Most of us move through hundreds of posts, clips, and headlines a day without thinking about it. But the stuff we scroll past isn't just passing the time. It's slowly teaching our brains how to work. In an interview with HT Lifestyle, Divya Jain, founder of Safeducate and host of The Divya Jain Podcast, shared ways that show up.
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Reduced patience
According to Divya Jain, first, our patience gets shorter. When everything arrives in quick clips designed to hook you in the first second, the brain starts expecting that payoff everywhere. Then you open a long article and feel the pull to check your phone before you've finished the first paragraph. That restlessness isn't a character flaw. It's a habit we practised without meaning to.
Remembrance changes
“We remember differently. When any fact is two seconds away in a search bar, there's less reason to hold onto it,” said Divya Jain. This is the Google effect: we're getting good at remembering where to find things and worse at remembering the things themselves. The trouble is that thinking hard about a problem usually means having the raw material already in your head, ready to connect.
Skimming
{{/usCountry}}“We remember differently. When any fact is two seconds away in a search bar, there's less reason to hold onto it,” said Divya Jain. This is the Google effect: we're getting good at remembering where to find things and worse at remembering the things themselves. The trouble is that thinking hard about a problem usually means having the raw material already in your head, ready to connect.
Skimming
{{/usCountry}}We skim instead of reading. Screens train the eye to bounce around, grabbing the headline and the first line and moving on. A lot of research on reading comprehension has found that people understand and retain less this way than they do on paper. We get through more and absorb less, and we often finish feeling like we learned something we didn't.
Changing believes
Repetition quietly shapes what we believe. Feeds show us more of whatever we already engage with, so the same ideas keep circling back. The more familiar an opinion gets, the more true it starts to feel, regardless of whether it holds up. That's how echo chambers form. Nobody builds one on purpose. Your sense of what "everyone" thinks just gets bent by what one app decided to keep showing you.
Reaction before reflection
We react before we reflect. Comment sections and hot takes reward the fast, emotional response, and over time, that becomes the reflex. We form an opinion in a few seconds and start defending it before we've actually thought it over. The slower work of sitting with a hard question doesn't get much airtime. “I don't think screens are wrecking our minds.
But the content we take in isn't neutral, and pretending it is makes it easier to drift. Whatever you give your attention to is shaping the attention itself. You can push back on that, and it doesn't take much. Read one long thing this week. Let a boring idea bore you for a while,” said Divya.