next.
Even tracking a woolly mammoth for days on end is ostensibly more varied, cognitively, than navigating a screen for eight hours a day.
Now, the thing is, neurons don't just eat. They also do the other thing, which is fine. The brain has its own cleanup team to change that litter tray periodically, but they can only work so quickly.
If you're using the same structures for nine hours a day, and, by the way, also taking your breaks by doing a very, very similar cognitive task, looking at a screen, it accumulates faster than they can clear it away.
And when those waste products accumulate, they can produce a feeling of brain fatigue or existential despair.
Left to stew in their own filth for long enough on a consistent basis, that can also ostensibly damage the neurons.
Worry not!
You can help your brain's cleanup team with that litter box situation by simply taking breaks every hour or so. Even five to 15 minutes is enough."
