Edward Hallowell, a New York psychiatrist and author specialising in attention deficit disorder, said: “Never before in human history have our brains had to process as much information as they do today.

“We have a generation of people who I call computer suckers because they are spending so much time in front of a computer screen or on their mobile phone or BlackBerry.

“They are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to think and to feel.

“Much of what they are exposed to is superficial. People are sacrificing depth and feeling and becoming cut off and disconnected from other people.”

The study found that our daily word intake is equivalent to 34 gigabytes of information — enough to overload the typical laptop within a week.

The estimates are based on reading information, such as in emails, text messages, on the internet or in publications, as well as what we see and hear on the television and radio.

It estimates that the total amount of words “consumed” in the United States has more than doubled from 4,500 trillion in 1980 to 10,845 trillion in 2008. The estimates do not include people simply talking to one another.

Total information consumption from televisions, computers and other media was estimated at 3.6 zettabytes (3.6 million gigabytes) in 2008.

The traditional media of radio and television still dominate our consumption per day, with a total of 60 per cent of the hours, researchers found.

Experts believe that the information overload could prompt our brains to evolve in a new way.

Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick, told the Sunday Times: “One of the things we have learnt over the past 20 years is that the brain does have a capacity to grow and increase in size depending on how it is used.

“Perhaps the personal experience of having to deal with all of this information will cause new nerve cells to be born and create new nerve connections in the brain.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/