Wired for Distraction: Kids and Social Media

By Dalton Conley | March 19, 2011 – [Link]

Most parents who worry about their kids’ online activity focus on the people or
content their children might encounter: Are they being cyberbullied? Do they have
access to age-inappropriate material? What I worry about, as a sociobiologist, is not
what my kids are doing on the Internet but what all this connectivity is doing to their
brains. Scientific evidence increasingly suggests that, amid all the texting, poking
and surfing, our children’s digital lives are turning them into much different creatures
from us — and not necessarily for the better.

For starters, there is the problem of what some researchers refer to as continuous
partial attention, a term coined by former Microsoft executive Linda Stone. We know
the dangers of texting or talking on the phone while operating a motor vehicle — but
what about when forming a brain? A Kaiser Family Foundation report released last
year found that on average, children ages 8 to 18 spend 7 hours and 38 min. a day
using entertainment media. And if you count each content stream separately — a lot
of kids, for example, text while watching TV — they are logging almost 11 hours of
media usage a day.

You (or your children) might think the people who have had the most practice dealing
with distractions would be the most adept at multitasking. But a 2009 study found
that when extraneous information was presented, participants who (on the basis of
their answers to a study questionnaire) did a lot of media multitasking performed
worse on a test than those who don’t do much media multitasking. In the test, a trio
of Stanford University researchers showed college students an image of a bunch of
rectangles in various orientations and asked them to focus on a couple of red ones in
particular. Then the students were shown a second, very similar image and asked if
the red rectangles had been rotated. The heavy media multitaskers were wrong
more often — because, the study concluded, they are more sensitive to distracting
stimuli than light media multitaskers are.

We have separate circuits, it turns out, for top-down focus — i.e., when we set our
mind to concentrate on something — and reactive attention, when our brain
reflexively tunes in to novel stimuli. We obviously need both for survival, whether in
the wilds of prehistory or while crossing a street today, but our saturated media
universe has perhaps privileged the latter form and is wiring our kids’ brains
differently. “Each time we get a message or text,” Anthony Wagner, one of the
Stanford study’s co-authors, speculates, “our dopamine reward circuits probably get
activated, since the desire for social connection is so wired into us.” The result, he
suggests, could be a forward-feeding cycle in which we pay more and more attention
to environmental stimuli — Hey, another text! — at the expense of focus.

Constant distraction affects not only how well kids learn but also how their brains
absorb the new information. In 2006, UCLA scientists showed that multitaskers and
focused learners deploy different parts of the brain when they learn the same thing.
Multitaskers save learned things more like a habit. Meanwhile, those who were
allowed to focus on the task without distraction stored information in their declarative
memory, which comes into play, say, in math class when you need to apply abstract
rules to new problems. The upshot of the study was that the focusers could apply the
new skill more broadly but the multitaskers could not. Multitaskers’ reliance on rote
habit would be all well and good if we want our children to work on assembly lines,
but to do the kind of high-level thinking that experts agree will be key to getting well-
paying jobs, we’d better exercise our collective declarative memory.

Some technology observers, like Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center
for Internet and Society, claim that social media are getting a bum rap and that the
real problem lies in the hyper-protective way we parent today. “Over and over, kids
tell me that they’d rather get together in person, but then they list off all of the things
that make doing so impossible” — like their overscheduled after-school lives or
parents’ fears of kids navigating the streets alone, she says.

Stone has observed something similar in technology use among adolescents: “When
they’re with friends, they won’t answer their cell phone. And if they get an SMS, they
will just answer, ‘BZ, L8R.’ ” Perhaps this is a sign that our kids will be better than we
are at learning how to prioritize tasks — something that will come in handy when
they become workers and spouses and parents.
But I am still concerned about the effect that 24/7 connectivity has on my kids — and
on my 11-year-old son in particular. School-lunchroom behavior — gossipy whispers,
competition for attention, etc. — now goes on around the clock. There’s no
downtime, no alone time for him to develop his sense of self.

So what’s a good dad to do? I’ve set some rules that are designed to aid his social
and cognitive development: no Facebook during school, and no electronic devices
after 9:30 p.m. The latter prohibition is designed to help him get more sleep, which,
according to some studies, is when our brains filter connections among neurons,
preserving and speeding up the ones that matter and flushing out the ones that
don’t. “Unfortunately, the new modes of communication and hours spent using them
are preventing already sleep-deprived teens from getting enough sleep, which
affects memory strengthening and behavioral regulation,” says B.J. Casey, director
of Cornell’s Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology. Even if kids get nine
to 10 hours of sleep but keep having multiple interruptions — from a buzzing iPhone
next to the pillow, for example — they will suffer cognitively and feel tired the next
day. Hence my 9:30 rule, which falls into that age-old parenting category: Do as I
say, not as I do.