Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains MPs looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children's brains 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 …
It's not like they did a decent replicable study that said smartphones et al, social media and/or AI are all fine and are not having negative effects. All they've really said is it hasn't been studied enough. You know like how there didn't used to be evidence for how dangerous tobacco is.
Not what I said but ok. My point is the headline is misleading. It suggests scientists said it wasn't an issue, when actually they just don't know
What they should obviously do instead of banning it is fund some high quality studies to actually fucking find out if it's dangerous. Nobody else will unless they want to control the narrative. You know like how tobacco or alcohol companies have funded studies over the years but with the aim of proving it's safe which surprise it turns out not to be.
"Scientists point blame at available products, fail to even mention parental accountability to restrict access of product to child if parent does not approve.
Also up for debate: Should sharp knives and hot pans be kept out of reach of children?
News not at 11."
They would have to have a viable size garden first Vs the postage stamp piece or zero that many have.
Where instead of gardens, developers and planners demand and substitute "communal" green space (featureless grass) with a piffling few trees, in order to "promote creation of community and social interaction" - translation "preventing anyone having a private outdoor space where they could do anything that we dislike the idea of, that like east Germany, everyone watching everyone else will keep everyone in line and constrain their so called 'legal' behaviours to a moral subset".
Where planners even oppose allotments, often seeing them as "dirty unruly spaces" where a "chosen few" get "unjustified and privileged access to what could be communal public spaces
(Just like my council are playing at right now - council owned garages have a lengthy waiting list, yet they have produced a consultation claiming they would need vast amounts of maintenance, too small for modern cars, could be repurposed to provide more parking spaces for everyone or communal green spaces to give YOUR kids a safe place to play (ignoring they dismantled various parks and play equipment to "save money")
Basically their "communities director" is a wonky, who doesn't believe in signage and thinks Facebook is a viable substitute, like Osborne doesn't believe the council should be renting garages and sees them as unjustified privilege. Same wonk who wanted to rent parking meters for a yearly rent that was 1/3 the cost of buying them, ignored the very struggling high street, kicked off when his "grand plan" to meter on street parking as well was denied, kicked off further when councillors caved to public rage and business apoplexy and cancelled the parking charges - resulting in the public purse being down x million pounds. Yet the arrogant Canute still stays in post.....
Council could REALLY do with losing a lot of its salaried staff as many of them are just deadwood, either right wing no state fanatics or hard left communitarians who don't believe in anyone owning anything or renting anything exclusively....
The views of the scientists given in the article don't really "pour cold water on claims mobile phones are rewiring kids' brains". They are merely pointing out that there have been insufficient scientific studies carried out from which to draw any reliable science based conclusions.
This seems to be yet another El Reg article where the headline doesn't quite reflect what the article tells us.
"Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence"
People refuse to learn this. We particularly saw it during CoViD, when the public and the scientists got new information at the same time. People would yell for explanations, but the scientific community had to take the time to evaluate the new information and draw some kind of conclusions. But by the time the conclusions had been responsibly drawn, the decisions had been made or the scientists had been cancelled (or both). People don't understand that sometimes the information does not yet exist.
If there is insufficient evidence to draw a reliable scientific conclusion then I would hope that has a cooling effect on the rhetoric from those claiming there's good reason to introduce legislation on the basis of harm prevention. That is to say nothing of how much of an insult to privacy said proposed legislation currently contains.
I think you have it wrong. When someone makes a claim, pointing out, as the professors repeatedly did, that the claimant have no evidence for their claim, no way to obtain the evidence they claim would exist, and the research that comes closest doesn't even always correlate with that claim is pouring plenty of cold water. It's true that, if they could have said "we did research this, got exactly the evidence you're asking for, and it says you're wrong", that would be much stronger opposition, but the burden to defend a claim as true, especially when proposing legislating as a result, is on those making the claim.
Consider a parallel:
Claim: There are aliens on Saturn.
Researcher: There is no proof of that. We have only a few tools for looking at what is on Saturn, and there are parts of it we can't see. Everything we have seen can be explained by understood natural phenomena and all observations from probes and telescopes works together.
UFO people will often decide that statement doesn't weaken their point, since the researchers admit that aliens could easily hide from observations and they can't prove they're absent. In reality though, it does weaken the claim severely unless any reason to think it's true through valid science arises, independent of someone thinking it's likely or wanting it to be true.
Did we read the same article or do I need new glasses? Anyhow, the analogy with aliens on Saturn fails because a research study typically starts with a hypothesis. And that hypothesis is typically built around some form evidence. If the research then confirms the hypothesis, it is being developed into a theory. And that theory then holds until some other study disproves or correct/refines it.
The problem with Saturn is, there is not the slightest evidence for aliens dwelling there to begin with. (And nowhere in the scientific process appears a claim.)
That is not what they said. You're doing the same thing the MPs were doing, insisting that the data says what you want it to say despite repeatedly being told otherwise. Partially, this was the scientists' fault by being polite and assuming people who ask them questions are smarter than they are. When they say "correlation", they think it clearly communicates the lack of strength in the data because "correlation does not necessarily imply causation" has been drilled into anyone working with data for a long time, though Professor Mareschal did attempt to explain this. I'm guessing you know that too, but because you think that damage is plausible, you too are willing to interpret this data differently than you would otherwise. Nonetheless, that's not the right approach.
Specifically, your "there's lots of evidence" parallel, no, not at all. The professors were asked to comment on the quantity of usable research, and they were consistent:
Blakemore: "What evidence do we have? Almost nothing. There are a few small studies, but they haven't been replicated, and they're purely correlational." (That one was in the article. Did you not read the article? Or maybe you don't understand why unreplicated research is a problem even bigger than correlational data? I have a feeling you know both those things.)
Dorjee: "As my colleagues have said, there isn't a lot of direct evidence that would involve brain scanning and could track changes in brain structure and function" (She goes on to describe things you can use, but since they don't involve saying "this is bad and I can show you on this chart", they kept asking for that instead).
Mareschal: "I know this is a mantra that there's very little information"
The MPs wanted, and your inaccurate summaries are insisting, that simple data exists. You're acknowledging that it's observational and not strong, but that's not what the professors were saying. They were saying that the data is inclusive and sparse even when you consider that observational information. They give plenty of advice about things you can measure which would suggest harms and ways to address them, but since they aren't as simple as at what age you stop blocking social media use, for which they were explicitly asked and refused, the MPs kept asking for that. Plenty of the harms they mentioned didn't work with the predecided plan because they indicated ongoing harm to adults as well, others because they suggested situational factors which a parent can manage but a law cannot, and still others because they suggested that harms weren't the same, sometimes less and sometimes greater, than the random guesses from armchair neuroscientists with no experience.
Excellent point and it's worth noting that even that was controversial because some were more comfortable with only the clergy having access to a Latin Bible. The fear was that the average person, able to read the Bible in their native tongue, might reach unacceptable conclusions without a clergyman to give additional information.
"Children learn self-regulation through conversation, play, sport, and social interaction," she [Dusana Dorjee] said, "which can be crowded out by excessive screen use."
Which distills down to claiming any activity the monopolises a child's time, thus limiting the diversity their experinces, might cause developmental harm. No argument there.
The same brain damage nonsense was flung about by the same usual suspects when television arrived and especially when daytime television became the norm. I imagine the same reasoned responses were forthcoming from the scientists.
I suppose the onus is on parents to encourage and participate with, their offspring in a diverse range of activities from an early age.
Unfortunately for most parents living in the modern world just making a living, to support themselves and their children, leaves very little time for much else.
The fatigue and time poverty (and in many case just plain material poverty) of parents can explain any failing in child development without recourse to the arbitrary excuse of the overuse of some technology which is almost certainly a symptom rather than a root cause.
Neural plasticity isn't only a property of immature brains — it persists into adulthood and probably lifelong. Adolescence is unique in that it would be the time a child starts to integrate the various possibly conflicting aspects of their personality into that of a healthy adult. It is that process that is being disrupted which is a rather dismal prospect — the world already has a surfeit of man·child chimera and other monsters.
The fatigue and time poverty (and in many case just plain material poverty) of parents can explain any failing in child development
If they can't afford the time and money to raise children, they shouldn't have children. Popping them out and then assuming that someone else will do the hard work of raising them is a large part of the problem.
> Popping them out
You sound like they choose to pop them like a t-shirt cannon. Prevention can fail, rape, left out during education depending on the country, making it difficult to get an abortion even if the cause was the woman getting raped (that part includes some EU countries as well, not limited to the USA, though the EU is enforcing change there which will have to become national law)...
No one in the developed world "assume someone else", that is classical extremist propaganda, so that fits your troll-like handle.
The USA adds all the money problems on top (whether healthcare, overwork just to survive, maternity leave etc, in the end all the same true god: Money.)
I'd agree with that if people were considering children right now.
But if you had children 10-15 years ago the world was a considerably different place. Most people had higher levels of disposable income, taxes were lower, things cost less. Thereby people worked less and has more time.
It's fucked now, the majority are struggling. No-one has time, energy or money to spare, everyone is stressed with the shit state of the world.
It's not fair to blame people who had kids 10 or more years ago for not having a crystal ball to tell them that they'd be fucked over by successive terrible governments who seem hell bent on entirely desttoying society.
But anyone considering children today should think very seriously about it.
This is The Register, where parenting is just as simple as it was in the 1970s, parents can easily individually take on the whole of Big Tech who want nothing less to get an entire new generation addicted, government mustn't be allowed to intervene to try and maintain some semblance of civilisation, and muh freeze peach means much more than your child ending up with the attention span of a goldfish or believing that Tommy Robinson or Andrew Tate are role models.
Maybe I'd be more in favor of mandatory age standards if parents were trying hard to prevent children from doing things and failing. When parents don't try at all, then I fail to be convinced that the many tools that exist aren't good enough. So far, the only theories I've heard for why parenting, or at least the part where you keep things you don't want your children to see from them, is harder nowadays are three unconvincing points about tech:
1. They've got a device on which they can look at anything and I can't physically watch them all the time. That's why you control what devices you give to them, whether that's by putting control software on it, only giving them restricted devices where doing things you wouldn't like is difficult or impossible, or not letting them have it all the time.
2. If I don't give them a phone, someone else will. This is not true. Children don't have a magic phone tree handing out relatively expensive hardware. They can, maybe, circumvent your control at times to read something you disapprove of, but that's not new, so parents have to handle that just as yours did, with perfect control impossible for you just as it was for them.
3. Existing control software can be disabled by someone with sufficient tech skills. Leaving aside the problem that people with those skills can probably disarm the software you're trying to get mandated as well, most of these "sophisticated attacks" involve things like guessing a reused password. I have yet to see any of these claimed easy bypasses that justify forcing everyone to live with your parenting preferences.
You are in turn making your own assumptions.
If you've ever had to work in Socvial services or with people who work in social services you'll probably know that a lot of people who have kids (and often many kids) do not think about having kids at all.
They do not consider the consequences or the impact on their lives of having kids they don't think about it very much at all. Probably because they don't think about anything very much.
Some will do their best and do very well with their kids, some will not and have no interest in those offspring who will be given whatever is needed to allow the parent to continue their life syuch as it is uninterrupted by the needs of children. So the kids gets, tablet, phone, tv in whatever quantity is necessary to stop them stopping the parent doing what they want to do.
It's not even a socioeconomic issue, I've seen well off parents ignore their kids and supply the cyber nanny the same as less well off parents.
But admitteedly the real horror stories I've been an unfortunate witness to are in the lower socioeconomic groups.
Social media is responsible for everything bad in the world from climate change, reality TV and supply chain delays to the decline of Sterling, bullying in schools and the rise of Nigel. If individuals were banned from interacting online without prior state approval, the world would revert to its utopian pre-social media state, no bullying, no wars, just wall-to-wall well-being and universal happiness.
Someone is going to get fired for finding experts who didn't toe the line.
I can tell you for sure that it is rewiring my Gen X brain!
When I'm watching movies/shows I find an urge to pick up my phone to do something else in the background while I'm watching - I guess it is no longer sufficient to stimulate my brain at least during slower sequences so I will pick up my phone to fiddle with.
I sometimes put my phone in another room to make it more difficult to do that without thinking about it - if there's something I need to check (or probably don't but get the urge to) it raises the bar by forcing to get up off the couch and go upstairs to the bedroom to grab my phone. If I get a call it will go through to my watch so I can't tell myself I need my phone close in case of an emergency lol
If it can do that to me, who didn't grow up with phones and social media a constant presence like today's kids do I can only imagine what it is doing to those with more "plastic" and manipulable brains.
Now obviously this is anecdotal and doesn't help the "finding proof" part of this, but I don't think people should sit on their hands and wait for proof before taking action.
I sometimes have that too. When it happens to me, what it often means is that the thing I'm watching is not that interesting, but I'm making myself watch it anyway because I started so I'll finish*. I don't know if that applies to you as well, but it could be useful to consider whether it does because wasting time not really enjoying the television is not any better than wasting time not enjoying the content on a phone.
* I have this reaction to many things I probably shouldn't, a combination of sunk cost and persistence being its own reward (it isn't). If a book's not good, then there's no reason I should feel the need to finish reading it anyway just because I've already read 30% of it.
> what it often means is that the thing I'm watching is not that interesting
Not that interesting in and of itself - or not that interesting compared to the addiction?
If you find yourself drifting from the gogglebox and thinking instead about playing the guitar, doing a bit of gardening, nipping off to the golf course, baking a cake, going for a stroll, writing some code, building a LEGO Artemis, changing the oil in the car, letting off a dozen arrows down the butts, needlefelting a koala, warping your loom, assembling an IKEA Billy, drawing a Billy the Cat adventure, writing a letter to your MP, making marmalade, carving a gargoyle or simply what you *ought* to have written in response to that commentard last week, that would've put 'em in their place... Well, in that case, you are probably right and continuing to watch the drivel is just self flagellation.
*BUT* if you are *always* finding yourself thinking about, or actually engaging, the same activity every time, as DS999 reports happens with his 'phone, it may be that there is an issue beyond "why am I bothering to keep this TV set, it is taking up space in the room, I could fit another Billy bookcase in there".
That's a fair point, but I'm not sure a single activity is necessarily a sign that that is an addiction. If, as certainly applies to me, someone has an aversion for whatever reason to stopping halfway through something, then an activity that can be done while continuing to watch feels easier than abandoning it to do something else. I suggest adding another question very similar to yours: do you [someone noticing this, ds999 in this case] feel like getting the phone similarly during other activities or just when watching television, and do you feel it the same way no matter what's on the television? I think that might be more correlated with the answer we're looking for.
For me it all started to go downhill when I got my first laptop years ago - suddenly I could be writing code or googling stuff whilst simultaneously fooling myself into believing that I can multitask and follow something on TV at the same time.
These days it's the phone and it's not just me: I try my hardest to put the phone down when it's something I actually want to see, but my wife will be constantly playing some kind of puzzle game if she's not working on her laptop. My teen daughter is just the same.
The ultimate escape for me is the cinema. It's the one sure fire way I know I'll watch an entire film without distractions. Doing a film night at home can help too, but the distractions are all still there and it can go wrong.
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The one rotted the teeth. The other ruins the eyesight.
Indeed ...
The one rotted the teeth.
Fortunately, dentistry progressed a great deal and that can be easily fixed (provided you have the money to do it).
But the other ruins the brain with its algorithm driven content.
The result has been generations of uneducated, non-discerning idiots who believe any and all bulshit that shows up on their screens.
Can't fix that, can you?
.
The article forgets to mention that the same is true of other things, such as medicines, which are forbidden to use on children not because they're known to be unsafe, but because there's no evidence they're safe.
And the reason why there's no evidence is that experimenting on children isn't something that's easily done, for a lot of very good reasons.
For this topic, you can't just pick a few hundred kids, put them all in the same house with a garden then give screens to one half of them and a placebo to the other half to get to a statistically valid result. The only way is observation of families and self-report, which makes it rather difficult to account for the effect of other uncontrolled parameters.
So in short, it looks to me that two sides, MPs and scientists, are doing their best to do their job properly. It'd be nice if the third, the screen-dependent media, would explain how complicated it all is, rather than resort to cheap clickbaity snark.
Hmm seperating the effect of smartphones on development from the influences of the rest of the world the subject is part of (genetic, family, society, technology, environment) I suspect would be nearly impossible.
It's why we come back to anacdotal evidence so much, because it's about all we have. I doubt too many people would say that we kids today are, cleverer, more resilient, happier than kids were 40yr ago (my own point of reference).
Myself I think it's the 'always on', 'always working', 'always shopping', always watching', 'always available', 'always suveyed', 'always stressed' nature of today that is the more general trend that is negative.
Tech has facilitated this, government has encouraged this and our brains lap it up.
From my humble experience with my kids their behaviour gets worse the more screen time they have and it doesn't seem to matter what screen it is. On demand tv seems to be just as bad even when the content is perfectly innocent. Not sure if it's the constant availability of screen based stimulation or the absence of having to wait for anything but it makes them shitty little brats.
This was posited on Reddit some time ago, which resonates and lingers. It also relates to dopamine addicted scenarios which are farmed for emotional input yet without all the other aspects of communication like body language and intonation entwine with social media too. I agree that an 'always on' digital presence stresses out our brains which haven't caught up much beyond food gathering and tidying up the cave. Our old brains are much bigger than the thinking bits. I have heard that dulled young men that spend too much time gaming into the night really need some interventions to help counterbalance the sadness of being stuck yet achieving only missions in Call of Duty orwhatever.
It does seem that the money that paid to be 'platforms' rather than publishers is maybe shifting focus again, its all our fault. Anyone here with a newspaper addiction?
I also recall that Gates n Jobs didn't give their young ones ipads.
The current government are about to enact a [completely unenforceable] law that prohibits social media access for children under the age of 16, on the grounds that it is harmful...
But at the same time are interviewing experts who say that there is no evidence that smartphones are have a material impact on children in their formative years.
I appreciate that these two sets don't overlap completely, but the venn diagram likely has significantly more in common than not. But what is more concerning here is that the social media ban for 16 year olds would - in the face of this evidence - to have been triggered without a sound foundation in science.
Isn't this why we have government agencies? Do you mean to tell me that we don't have a ministry or minister or cabinet member with the wherewithal to determine from scientists that one of the most widespread and powerful influences on the young in our society hasn't been researched? That we simply don't understand what effects it could have?
Pardon me, but what the #### are the government doing then? Don't sit around a committee room repeating the same question and expecting a different answer [a classic instance of Einstein's definition of insanity] - commission a study, set up a research grant, get a good British University or two involved, and **find out**. And if social media and constant interaction to connected devices is changing children in their formative years, ####ing well do something about it.
Out of curiosity, when it became apparent that the experts called to testify couldn't give a definitive answer, did *anyone* ask them, "What would it take, in terms of studies or research, to get to useful, actionable data?"
I have a horrible feeling that I already know the answer to my own question.
Sigh.
