Is technology driving us crazy?

Last updated 13:12 15/10/2012

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Could being plugged in to social media be rewiring kids' brains?




''I see kids clinically who spend the whole day engaged with electronic media and it's clearly a problem,'' said Professor George Patton from Australia's Royal Children's Hospital's Centre for Adolescent Health. ''During those teenage years when the brain is in a very active phase of development and learning to process information about relationships and emotions, there's a concern that these kids are actually going to be wired differently in the future, given the malleability of brains at that age.





Larry Rosen, a Californian psychologist and one of the world's leading authorities on technology overuse, believes future generations will increasingly suffer from ''iDisorders'' - psychiatric conditions such as narcissistic personality disorder, mania and attention deficit disorder, sparked by excessive use of social media, smartphones and computers.


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''Technology by its engaging nature is creating multiple problems. It encourages rapid, continuous task-switching, which means that we are only processing information at a shallow level and not deeply so we're not able to have complex thoughts but only superficial ones,'' Rosen told Fairfax Australia.



On Tuesday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed there had been a 32 per cent rise in smartphone data downloads between April and June this year, compared with the last three months of 2011. By 2015, it is estimated 80 per cent of the world's population will own a smartphone, tablet or laptop.

Last week, Fairfax's Sunday Age revealed increasing rates of addiction to online video games could lead to ''internet use disorder'' being classified as a mental illness in the redrafted psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

This cacophony of electronic noise has prompted calls for schools to start teaching students how to switch off. Melbourne-based non-profit group Smiling Mind has created a mindfulness meditation program - delivered, somewhat ironically, via a website and app - which is being piloted in 20 schools across Australia, with the aim of being embedded in the national curriculum by 2020.

Fourteen-year-old Taylah Armitage from pilot school Elwood College hopes the classes, in which students sit with eyes closed as they are taken through a guided meditation, will help her to focus more and become less dependent on her iPhone.

''If I have credit I'm pretty much always on it. When my mum wants to go out I always need Wi-Fi so I can be connected because I need to be able to check my phone for Facebook and texts and Tumblr. Sometimes it feels like I've just been on it for five minutes but then I realise it's actually been an hour or more,'' she says. ''I often find that I go straight home from school and I won't be with my friends so I can talk to people on Facebook or on my phone, which is pretty sad so I have to try and stop that.''

Richard Chambers, a headspace psychologist who helped develop Smiling Mind, says mindfulness improves our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment, which is protective against anxiety and depression, and can improve interpersonal skills and resilience.

''You can actually train this capacity to pay attention to what you're doing, to watch the sunset, to listen to the music, to listen to the conversation or the teacher in class. As people do that the mind becomes calmer, levels of stress decrease, productivity improves and over time it can actually create functional and even structural changes in the brain,'' Chambers said.

Year 9 Elwood student Oscar Swift, 15, is wary of the lure of social media and says he tries to limit his time online. ''If you used all the time that you were on Facebook reading a book, writing or playing a guitar, you could either be like a musician or an awesome artist or whatever, so I think it's really important to be balanced with media otherwise you can become a bit of a vegetable.''


Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has been the most vocal in raising the alarm on the shift from face-to-face contact to screen-based communication - a trend she says poses a bigger threat to humanity than climate change.



''Too much of anything is not good for you. So there are certain young people who will be at risk of internet addiction just as there are certain young people who are at risk of alcohol addiction. We can't take small case studies and generalise it to the whole of the population,'' said Jane Burns, chief executive of the Young and Well Co-operative Research Centre, a Melbourne-based, federal government-funded body set up to explore the role of technologies in improving the mental health and wellbeing of 12 to 25-year-olds.

A study of 2000 young people, conducted by the centre and published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2010, showed one-third spent one to three hours a day online and on social media, and 50 per cent spent less than an hour on their devices.

Burns says the findings busted the myth that most young people were overexposed to electronic media. A blanket claim that technology is bad, she said, does not take into account its benefits, particularly for marginalised groups such as those with a disability or chronic illness, and gay and lesbian youngsters.

''Technologies allow you to be connected, and being connected is very important for mental health and wellbeing. It allows you to share positive stories of change, reduce stigma and embrace diversity,'' she said.

''There is research which shows that those who are engaged in both online and offline communication are more involved in activities, more involved in what's happening on a global scale, more interested in what's happening to the environment, to politics and are actually more active and participating in more meaningful ways.

''The internet is here to stay so we've got to harness its potential, and like all things big it has the potential to do both good and bad. If we can get the good right then the bad becomes significant for a few but insignificant for most.''

Dan Lubman, an expert on addiction and the developing brain, and director of Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, says that while he believes there is presently insufficient evidence to suggest adolescent brain development is being adversely affected by online behaviour, he wants government investment in research to address this vast knowledge gap.

''I don't think we have a good handle on when is this behaviour risky, or how do we let parents know in terms of when they should be worried? But by the same token we also don't know what are the real strengths or advantages of this way of communicating in terms of how does this build resilience and improve our kids' ability to socialise,'' Lubman said.


''There are lots of social pressures to respond instantaneously, whether you've got your on-leave email tracker on or not, so that work-life balance is a growing issue ... We're embedded in a culture where this is normative and we just do things without stepping back and reflecting and asking is this actually good for us or the next generation?''

- FFX Aus

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