Tucson Opinion: Buzz words are bad for our brains

Like any other “new” thing in our social world, electronic “buzz words” found in “memes” have roots in older technologies. Memes are social media posters with words (or video clips) shared at places like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Writing itself is a technology that extended human memory. Before writing, we had only spoken memorized stories. Social media’s memes grow from older technology’s buzz words. Controversial buzz words are words, spoken, broadcast, or in print, that aggravate us and may make us clench our fists. Psychologists are studying the contagion effects of social media’s negative buzz words.

Negative buzz words are what we do not want to be called: liar, hypocrite, dissenter, gangster, etc., because of their physical effect on us, missing from dictionary definitions. Buzz words shock us, connecting our brains to unpleasant memories: events we have experienced, read about, or viewed in media. Buzz words make neural paths in our brains the more times we encounter these words, the stronger and more numerous the connections are to our emotional memories.

There used to be a wind-up toy called a “joy buzzer” that you could hold in your palm secured by a metal ring around a finger, then when you shook someone’s hand, the mechanical vibration of this wound-up toy gave the recipient a kind of physical jolt. This was a “practical joke.” The words that give us a sudden emotional reaction are the verbal cousins to the joy buzzer because they sharply focus our attention. That means these joy buzzer words are true? Perhaps not. But buzz words interact with our brains in a different way from neutral words.

You might want to hear how buzz words’ effects are studied. First, buzz words affect our memories. They cause us to give more memory space to buzz words in memes than to neutral words, like tree (when trees are not emotionally upsetting in some way.) Studies have established that memory is different for emotional words than for neutral words, according to psychologists Jennifer L. Sharkawy and Katarina Groth in their study “False Memories of Emotional and Neutral Words” in the journal Behavioural Neurology. Not only do repeated reading of emotional memes make us give these words more memory space, but they may even cause us to create false memories or associations.

On a related note, cognitive researcher Alin Corman observed in Experimental Psychology that, due to the constructive nature of human memory, we may move other memories down in our brain’s memory storage until the prior memories disappear. When we hear repeated buzz words frequently, as on social media. Alin Corman calls the result “induced forgetting,” caused by repeated exposure to memes rolling down our smart phone screens in a parade of little jolts to the brain.

Suppose a group — for example, vegetarians — is being criticized in on social media. Vegetarians are called awful people who believe weird and crazy things. We can SHARE and LIKE these social media posters or memes, showing how much smarter we are than vegetarians. Each time we share a meme we get a tiny boost of dopamine, the feel good hormone.

Maybe our good friend Tina is one of those vegetarians. Having Tina as a friend counters the message of those negative memes. We like Tina. But we are not getting repeated messages every day about our friend Tina the vegetarian, so gradually our good memories of Tina fall lower in brain storage until the good memories of Tina disappear. Now the affected meme reader can agree that all vegetarians are terrible people who believe awful things and should probably be avoided.

Try to see and hear those negative buzzword memes coming and become aware that they act differently in our brains than neutral words that do not stir us up. Buzz word awareness can help us keep our tempers and blood pressure down.