Growing Up Social by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

“The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

—DR. GARY SMALL

chapter nine

screen time and

the brain

When my (Arlene’s) children watch television, they are riveted by what is happening on the screen. When my husband walks into the room and sees them with eyes transfixed and bodies motionless, he declares, “Quick! Turn off the video before their brains are sucked out of their heads!”

No doubt you have seen your kids glued to a screen. Although you know their brains are intact, you probably have wondered what all that technology is doing to their brains. Moving images are extraordinarily stimulating to the brain, whether on a flat-screen television or a smartphone. A child’s growing brain is particularly sensitive, and it is increasingly exposed to new technology.

When a baby is born, he comes into the world equipped with a hundred billion neurons. During the first three years of life, these overabundant neurons are active, building connections to each other. The extra neurons are pruned back around the age of three. It’s like the pruning of a tree; by cutting back the weak connections, the strong ones flourish.

Using MRI scans, neuroscientists have mapped out brain growth in individual children and teenagers. Frontal brain circuits, which control attention, grow fastest between the ages of three to six. The second spurt of synapse formation happens in the brain just before puberty (roughly age eleven in girls, age twelve in boys). Then there’s a pruning back of neurons again in adolescence.1

Some experts theorize this is a particularly important time in development that can impact a child for the rest of his life. Dr. Jay Giedd from the National Institute of Mental Health says, “Our leading hypothesis … is the ‘use it or lose it’ principle. If a teen is doing music or sports or academics, those are the cells and connections that will be hardwired. If they’re lying on the couch or playing video games or [watching] MTV, those are the cells and connections that are going to survive.”2

Digital natives are spending an average of eight hours a day on screens. If your child is one of them, ask yourself: “What type of brain cells and connections will be shaping his future?”

your child’s brain on technology

Dr. Gary Small, head of UCLA’s memory and aging research center, conducted a fascinating experiment to demonstrate how people’s brains change in response to Internet use. He took a dozen experienced web surfers and a dozen nonusers and scanned their brains as they performed searches on Google. The computer savvy group showed broad brain activity in the left-front part of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, while the novices showed little, if any, activity in this area. Their brains look very different when searching the Internet. But when both groups read straight text in a book, the brain scans of the two groups were alike.

The novices were then instructed to spend just one hour a day searching the Internet for five days.

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