"We’re Regressing Into The Unknown" - Dr Jared Cooney Horvath
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What do we know about the impact of screens on children's brains?
What do we know about the mechanics of how screens and what we see on screens affects our brains?
It's exactly what you would expect. None of it is great. A parent asked her, when should I give my kid a cell phone? And her response was, when are you ready for them to watch porn? That will be the first thing they do when they pick up that machine.
That's a great answer.
One of the things I found absolutely shocking, this generation of children are cognitively inferior to their parents' generation, and you associate that with screening.
Yeah, and there's no easy way to say it. 50% of kids have a special plan that gives them extra bonus time to help them because they have a learning disorder, typically an attentional disorder. 50%? You can have what's called induced ADHD, where basically you act as though you have it, but you genuinely do not. Over half of our kids are on a computer one to four hours every day for learning. Imagine I had a drug. I invented a new drug and you say, what does that drug do? And I go, why don't you give it to your kids and we'll find out.
Jared, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you so much. We're so looking forward to the conversation because the things you talk about in our view are really important. Before we get into them, tell us a little bit about your background. What's your story? How have you come to do what you do and say what you say?
How does cognitive development compare between generations?
Yeah. Well, similar to Francis, I was a teacher originally. So teaching was my passion. But I got into neuroscience because when I was teaching, that was a decade of the brain. So everything was brain, books, brain, gym, brain this. So I figured, all right, that must be the next evolution. So I'll go learn that stuff, bring it back to my classroom, thinking that'd be a year or two. That has ballooned into 18 years now I've been stuck in academia. I can never quite get out. But my whole focus has been, yeah, on the science of learning. How do human beings learn? Can we bring that back to schools and say, if this is learning, then what does that mean for teaching? What does that mean for studying, for the tools we use?
And the way I came across your work is a friend of the show sent me a clip of you on C-SPAN, I think it was. I think you were testifying in Congress. Yeah, I think it was Senate, one of those. Senate, Senate, right, yeah. Well, yeah, Senator Cruz was there, actually, I remember now. And you were talking about the impact of screen time and screens on children, on learning, and on their brains. And one of the things I found absolutely shocking, but also kind of made sense to me, is that this generation of children are cognitively inferior to their parents' generation, and likewise. Whereas prior to now, every generation basically got cognitively better. Actually, we're now seeing a decline.
What are the implications of screen time on children's attention spans?
And you associate that with screens.
Yeah, and there's no easy way to say it. Like, you've got to find the nicest way to say that sentence, that our kids are cognitively less developed than we are, but it is just where it is. So since we've been recording cognitive development, turn of the century, late 1800s into the 1900s, Every generation outperforms their parents, you name it, on basic IQ, memory, attention, literacy, numeracy. And we always attributed that to school, that the more kids spent time in schools, the more their general competencies went up. And it makes sense. That's where we're cutting our teeth. And then 2010 rolls around, and all of a sudden, schooling and development decouple. Kids today spend more time in schools than we did growing up, but all of their scores are down lower than ours.
They're equivalent to us in about 1992 now in literacy, in numeracy, in executive functioning. All these things have gone down. And you can't say, look, school didn't change all that much. Biology didn't change all that much. So what changed? It was the stuff we were putting in schools. the screens that they were now being taught through seem to be having a big impact on that.
That's so depressing. Because what we're actually talking about is we're going backwards as a species.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What do we know about the impact of screens on children's brains?
0:02–1:21
2
How does cognitive development compare between generations?
1:21–2:37
3
What are the implications of screen time on children's attention spans?
2:37–3:57
4
How does technology affect learning in schools?
3:57–4:51
5
What role does empathy play in the learning process?
4:51–6:33
6
How can parents mitigate the effects of technology on their children?
6:33–8:16
7
What are the challenges of integrating AI in education?
8:16–9:51
8
What is the future of education in a technology-driven society?
9:51–1:06:23
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