UK Scientists See Little Evidence for Claims Smartphones Are Rewiring Kids' Brains (theregister.com) 51
UK's Members of Parliament (MP) were "looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children's brains," writes The Register — but they got "a less satisfying answer from neuroscientists on Wednesday: nobody can really prove it."
Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week, three researchers spent much of the session explaining that concern and evidence are not quite the same thing. Asked what evidence exists on the impact of digital devices on infants and young children, Professor Denis Mareschal, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, replied: "There is very little, if any, causal research in the early years. Almost everything is correlational."
MPs kept coming back to the question — and the experts kept coming back to the same answer. When questioned about social media's impact on adolescents, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University of Cambridge was equally cautious. "What evidence do we have of the impact of digital devices or social media on the adolescent brain?" she asked. "Almost nothing. There are a few small studies, but they haven't been replicated, and they're purely correlational...."
MPs also wanted to know whether neuroscience could settle one of the liveliest arguments in the debate: how old a child should be before they're allowed onto social media. "What neuroscience can't do is pinpoint a precise age," Blakemore said. "The individual differences in brain development are vast...." If there was a takeaway from the hearing, it was that concern about digital childhood is running well ahead of the evidence needed to settle the argument.
MPs kept coming back to the question — and the experts kept coming back to the same answer. When questioned about social media's impact on adolescents, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University of Cambridge was equally cautious. "What evidence do we have of the impact of digital devices or social media on the adolescent brain?" she asked. "Almost nothing. There are a few small studies, but they haven't been replicated, and they're purely correlational...."
MPs also wanted to know whether neuroscience could settle one of the liveliest arguments in the debate: how old a child should be before they're allowed onto social media. "What neuroscience can't do is pinpoint a precise age," Blakemore said. "The individual differences in brain development are vast...." If there was a takeaway from the hearing, it was that concern about digital childhood is running well ahead of the evidence needed to settle the argument.
Asked and...(wait for it)...answered. (Score:5, Funny)
"What evidence do we have of the impact of digital devices or social media on the adolescent brain?"
* stare-buffering *
* stare-buffering *
* stare-buffering *
(GenZ) "Wait..wut?"
Nothing to see here, move along (Score:2)
Ever take a tablet away from a 6 year old boy, with the promise that it will be returned shortly? Screaming and crying is just perfectly normal human behavior.
What used to be nothing to see, is now a crime. (Score:2)
Ever take a tablet away from a 6 year old boy, with the promise that it will be returned shortly? Screaming and crying is just perfectly normal human behavior.
Slapping and spanking a child, used to be perfectly normal responses to that behavior too. Even in public. Even in public school.
It's not the problem of taking away a toy from a child. It's the methods at which we use to address and control that timeless immaturity.
An iPad kid melting down in the Boomer era would have been forced to watch Father and His Shotgun in the backyard, with Dad yelling "Pull!", right before the electronic device known as you-wanna-act-like-that gets tossed in the air for the la
Credit where due. (Score:5, Funny)
The researchers would like to thank Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Netflix for their generous support and funding.
Re:Credit where due. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Credit where due. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the same attitude of the people in the 90s defending Big Tobacco. Your defense of these companies will look silly in 20 years.
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You don't have to be a neuroscientist to know that tobacco was addictive, you just need to have ever jonesed for a cigarette.
Both Wrong (Score:3)
No, this will not be a Satanic Ozzy Dungeons and Dragon mistake, nor a big tobacoo like issue; this is like video games in the 90s!
Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/video-gaming-may-be-associated-better-cognitive-performance-children]
The children denied smart phones will be stupid like the ones that did not play video games.
Re: Credit where due. (Score:4, Insightful)
20/20 Vision? (Score:1)
Yeah the kid with no limit has their smartphone in their hand and is using it.
You should talk to someone about your violent fantasies before you hurt someone.
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Re: Credit where due. (Score:2)
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It'll look as silly in 20 as the hysteria over Ozzy and D&D.
Sad people believe that. Because the evidence has been in for a while now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Ozzy? You could shove four decades worth of Tipper-crippling heavy metal lyrics into a single song and still not create the measurable cognitive decline we have today. D&D "panic" came and went with a young Tom Hanks trying to manufacture panic in a horrible movie that sold that panic like bad wrestling.
20 years from now the status quo will be defending full-blown Idiocracy at this rate of d
Utter Shit (Score:4, Informative)
AKA for fuck's sake do your fucking job
Re:Utter Shit (Score:4, Insightful)
And as Professor Denis Mareschal said, these are all correlational, not causational. Smartphones do not *cause* any of that, otherwise they wouldn't even need the studies because millions, if not billions, would be affected - and there are plenty of smartphone users who don't have any of those issues. It's most likely the other way around, people with those issues are more likely to spend more time on their smartphones, which might even feedback into their issue - but the base issue was not caused by a smartphone.
Crime is linked to lower education, but lower education does not *cause* crime nor does increasing education completely eliminate crime. Taking away the smartphones won't fix people's BMI or sleep troubles, it won't bring back their executive functions, and it won't force people outside or to be better at socializing. People's screen time will go down as their underlying issues are solved.
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Lmao. Think what you want, but smartphones do not cause those issues. At best, they exasperate already present, underlying issues. Solve those issues and then the smartphones have no place in the equation. Everything you posted can also be linked to mental health issues. Smartphones do not inherently hurt your mental health. Can you use them in a way that does damage your mental health? Yes. But that is your fault for how you use the smartphone. The smartphone didn't trick you. Google didn't trick you. Appl
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I'm honestly surprised to see on Slashdot so many unscientific pearl-clutching opinions on here when it comes to "Think of the Children!".
People are really saying that seeing information; pixels on a screen, can somehow damage a child or adolescent's brain, yet somehow when they become over 18 this effect magically goes away?
Same with all the anti porn weirdos on here, claiming again these pixels can have a narcotic like effect on the brain (if this is true then watching TV must have the same effect. Such p
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Mitigation is fine, but you have to mitigate the right parts of the equation in order to have an actual affect on the result. Mitigating the usage of cell phones isn't the solution you think it is. Better mental healthcare is. It also doesn't eliminate the problem, but it does actually mitigate it like you want.
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There is a huge difference between sitting at a computer to perform school work or paid work, and carrying around an addictive, notification-pushing-nagging device everywhere that many people can't seem to ignore or put aside.
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many people can't seem to ignore or put aside
Which is a problem with those individuals, not the devices, or any apps, themselves.
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>"Which is a problem with those individuals, not the devices, or any apps, themselves."
Correct. But there is a reason we have controlled substances that are completely illegal, require a prescription, or are limited to those 21 and over and with additional restrictions. Or services, like gambling. In all those cases, you can say the problem is with "those individuals" who misuse or abuse them. But it doesn't stop society from recognizing the great risks/issues and trying to help prevent abuse. On th
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But there is a reason we have controlled substances that are completely illegal, require a prescription, or are limited to those 21 and over and with additional restrictions.
The percentage of the population that is susceptible to physical addiction of chemicals, when broken down and simplified to a number, is between 15-20%. For example, I smoked cigarettes for a short while in my youth, getting to between half a pack and a pack a day then quit cold turkey. My roommates even still smoked at the time, yet I didn’t find it that hard to quit and never had any real urge to start again. Clearly it was far far easier for me than someone susceptible whom I know several and it
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No, stop blaming the victim. Especially since we're talking about young kids who don't know any better. You really expect 3 year olds to say "I think I've been spending too much time watching awesomeness on my tablet. I'm going to meditate instead." Bullshit. What world are you living in?
If I sneakily lace your food with cocaine for a month straight, is it your mental or moral failure when you beg me for another bite not even knowing there's drugs in your food? No. It's my fault you got addicted. Sa
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No, stop blaming the victim.
These people are not victims.
You are correct in that the physical smartphone by itself doesn't cause those issues. It's how you use it that's the issue and so many things about smartphones and the apps/websites people use on them are designed to enhance those addictive properties.
Apps and websites are not addictive.
If they were inherently flawed as you believe, then they wouldn't be able to get better without meds.
They do require meds, because they are inherently flawed. Most humans are.
Reduce someone's screen time and their underlying issues improve.
I'd rather solve the underlying issue instead of putting a blanket over it and pretending it isn't there.
feel better and stronger than them. You're not.
I feel better and stronger than them because I am. No blaming needed.
Use your device the same way they use theirs and you'll end up with the same issues.
I have and didn't. I've been using smartphones for over 20 years at this point.
You have to know you have an issue, have a reason to fix yourself, have the knowledge on what to change, and have the willpower to do that in order to fix your issues. Kids don't have any of that. They can't fix themselves without outside aid because to them there's nothing to fix.
And that is what being a parent, and regular mental healthcare, is supposed to be for. Every single person should get a
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It sounds like we're using different definitions of mental healthcare. Your 'more relaxed' version of mental healthcare fits your posts better than the 'harder' take-meds-to-numb-your-brain mental healthcare I was reading them as. Thanks for the reply.
Screentime is rotting children's brains (Score:3)
It is patently obvious that kids raised on screens are disadvantaged. At that stage they should be engaged in play, socializing and exploring the physical world. With their faces buried in a screen they get none of that. One doesn't need a professionalship to know this.
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Once when my daughter was 4, I told her that she'd had enough screen time and needed to turn off the tablet, and her rebuttal was, "but my brains aren't rotted yet!"
I am pissed off at seeing (Score:3)
We had a period of 4 years during which everything in a kid's life got completely upended and we wonder why we're having problems with academics.
There's also a nasty little bit of business that we don't think or talk about. We spent the last 45 years automating every blue collar job we possibly could. Massive amounts of factory automation. And what we couldn't automate which was about 30%, we either shipped it overseas or we brought in cheap labor for it.
This means if you aren't cut out for college you don't really have a lot of options. Yeah everyone will talk about how much money you can make in Blue collar but the thing is those jobs are brutal on your body and you can really only do them until you're late 30s or early 40s at best. You can of course find the occasional genetic freak that can just keep going, I've known some. They are genetic freaks and they are not the norm. Meaning that you're going to be killing yourself for two decades and then suddenly have a large drop in your pay.
And that's best case scenario if you're not somebody who can hack one of those brutal jobs like working on an oil rig or diesel mechanic and you're not one of the handful of people that blenders into one of the really sweet gigs that are few and far between like the guys who maintain elevators or large industrial cooling and heating systems then they're just isn't anything for you.
So we've been taking those kids and basically forcing them to stay in school longer and longer because we just don't have anything to do with them and if nothing else while they're in school we don't have to face facts that there aren't any jobs for them.
What this means is that even though class sizes keep going up per capita spending on students is also going up. Those two things shouldn't be compatible in theory if you're spending more on each individual student your class sizes should be shrinking but my kid when they graduated high school had 45 students in their math class. Some of the kids had the stand in the back because there weren't enough chairs for fucksake.
You end up having to spend a lot more money because you have all these kids that normally would be on their way to trade schools but we just don't need them to do that work. I mean we could be fixing our infrastructure and rapidly switching the wind and solar power but fuck that. Elon Musk needs to be the first trillionaire because he invented the electric car and the rocket.
None of this is sustainable and the Epstein class knows it so they're moving to shut down elections and put a dictator in charge. And we are well on our way to letting them do that because fuck those trans kids in sports or whatever the fuck we're currently panicking about instead of anything that actually fucking matters. Because we didn't learn what a moral panic was when motherfucking He-Man was being attacked by Evangelical rapist assholes...
Literally every experience "wires" the brain (Score:2)
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Yeah came to say this. What does it even mean to say that phones "don't rewire kids' brains"? Just as everything else does, phones do. This in itself is neither good nor bad, it's how our brains function. A more relevant question is whether phone use in some way "rewires" brains in some specific way that differs from its response to other activities, in some specifically harmful way.
What the title should say is: (Score:2)
UK Scientists funded by big tech See Little Evidence for Claims Smartphones Are Rewiring Kids' Brains
The evidence is obvious, and even if it isn't rewiring kids brains it's definitely causing societal changes that are not good. Another thing is the tech companies just serve up ads at an increasing rate and polerize society, so down with them.
UK scientist say? (Score:1)
You want a photo of it?? (Score:4, Informative)
>"UK Scientists funded by big tech See Little Evidence for Claims Smartphones Are Rewiring Kids' Brains"
Um, exactly what "evidence" are they looking for? Something on various brain scans? I can guarantee there are lots of thought/behavior issues that can't be "seen." I don't think most people are claiming obsessive phone use is "rewiring" brain functions. But the evidence are the BEHAVIORS that are seen before/during/after long exposures, especially when combined with social media use on them. If there aren't studies showing this, then they aren't looking very hard.
For many, there are clearly addictive behaviors that cause them to suffer from constant distraction, anxiety, inability to focus, attention disorders, and various social interaction issues, especially if denied access to their screens for extended periods of time. And this affects adults as well as children. Children just tend to be more vulnerable.
For example, one survey showed 25% of people actually interact with their phones WHILE ACTIVELY DRIVING.... Illegal and clearly an extremely dangerous endeavor. 30% while at meals with others, 38% while using the bathroom (really???), 80% while walking around outside, ignoring traffic, other people, interesting sights, being situationally completely unaware.
I don't think so. (Score:2)
Smart phones aren't messing with the development of kids' brains?
I don't think so, mate.
Ummmm (Score:2)
Be a bit embarrassing ... (Score:2)