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Chapter 1: 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?
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Chapter 2: 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.
Chapter 3: 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.
Yeah. And some people say, look, going backwards is fine.
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Chapter 4: How does technology affect learning in schools?
Because if you just take general IQ, right? Our generation, we have about 130 IQ compared to our great grandparents, 100 IQ. So if you slice it one way, that means half of us are geniuses. Or slice it the other way, half of our great grandparents were mentally decrepit. Of course that doesn't make sense. So you've got to recognize what we've been developing through IQ isn't general intelligence.
It's a real specific kind of intelligence that we'll call school ability, or almost like a scientific conceptual way of viewing the world. Our grandparents were very physical. If it didn't matter to me and my farm and my immediate surrounding, they didn't need to know it. We have a much broader view.
So as kids start to kind of regress back, somebody made the argument, well, maybe they're getting better at physical stuff. They're just going back to what our great grandparents were doing. Have you hung out with young kids? The one thing they are not is hyper-physical. So it's not that we're going back in a good way.
Chapter 5: What role does empathy play in the learning process?
We're kind of regressing into an unknown where I don't see any real benefit or growth to what they're doing, anything better than what anyone else has been doing.
And how much of this is due to the lack of a concentration span?
There's where you're going to get your correlation is a lot of people think their concentration, their attention is kind of going down. Realistically, if you go into labs, it's not that far down. And you could say that probably came after a lot of the tech stuff. So here's an interesting kind of fact.
If you take how long a kid spends on a screen, this is an average 8 to 18-year-old across the US. Per year, they will spend about 450 hours every year learning from a screen, which is massive. That's way more than most people think. But they will also use that exact same screen to passively consume rapidly switching media for over 2,500 hours every single year.
So basically, it's just straight training. If all you're doing is using a tool with the attention economy, constantly flipping, constantly jumping, now I sit you in front of that tool and say, time to focus and learn. You make it about six minutes till you go back to open a tab, look at this. It's like Pavlov's dog. I don't think their attention span caused anything.
I think we've basically ruined their attention span by the tool we're using. Get rid of the tool. They can still sit there for three hours and watch a movie if they have no distractions. They can still read if they learn how to do it. We're just not teaching that anymore.
And how much of it, you mentioned that it's about what we're doing in school. Is it about that? Or is it also, as you say, what we're doing outside of it? I mean, I had literally, to me, it was probably one of the most shocking things I've seen with my own eyes in recent years.
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Chapter 6: How can parents mitigate the effects of technology on their children?
I took my son to a playground near where I live, and he was going up and down on the slide. And there was a kid next to him with his grandfather who literally would not even put his phone down, which he had in his hand playing the same stupid game or something. I don't know, maybe like a five, six year old. He would go down the slide while staring at his phone. could not pull it away.
And that's where you, school used to be seen as a unique context. There's a teacher up in Canada named Andrew Cantor Rudi. He calls it the walled garden. We're very similar to like a hospital or a movie theater. The context sets your expectations. And if you don't heavily control the context, Don't be surprised when people don't meet your expectations.
So school used to be that safe zone where whatever you were doing out there, at least here, we got hard rules. But then this weird thing started happening where we tried to make school more like the real world. Well, if kids are doing that out there, then surely they should be doing it in here as well. And once that bleed started to happen. So I think you're right.
It's going to be a mix between the outside and the inside world of school. And really the problem is the more the inside of the school tries to mimic the real world for whatever reason, and we could talk about digital literacy and jobs and stuff, that's where now those behaviors out on the playground we're seeing in a classroom as well.
If you can't even focus long enough to slide, good luck trying to learn chemistry or algebra.
And what do we know about the mechanics of how screens and what we see on screens affects our brains and especially children's brains?
It's exactly what you would expect. None of it is great. The fun thing about the brain is it's wickedly malleable. The thing that makes our brain powerful is it's constantly changing.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges of integrating AI in education?
If you read books really deeply, your brain will change to make sure you can sustain focus. So basically, just whatever a kid is doing on a screen, it's a good rule of thumb that the brain will now start to seek that out. It will adapt and say, that must be normal. Give me more of that. It's all malleable. We can push it back if we choose to.
But if you then want to kind of go deeper, I think some of the more interesting stuff is like the relationship side of things. When we interact live in a person, like right now, if we're getting along, our bodies will release a certain set of chemicals, one of which is oxytocin. We call that kind of a bonding chemical.
You see it when people are breastfeeding, you see it when people are making love, when they're interacting. When kids interact online, their bodies don't release oxytocin. They're more likely to release tachykinins. So that's a completely different chemical. This chemical leads to depression. That's a marker of isolation.
So it's a real good sign that human biology does not appear to recognize digital communication as a form of actual interaction. It recognizes it as isolating and threatening.
now if i'm a kid spending more and more time online feeling more and more lonely what do i do i reach out to more people online thinking that's going to be the cure and realistically the poison starts to cycle so you get emotional disturbances you get bodily disturbances um in your country um sophie winkelman she's kind of like my counterpart in the uk wonderful she talks about all the physical changes your hormones changes your bone structure uh more kids today are myopic than it ever
or any other point in history. And you can ask, act surprised and say, this is all correlational.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of education in a technology-driven society?
You can actually have a real discussion and say, well, there's something's changed and it's not books.
Well, it's something that kind of is obvious. Like we are here in the US now. My wife and son are back in the UK. I miss them. I talk to them on the phone. And it's just not the same thing. We do it because we want to keep in touch. But you don't feel the same way having a Zoom call with somebody as you do sitting down face to face.
And even on the device, as fathers, all I want to do is call my daughter. But on that machine, my brain is also thinking about, should I check my mail while I'm here? Should I do all this? And it's just killer. But I think another interesting thing, if you drive learning, There's a concept called empathy. Everyone's heard of empathy. Empathy is a key driver of learning.
So that's where a lot of people think, well, cool, we want teachers who are empathetic. But the joke is empathy isn't a trait. It's not an emotion. It's not a thing that you have. It's a resonance between two biologies. If you and I start to empathize, it's a measurable thing. What's going to happen is our heart rates are going to start to beat simultaneously.
We're going to breathe at the same rate. We're going to blink at the same time.
empathy is resonance and when you're resonating now i'm in your head so that's why it's so easy to learn from you i'm making the same moves you are on a screen it is ridiculously difficult to get resonance so if i'm talking to someone on a phone with a screen versus in person it's real hard to sync up to them that's why zoom learning during covid was just didn't work as well and so then a lot of people said well get rid of the teacher just go right on to ai or something well look
If I need two pairs of biology to resonate, and it's hard to do it over a screen, getting rid of the other person and just having a tool, there is no more biology for me to resonate with. That's why dropout rates online are about 85%. As soon as a kid starts struggling online, there's no sense of momentum, no sense of connection. They just drop out and go to the next thing.
And the great irony in all of this is social media in particular has said to us, this is the best way of staying connected.
Yeah. Wasn't that the sales pitch all along was this was going to bring the world together. What's the one thing it did? It just drove a wedge right between everyone. It makes you feel lonely, isolated, and it gives you, and you could bring that back to learning too. It gives you the echo chamber. You're not hearing the breadth of the world. You're hearing your little slice of it.
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