Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.

Scientists say updates on networking tools such as Twitter are often too quick for the brain to fully digest.

New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's "moral compass" to process and could harm young people's emotional development.

Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern California study.

"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

The report, published next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, studied how volunteers responded to real-life stories chosen to stimulate admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain.

Brain scans showed humans can process and respond very quickly to signs of physical pain in others, but took longer to show admiration of compassion.

"For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and refection," said Immordio-Yang.

She said the study raises questions about the emotional cost, particularly for young people, of heavy reliance on a torrent of news snippets delivered via TV and online feeds such as Twitter.

She said: "We need to understand how social experience shapes interactions between the body and mind, to produce citizens with a strong moral compass."

USC sociologist Manuel Castells said the study raised more concerns over fast-moving TV than the online environment.

"In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in."

Research leader Antonio Damasio, director of USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, said the findings stressed the need for slower delivery of the news, and highlighted the importance of slow-burn emotions like admiration.

Damasio cited the example of U.S. President Barack Obama, who says he was inspired by his father, to show how admiration can be key to cultural success.

"We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration. It's a deep physiological reaction that's very important to define our humanity."

Twitter, which allows users to swap messages and links of 140-characters or less, says on its Web site that it sees itself as a solution to information overload, rather than a cause of it.

This function, It says, "means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you and it never queues up with increasing demand of your attention."

I have a sneaking suspicion that the people that claim that social networking is destroying humanity are just the sort of people whose livelihoods depend on it pushing that agenda so they can continue to write papers without having to adapt to new modes of transmission and dissemination.

Is it necessarily changing the way we think? I don't think so. Using the aforementioned #amazonfail, I was simply reporting what I knew to be true at the time. Long after I'd formed an opinion (that it actually was a glitch) people were still under the opinion that a hacker with code that didn't work did it using functionality that didn't exist because they didn't take the time to research what they'd been told. Is that a systemic problem? No. That's a problem with them. Twitter doesn't cause people to disregard the whole story any more than any other form of communication. That's my point.

I'm not saying we're not changed in some way. I know I'm a lot more open to travel now that there's Google Maps. But what I'm saying is that the basic premise of communication--I need to tell you something and would like your feedback--is no different now than it was a hundred years ago

They don't give us any estimates of effect size. So I've calculated the standard deviations, assuming that the standard errors they give were determined on the basis of 13 subjects times 12 narratives per category, for N=156. If this is correct, then the effect sizes for time to peak are moderate to large-ish — the average time-to-peak difference between CSP and CPP was 1.66 seconds, d=0.36; the average difference between AS and CPP was 3.53 seconds, d=0.71). The effect sizes for duration are small to moderate (a mean difference between AS and and CPP of 0.55 seconds, d=0.05, and a mean difference between CSP and CPP of 4.68 seconds, d=0.47).

But wait, how did they test the way that Twitter and Facebook and TV News "numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering"? Um, well, they didn't.

OK, so how do these interesting but frankly underwhelming results suggest that "Using Facebook or Twitter may make you a bad person because it ruins your moral compass", as one news story put it? How did another reporter conclude from this research that "the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people's brains"?

Well, it all started with the press release by Carl Marziali, "Nobler Instincts Take Time", USC News, 4/14/2009.

Egged on by a rather fanciful press release from the University of Southern California media office, and a quote from a sociologist, the story was unstoppable. I got hold of the research paper, with some hassle. In a sentence, the study finds that the brain bloodflow changes which are observed when a subject is experiencing compassion for social pain peak, and dissipate, at a slightly slower rate to those seen with compassion for physical pain.

It does not mention Twitter. It does not mention Facebook. It does not mention social networking websites. It makes - and I'm being generous here - a single, momentary, passing reference to the rapid pace of information in "the digital age" in the discussion section, but that is all.

Am I a lone pedant? I emailed Prof Antonio Damasio, the senior academic and "corresponding author" on the paper. "Thank you for your inquiry. As you can see if you read our study, we made no connection whatsoever with Twitter. Some writers did make that connection but it is not ours."

Where did it come from, I asked? He dug. "I found the press release from USC where the writer made, on his own, a connection to social networks. We, the authors, certainly didn't and don't.

"The connection to Twitter and other social networks, as far as I can see, makes no sense. I presume you will reach the same conclusion after reading our article."