Most parents who worry about their kids’ online activity focus on the people or content their children might encounter: Are they being cyberbullied? Do they have access to age-inappropriate material? Can sexual predators reach them? What I worry about, as a sociobiologist, is not what my kids are doing on the Internet but what all this connectivity is doing to their brains. Scientific evidence increasingly suggests that, amid all the texting, poking and surfing, our children’s digital lives are turning them into much different creatures from us — and not necessarily for the better. For starters, there is the problem of what some researchers refer to as continuous partial attention, a term coined by former Microsoft executive Linda Stone. We know the dangers of texting or talking on the phone while operating a motor vehicle — but what about when forming a brain? A Kaiser Family Foundation report released last year found that on average, children ages 8 to 18 spend 7 hours and 38 min. a day using entertainment media. And if you count each content stream separately — a lot of kids, for example, text while watching TV — they are logging almost 11 hours of media usage a day. You might think the people who have had the most practice dealing with distractions would be the most adept at multitasking. But a 2009 study found that when extraneous information was presented, participants who did a lot of media multitasking performed worse on a test than those who don’t do much media multitasking. In the test, a trio of Stanford University researchers showed college students an image of a bunch of rectangles in various orientations and asked them to focus on a couple of red ones in particular. Then the students were shown a second, very similar image and asked if the red rectangles had been rotated. The heavy media multitaskers were wrong more often — because, the study concluded, they are more sensitive to distracting stimuli than light media multitaskers are. We have separate circuits, it turns out, for top-down focus — i.e., when we set our mind to concentrate on something — and reactive attention, when our brain reflexively tunes in to novel stimuli. We obviously need both for survival, whether in the wilds of prehistory or while crossing a street today, but our saturated media universe has perhaps privileged the latter form and is wiring our kids’ brains differently. “Each time we get a message or text,” Anthony Wagner, one of the Stanford study’s co-authors, speculates, “our dopamine reward circuits probably get activated, since the desire for social connection is so wired into us.” The result, he suggests, could be a forward-feeding cycle in which we pay more and more attention to environmental stimuli — Hey, another text! — at the expense of focus.
