Heavy Screen Time Rewires Young Mouse Brains, for Better and Worse | Hacker News Reader

Heavy Screen Time Rewires Young Mouse Brains, for Better and Worse

npr.org

TLDR: mice exposed to very high levels of stimulation early in life, grew up to treat that level of stimulation as baseline later in life. Study posits that brains wired like that would deal well with high stimulation environments that would overwhelm regular subjects - but be under stimulated and restless in "regular" situations.

Very interesting finding for sure - especially since the mice weren't even playing games etc. They were just exposed to high levels of audiovisual stimuli. Makes you wonder if actually interacting and problem solving, instead of just being bombarded with stimuli, would have a different effect...

Anecdotally reflected in my youth- had little exposure to television as a kid. I simply could not ignore "background televisions" for many years, while other kids whom I knew grew up with constant "background television" could ignore it without difficulty.

Interestingly, I recall the same problem as a young child, however, now I often need some form of "background noise" to focus.

When it's dead silent, I get distracted really easily.

Given the environments that a child born today will likely face in the future, what do you think is the right balance to strike in early childhood?

pediatricians say for young children (under 2), background noise is discouraged as it interferes negatively with language development.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/128/5/1040.

I think being vulnerable to overbearing stimulus is probably less evil than requiring ongoing level of stimulus to function. Your kids might struggle with pulling them away from stimulus they are not used to, but they will figure it out as they grow up and hopefully keep the ability to go without constant stimulus.

Personally, my plan is to minimize background stimulus so as not to stunt the ability to focus, and to ensure there are balanced periods of both stimulus and no stimulus.

You might say that stimulus will be harder and harder to escape in the future, but I like to think if you choose, you will still be able to keep much of your life free of it.

Anecdotally, I moved to Asia when I was 18, and have since always found lower-density urban environments of western countries boring. An SF-area friend visiting me here in China yesterday from his now home in Brooklyn, New York also commented that he needs density. Personally, returning to visit, I often happily observe that immigration is slowly changing these places (eg. Sydney, Auckland) to have greater 24 hour life.

Also, I have a 2.5 year old. She can get a lot more situational cues for linguistic development from sporadic exposure to decent TV than we could offer her in two or more languages. Sometimes we just show her film in a third language neither of us speak. Decent TV for kids ... now there's a thread waiting to happen.

Tried language through TV with my kids. The experiment with the first kid was an accident. She used to watch Chhota Bheem a cartoon in Hindi. Within a couple of months she was able to understand and speak Hindi though none of us spoke the language at home. She was 3 years old. With the next kid we sort of experimented. We never spoke in English to him. But he has picked it up by just watching Peppa pig on you tube. He is 2.5 years old now.

The brain adapts to better deal with what it is exposed to.

Of course an animal raised in an intense environment will handle it better than one that isn't, and have some difficulty with calmer environments. The reverse is also true.

It doesn't surprise me that children used to the quick pacing and interesting stories found in television and games have trouble focusing in slower environments, such as school.

It's easy to jump to the conclusion that children should be raised without television or games, but I think we should also experiment more engaging means of education.

Perhaps the differences in human and mouse metabolism are small enough that they make good models for testing drugs. I can't think of anything mouse studies would be less likely to be accurate models for than the effects of the consumption of media. Video games require modeling a world, suppressing irrelevant and distracting details, and pursuing goals. This seems very different from shining a bunch of lights on a mouse.

On top of that, mice are nocturnal creatures, so they do not ordinarily experience the same constant barrage of visual stimuli that humans do.

I very much feel by this study...

I grew up with television, books, audio stories=>constant stimulation. I brought books to class to read when it got boring...some teachers let me get away with it(guess who were my favourites).I still crave it and am only slowly learning to relax nowadays. It actually makes interaction with non "hyperstimulated" people hard, because I either steamroll them, interrogate them (because I am interested and give them my full, hungry attention) or zone out because nothing is happening. "Vibing" and hanging out is not easy for me.

I always blamed it on being minimally autistic(not diagnosed and don't want to be insensitive, but some non neuronormative things are there i think)

I had quite a similar experience, and i think many HN users resonate with this comment as well. I found physical exercise to be the most effective tool to alleviate this problem.

About a year ago, i started swimming 3-4 times a week, and it definitely helped me maintain a less hyperstimulated baseline. Although i have no resources to back it up, i think it is somehow related to increased production of dopamine and the psychological effects of exercise (patience, self control, discipline).

The human brain has proved highly adaptable despite the increasing rate of technological evolution over the last several centuries. The important question in my mind is what are we adapting our brains for? If you spend 70% of your waking life watching TV, the skill sets you develop are unlikely to serve you well in any productive domain.

I've the same question in my mind. They say we're still evolving. Maybe. Or, is this an evolution at all?

> unlikely to serve you well in any productive domain

Except, perhaps, those guys tasked with watching two dozen security cameras ...

(Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, there may be a job title such as 'video pattern recognition specialist')

I suppose this might be able to explain why I've seen a lot of younger computer users seem to have no problems at all reading webpages full of flashing, moving ads or just animated GIFs in general, that I would have to physically block out in order to even focus on the text. However I've also noticed that a lot of these users are not as attentive to the details of the text they're reading, skipping entire words and even sentences. Maybe they are being distracted, but don't notice that they are.

As soon as I saw the title of this post I thought, "somebody is going to take a jab at Millennials in less than an hour."

Was not disappointed.

I think the interaction human brain + modern tech stimulation is a giant trend in human society and evolution. Tech stimulation SIMULATES interaction with another person, but without all the actual effort and risk exposure to interacting with another person. Humans prefer the simulation, and since the entirety of human society is presaged on humans interacting with one another, the complete proliferation of constant electronic stimulation in human societies does not bode well for the continued functioning of society.

In the case of humans I don't see how it is any different than say: spending enough time in the countryside then feeling overwhelmed in a large city.

I'd stipulate, frequent exposure to strong photostimuli burns the eyes. You should look at the eyes and how those are changed. You here me, people in an old thread?

Getting tired of the "rewired brain" metaphor.

Yep. It seems like if all of these external activities can "rewire" the brain, it's logical that it would often be able to "unwire" itself once trained. "Wiring" is probably a bad term for something adaptive like this.

That's just because your brain has seen it so many time it's been rewired to be bored of it.

Dito. The whole point of adolescence is to 'wire' the brain for the environment it has to perform in. The term 'rewiring' implicates that there is some kind of expected structure or operating mode that every brain has to conform to.

Every brain is different. Yes it contains some sort of 'wires', but it is obviously not that simple and only causes more confusion by using these unnecessary simplifications.

> "Many of those changes suggest that you have a brain that is wired up at a much more baseline excited level," Ramirez reported. "You need much more sensory stimulation to get [the brain's] attention."

I wonder what is control group on this study. Some rat closed in small sterile cage with zero stimulation. Of course rat from such environment needs less stimulation to get excited.

It would be valid to compare with rats from their natural environment with all the exciting smells, predators, food collecting...

Nice try but humans aren't mice

Ditto, plus, what doesn't 'rewire your brain for better and worse'?

>excessive screen time early in life can change the circuits in a growing brain

Any activity changes the brain. Also, as BurningFrog points out, "rewires" is a metaphorical term and therefore vague. Ditto "circuits".

>mice

...aren't human.

> But it also meant they acted like they had an attention deficit disorder

Such disorders are pretty loosely defined. Something "like" such a disorder is vaguer still. And, again, these are mice for goodness sake.

>In a video game, he said, you can meet the equivalent of a lion every few seconds.

No you can't. Lions are dangerous!

>our understanding of how sensory stimulation affects developing brains.

We're not passive. We decide what to pay attention to. Thus we can't be stimulated arbitrarily by the environment. Actually I think this is assumed by the contradictory concept of "attention deficit", elsewhere in the piece.

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