It’s official. Twitter, that will make a twit out of you, has now made us dumber than the average gold fish.

According to this recent article in The Telegraph, humans now have a shorter attention span than goldfish, thanks to smartphones. The article summarized a recent study by Microsoft that surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms and demonstrated that the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, when the mobile revolution began, to 8 seconds today.

And why are people checking their smartphones every 8 seconds? It’s not web browsing, that still doesn’t always work that well on a small screen. It’s not e-mail, that only polls the server and pulls e-mails down every 5 minutes at most. It’s not Facebook, people are always on it, but not posting every 8 seconds. It’s Twitter. New tweets in your feed every single second. Non-stop beeps for attention. And the 140 characters can be formatted to fit your screen exactly.

Congratulations Twitter. Thanks to you, we are now dumber than an average goldfish (which are believed to have an average attention span of 9 seconds).

I guess there’s nothing left to do except join in the chorus. I am the Twitter!