Video Calls Are Changing Our Brains processing ability Reveals Study

After the COVID pandemic, things like work from home, study from home, video calls became very common, in which video calling based conversations got a boost. But scientists are saying that video calling affects our brain capacity. How? It has been told through this study, which says that video calling affects the ability of our brain. The ability to process a conversation, or interaction in English, with someone.

Work on this study has been done at Yale University. Which explains how face-to-face conversations shape our natural communication. That means video calling is distorting the ability of this natural communication. According to study senior author Joey Hirsch, our brains have a social system that is more active and works better in real, face-to-face, or in-person interactions.

The study says that seeing faces online does not keep this social neural activity of the brain as active as live, or face-to-face conversation does. For the study, Hirsh's team experimented in two ways. In one, a live conversation was recorded in which two people are actually having a conversation in front of each other, and their neural systems are also being recorded. While in the second also two people are talking to each other, but they are talking through a video conferencing on Zoom.

This experiment found that the process of sending neural signals during a conversation was greatly reduced in conversations being conducted on Zoom, whereas it was much greater in face-to-face interactions. It was concluded that in face-to-face conversation, more signals are sent by the brain because the person has more time to look at the other person, and the presence of the other person is spread on a larger scale. This also increases ECG activity which shows the ability of face processing. Overall, the study says that video calling is reducing the face processing capacity of our brain.