What's Going on in Your Child's Brain When You Read Them a Story? | Hacker News Reader

What's Going on in Your Child's Brain When You Read Them a Story?

kqed.org

185 pointslaurex49 comments

I want to know what's going on in my child's brain when they watch YouTube videos of other people playing video games.

Change "playing video games" to "playing football/soccer/basketball".

It's just a different competitive activity.

Through, kids tend to be calm after playing those sports and tend to act like jerks after playing videogames. They also focus on homework better after sport and worst after game.

They are also able to stop soccer easier while not too tired, but play game longer then they can handle (leading to royally annoying behavior).

Definitely not limited to children, I observe this in myself too. (although hopefully I handle it better than a child)

I suspect that is because when playing a physical sport, the physical exertion gives you a dopamine rush whether you lose or win. When playing video games, you have no such release if you lose - just pent up frustration.

That or the exercise means you're too tired to actually do anything with your anger and disappointment and instead just sit there hating yourself.

I don't think that describes feeling and behavior after people playing sport. Not in my experience at all. It is other way round - angry sad people are happier after physical activity (which does not have to be competitive anyway).

I'd like some citations for that wildly presumptuous statement.

Let’s call it repeated observation. Watching people play video games induces a drug like numbness and craved fixation followed by withdrawal once the stimulus is removed. The withdrawal is observable as a lack of cognitive concentration compounded by emotional sensitivity.

Personal "repeated observation" is nothing more than anecdotal evidence. It doesn't mean anything.

Watching anything that you enjoy will create a stimulus feedback loop.

I like watching let's plays of old games and learning new strategies for old games from people who dedicate large amounts of their time and expertise to that kind of thing.

I don't suddenly have a "lack of cognitive concentration compounded by emotional sensitivity" after watching. I experience the same symptoms I would if I had just watched half an hour of television, whether its a sports game or cartoon. If I was intellectually stimulated during this time, then my brain begins sorting and strengthening connections between new and old information. If I have a mental addiction to whatever I'm doing, then some negative impulses may also occur, but that happens with literally anything and is irrelevant to video games.

The ideas you're suggesting, that watching someone else play video games creates negative behavior such as "focusing on homework better after sport and worst after game" is some serious armchair psychology that, unless you can provided citations to credible studies, simply has no basis in reality.

I don't suddenly have a "lack of cognitive concentration compounded by emotional sensitivity" after watching. I experience...

I'm not rude enough to just reply "That doesn't mean anything" to that, but the thought of doing so crossed my mind.

I'm confused.

Are you trying to call me out for negating a personal anecdote with another anecdote?

That's the whole point. To show that they don't mean anything statistically.

It's not rude to point out to someone that their anecdotal "evidence" is meaningless. It's just a fact.

Hi. Well, firstly, facts/honesty can be brutal. Someone's 'just a fact' can be someone else's flaggable offence, as often seen on here. I was threatened with banning for stating 'just facts' just yesterday. (true story!)

Ah, sure, I see..but even rereading now, it really doesn't seem your anecdata was meant to be meaningless. Too subtle for me, maybe, I'm no expert. Sorry, I'll butt out now.

Edit: Downvoter, could you explain why? Thanks.

Edit2: I looked at your recent comment history, it happens quite a lot that you get downvoted for telling people their ideas have no basis in reality, in a way that I guess doesn't seem rude to you, but seems so to me. We have different levels of 'acceptable abrasiveness' I guess.

For the record, I didn't downvote you. Simply having a disagreement is not what that button is for.

But I'd love to see another example of a recent comment where I told someone their idea had no basis in reality, because I definitely don't do that. My comment here was specifically rejecting the notion that OP could form such conclusions with only weakly described, negative-biased anecdotal evidence.

I think the downvotes are because your comments do not make it clear who/what you are responding to or what you are trying to say, and seem tangential to the topic under discussion. Both of them impose extra mental load on readers without any obvious payoff.

There was 1 downvote (until now), the person I responded to got downvotes, plural.

It was obvious who I who responding to, surely. No idea why you say that. Ok.. It's not clear to me what type of comments I am allowed to make about people's posts if not the type I made. If you don't understand, ask. Telling me it's 'tangential' and referring to what I'm 'trying to say' are unfriendly moves that could be used in replying to most comments on HN. But I feel that whatever I could say wouldn't be welcome here so...bye.

I get downvoted quite regularly for expressing my opinion, you get used to it. Just try to make sure you're actually expressing a related opinion and not just tangentially responding in a way that doesn't foster more discussion.

Opinion comes from my personal experience with children whether ones that I just observed or was responsible for. Biology is just different during the two activities I guess.

I used to defend games until I had to deal with kids behavior after.

During what two activities?

Independent of how well this narrative typifies any particular group of people, this response is a non sequitur, in the context of the original comment. Ie, atom-morgan is suggesting that the mental experience of video game stream audience members is similar to that of sport stream audience members. Presumably, we would match a video game and sport of similar intensity (team fortress : football :: papers please : figure skating).

I’m an adult and I do that. I watch them because I’m trying to get better at the game and watching what better players do helps.

I’ve also watched people play through games to see if I want to buy them.

There’s a few twitch streamers I’ll sometimes watch because I think they’re funny or whatever but that’s closer to like listening to talk radio than watching sports.

To be fair, I want to know what's going on in my brain when I watch unboxing videos of board games.

Maybe it's Pavlovian, you associate taking the game out of the box with the fun of playing to such an extent that you receive the reward through the paired stimulus.

I'm 27. I absolutely love watching people play games (only certain games though). It's relaxing and very rewarding. For example, in a strategy game, I get to do my own strategies in my head and either:

- they get executed, which makes me feel good about myself

- the player executes a better strategy, which makes me go "hmm!"

- the player executes a worse strategy, which makes me go "ha!" :)

It's also a lot more passive than actually playing. I can hit pause or sit up and walk at any time, I don't need to finish the game or anything like that.

I guess that is why some people watch sports too

The same thing that happens when they watch other people play sports or chess or ping pong, or when I watch other people complete home improvement projects that I have been putting off for years (I swear honey, I am going to build us the radest deck one day)

With sport there was a recent report that as we live vicariously through the sportsmen we watch - that we're, IIRC, less likely to seek out active pursuits. As of our brain thinks we've been doing sport ourselves.

When I watch chess I can almost play along, it's very close to playing for oneself.

I'm not sure it's a foregone conclusion that our desire for gaming would be sated, rather than stimulated.

It's probably different for children too? When I was young I couldn't watch sport; it didn't make sense to me to sit and watch someone else have fun instead of going and having fun myself.

The practice of consuming content accompanied by a commentary or 'gloss' is an educational practice dating back to the Middle Ages:

https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2015/09/17/reading-b...

The novice gets to see a more experienced student tackle the same problems, 'live'. Which helps him to identify some of his own misconceptions.

The author of the book or video game is less able to assist in this way because as an expert he has forgotten his early misconceptions, suffering as he does from the Curse of Knowledge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Modern publishers have dropped the practice because [insert correct historical explanation here ... because we don't copy our texts by hand?] and this may explain why textbooks now so unreadable. The practice has re-emerged spontaneously on YT because children, contrary to popular belief, actually enjoy learning things.

When people explain things to me, the point they make is often unhelpful... but incidentally, in the course of their explanation, I learn the crucial thing neither they nor I realized was the problem.

Walkthroughs would have a similar effect.

> dating back to the Middle Ages

Or realistically long before the invention of writing. Observing the world together and explaining what is happening is one of the things parents do with their young children all the time, and is also a big part of how tutoring/coaching/mentoring works in any field, and arguably a focus of good lectures as well.

Legibly adding layers of commentary in written books is a difficult typographical challenge though. Medieval-style books aren’t all that easy to read.

The biggest problem by far with many current textbooks, at least in early grades, is that they are developed by people without any particular skill or expertise, based on a terrible committee process driven largely by politics and marketing. I don’t think adding interlinear annotations would help.

Here in China there are a lot of videos of kids (or adults) playing with toys. My daughter can't get enough of them, so far as I can tell because she enjoys seeing other people create inter-toy relationships and play scenarios in their minds. She is 4, the same age as the children in this study. She's not self-reading yet but she is a vicious monopoly player and we do read to her in English and Chinese.

I think it's similar to what is going on in an adult's brain as they watch other people play sports; only a bit more sophisticated as your child likely plays the same game competitively and is gleaning strategy and insight, rather than drinking beer and cheering for a colour.

> The emotional bonding and physical closeness, Hutton says, were missing. So were the exchanges known as "dialogic reading," where caregivers point out specific words or prompt children to "show me the cat?" in a picture. "That's a whole other layer," of building reading Hutton says.

While I absolutely agree that the emotional bond is one of the biggest parts of the experience I don’t think it has to be limited to reading. For example, my daughter will sometimes sit on the couch next to me and watch YouTube or play mobile games and tell me about what she’s watching or playing. I’ll also ask her what she’s doing and try to add some context or have her show me what she’s interested in. She also shows me stuff she thinks is hilarious and we can laugh about it together. We do read together before bedtime, but I think overall just the fact that she gets those small moments of connection even while her head is in her screen makes a difference.

I'm curious to know how storytelling without a book but with the storyteller present would compare. You wouldn't have pictures but there would be lots of body language that you don't get with just a recording.

My son is 7, and he’s in a transition phase where for ~45 mins/day we read to each other (naturally, for a long while I was the only one reading). I’ve always been curious about his mental development related to hearing stories read to him. Fortunately so far I’ve only heard and read positive things about this. But I must admit I’m surprised to see that the so-called Goldilocks environment is created using illustrated books. I always thought that visual cues created a lazier imagination because a part of the work is done by the artist on behalf of the listener.

It's pretty interesting to see that even after all these advancements in technology and better-than-ever animated movies, the best way to tell a story to a child is still through a good old illustrated book.

I could totally believe that this is a true and valid result. I could also believe that the "audio-only" case did not work well, not because it's "too cold", but because perhaps it is really freakin' loud inside that FMRI and they cannot hear well enough to follow what's going on.

So for fun, I read this article to my child. He just farted at me and giggled, maybe too meta.

Ps how do you get a 4 year old to lie still in an mri ?

Read them a book

It rhymes with bloroform

Well that is the usual way of getting kids in an MRI. I would assume that wouldn't work if you want to measure their response to stimulus. Plus ethics and stuff.

Actually, it was a tasteless joke on my part.

>Well that is the usual way of getting kids in an MRI.

Wait, is chloroform still used as anaesthesia?

I didn't think it was entirely tasteless :P They do sedate them, not cloroform though.

> Ps how do you get a 4 year old to lie still in an mri ?

I’m curious about this, as well. Could it have biased the results at all by finding kids who were able to sit still and focus long enough to get measurements from the FMRI machine?

Also, a sample size of 27 doesn’t seem sufficient, though maybe it is for a study like this.

When they are young enough you can read anything as long as it's in a soothing voice, I read the C++ annotated reference to my son.

Now that's child abuse.

Should have read them K&R C.

I assume it puts him to sleep pretty easily. Whatever happened to hard-copy programming reference books, anyway?

I have often seem them used as a base for a monitor.

Questions about kids' minds always surprise me. Since the askers presumedly had a childhood, can they really not remember the answers from their own childhood?

If noone ever read them a story, that's a sad possibility, I guess. (That was one of the advantages of radio drama.)

If you read a child stories with various elements that are clearly not true to life then it shouldn't be a surprise if the child invents similar stories. Parents don't seem to make the connection though and describe their children as having "imaginary friends" etc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com