Brains on Screen: Rethinking Learning in the Age of Digital Overload

As I sat in my final class of the day, a Year 7 English lesson, I decided to allow the use of iPads for a research activity. Not long into the task, I noticed a few students unusually engrossed, not in their screens but in their body language; hunched, wide-eyed with intensity. Curious, I peered over a shoulder and saw not a webpage or a digital textbook, but a game of FIFA in full swing. Not just a stray image or idle app switch, they were playing a fully rendered football video game, live, in the middle of class.

When I was their age, FIFA required a TV, a console with controllers, the game disc and a designated living room. Now this whole set-up fits inside a schoolbag, slips beneath the desk, and plays covertly without the attention of the teacher. The modern classroom is no longer just a battleground for attention; it’s where the demands of cognitive development conflict with the allure of pocket-sized digital worlds. This might just be one experience, in one lesson; but it poses questions: what is technology really doing to our learning experience? And more specifically what, exactly, is it doing to the brain?

Cognitive science has long established that our working memory is like a mental “notepad”, where we juggle bits of information, which is limited. Add too much, and it overflows. The problem is that digital technology is excellent at demanding attention, but terrible at sustaining it. In a 2009 study that should be pinned to every school administrator’s wall, Ophir, Nass & Wagner found that students who frequently multitask with digital media perform significantly worse on tasks involving attention control. They are more easily distracted, slower to switch between tasks, and struggle to filter irrelevant information.

Worse still, the mere presence of a smartphone (even face-down) has been shown to reduce working memory capacity. In a 2017 study, Ward et al. called this the "brain drain" effect: students perform more poorly on tasks of reasoning and attention simply because their brain is allocating resources to suppress the urge to check their phone. Put simply: even when the device is off, it’s still on, in your head.

From Deep Learning to Digital Skimming

Attention is also what leads to another cognitive casualty: deep reading. Reading in print typically encourages linear processing, reflection, and immersion. But digital reading; often hyperlinked, scrollable, and interrupted by notifications; changes the way we engage with text. Maryanne Wolf, in Reader, Come Home, argues that we are rewiring the brain away from “cognitive patience” toward shallower, fragmented processing.

Empirical studies back this up. Mangen, Walgermo, and Brønnick (2013) found that students reading the same text on paper comprehended more than those reading it on screen. This difference wasn’t just about word recall, it was about narrative structure, character empathy, and inference. If the screen is a portal, it’s also a filter; it mediates the experience of meaning, often in ways that we don’t notice until we test for depth.

There’s a growing tendency to outsource memory to devices. Dubbed the “Google Effect” by Sparrow, Liu and Wegner (2011), this cognitive offloading means we’re increasingly remembering where to find information rather than the information itself. This is not entirely new. The invention of writing itself was a kind of offloading, but the scale and speed have shifted. While some educators argue this frees up cognitive resources for higher-order thinking, others caution that foundational knowledge, such as facts, vocabulary, formulae, are still essential for meaningful problem solving. Willingham puts it bluntly: “Understanding is memory in disguise.” Without stored knowledge, there’s nothing for critical thinking to operate on.

Are We Rewiring the Brain?

Perhaps the most sobering question is whether we’re structurally changing the brain. Emerging fMRI research suggests yes, we are; to a degree. Montag et al. (2018) found associations between excessive smartphone use in adolescents and reduced grey matter volume in areas related to social cognition, impulse control, and emotion regulation. This doesn’t mean phones are damaging brains like radiation, but it does suggest that how we use devices is shaping neurodevelopment. As Wolf notes, the brain is plastic; but plasticity goes both ways. What we practice, we become. So what do we do, as educators who value cognitive development and live in the real world?

As teacher we can make use of a few guiding principles to help students traverse the cognitive challenges of digital learning. First we need to manage cognitive load by breaking learning into manageable chunks and avoiding any assumptions that students can juggle multiple streams of attention at once. Secondly we should facilitate metacognitive awareness, and encourage students to reflect on how their digital habits influence the way they think and learn. We must also design for digital depth, using technology to support continual exploration and critical engagement rather than reducing it to passive busywork; this could come in the form of online debates or collaborative projects. Finally it is equally important to build in intentional offline time, through practices like reading longform texts, annotating on paper, or holding device-free discussions that change focus and depth.

Ultimately technology isn’t the enemy. But nor is it just a tool. It moulds us in invisible ways not immediately recognisable. Our attention, memory, and thinking included.

Further Reading

Baron, N. S. (2015) Words onscreen : the fate of reading in a digital world. 1st edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kirschner, P. A. & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2013) Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education. Educational psychologist. [Online] 48 (3), 169–183.

Maruatona, T. (2004) What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. International review of education 50 (5/6) p.574–576.

Montag, C. et al. (2021) How to overcome taxonomical problems in the study of Internet use disorders and what to do with “smartphone addiction”? Journal of behavioral addictions. [Online] 9 (4), 908–914.

Ophir, E. et al. (2009) Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS. [Online] 106 (37), 15583–15587.

Sew, J. W. (2011) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New media & society 13 (4) p.685–686.

Ward, A. F. et al. (2017) Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. [Online] 2 (2), 140–154.

Wolf, M., (2018) Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York: HarperCollins.