Two British scientists have recently suggested that spending all day, and much of the night networking on a computer might in fact be bad for your body and your brain.

Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, said her fear is that “these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment….

“If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales….

“Real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.”

Dr. Aric Sigman, a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, looked at “the biological implications of social networking,” concluding that “time that was previously spent interacting socially has increasingly been displaced by the virtual variety…social networking encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities…. The time we spend socializing electronically separates us from our physical networks.”