Our brains—or worse, children's brains—could be rewired from the fast pace of modern social networking sites, TV shows, and video games, says Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield. The researcher said this week that kids seem to have more trouble understanding each other (in real life, that is) and focusing in school, and that it could be due to the proliferation of short, bite-sized clips of information in the online world that is causing their brains to physically change.

Greenfield said that sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Twitter may be forcing kids' brains back into an infant-like state, as infants need constant stimulation to remind them that they exist. She added that she worries that "real" conversation will eventually give way to these little snippets of text dialogue, indicating that our normal language might eventually turn into pokes, wall shout-outs, and 140-character snark fests.

"My fear is that these technologies are infantilising 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," she told the Daily Mail in an interview this week. "It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations."

In fact, Greenfield went so far as to suggest that a recent increase in autism diagnoses could possibly be related to kids spending more time on the computer or the video game console. "Of course, we do not know whether the current increase in autism is due more to increased awareness and diagnosis of autism, or whether it can—if there is a true increase—be in any way linked to an increased prevalence among people of spending time in screen relationships. Surely it is a point worth considering," said Greenfield.

As some critics have already noted, Greenfield didn't cite any specific research when making these comments. Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told the Wall Street Journal that, while Greenfield was entitled to her opinion, "we have not seen anything to really back up that worry."