The world that today’s kids inhabit is very different from the one their par-ents grew up in. Unlike other generation gaps, this one isn’t about music or fashion–it’s about technology. In South Korea and around the world, teenagers make up and break up with a few strokes of a cell-phone keypad.
Today’s kids aren’t just wired–they’re wired and rewired as technology companies continue to offer them new ways to play. Text messaging via mobile phones was the new thing in Europe a few years ago; now Korean kids are using their phones to download songs at $1 a pop. Phones and PDAs now regularly come with cameras attached; even clothes contain microphones and MP3 players.
Is this a good thing? Is all this new media preparing kids for the future–or turning them into antisocial, superficial creatures? There are no definitive answers. Only recently have scientists begun to explore what happens to children’s brains during the hours they spend playing videogames or surfing the Web. What seems clear is that children are developing a different set of skills than generations before them. They know how to handle visual information. And for the kids on the social margins, technology provides an “in,” when previously they might have been hopelessly “out.”
Jonathan Wendel first picked up a Nintendo control pad when he was 5. As a teenager, he spent hours playing Duke Nukem and other shoot-’em-up games. Now 20, he’s a professional gamer and spends more than 40 hours a week with a monitor and joystick. When the brain spends this much time exposed to a fast-paced visual medium, it adapts, it changes. But into what?
Cognitive neuroscientist Daphne Bevalier wondered the same thing two years ago when she gave some students at the University of Rochester in New York a test to measure their ability to sift through visual information. The one student who did especially well turned out to be an avid videogame player. Intrigued, Bevalier put together two groups of students–avid gamers and nongamers–and gave both a series of computerized visual-perception tests. On average, the videogame players scored 30 percent better than nonplayers.
What is it about video-games that makes people particularly good at seeing things? Is it because the games are so graphically compelling or because they create a sense of urgency that focuses the brain on the task at hand? Videogames clearly play on the user’s emotions. What worries scientists is that they stimulate the brain’s emotion-processing right lobe without employing the more rational, analytical left lobe, which puts things in context. That may be why playing violent games like Mortal Kombat can correlate to aggressive personalities, poor academic performance and delinquency.
Of course, not all video-games are violent. The Sims, in which kids create fictional families, may foster problem-solving and role-playing skills, scientists say. Such games favor not the brain’s visual circuits but its prefrontal cortex, which serves as a command center. “Videogames can either stimulate brain development or stifle brain development, and the difference between the two has to do with the design of the games,” says Trevor Neilson, executive vice president of the Casey Family Foundation.
The most unambiguous benefits of new technology may lie in its most frivolous applications. Kids have always liked to gab, and chat rooms and instant messaging give them ample opportunity. Analia Miyagi, a bubbly 17-year-old from Buenos Aires, logs on for two or three hours a day to gossip with her friends from school. “If I forget to say something to one of my friends, I can find her in the –chat,” she says. She and her friends look nothing like the stereotype of technology-obsessed kids as antisocial loners. Indeed, in a study of seventh and 10th graders, UCLA researchers found no relationship between Internet use and loneliness, depression or social anxiety. And when it came to approaching the opposite sex, instant messaging was a whole lot easier than getting up the nerve to speak to somebody in the school cafeteria.
One thing seems clear: saddling kids with too many activities may be taxing their young brains. “Kids are getting better at paying attention to several things at once,” says Patricia Greenfield, director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at UCLA. “But there is a cost in that you don’t go into any one thing in as much depth.” David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, had adults turn back and forth from math problems to recognizing shapes. They took longer, it turns out, to do both tasks simultaneously than one at a time–and they made more mistakes. Kids may be somewhat better at adapting to a diet of overstimulation, but to what extent? This is one problem technology has surely helped create. With luck, one day it will help solve it.
