March 13, 2010
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 1997 Vol. 6 No. 2
Bioelectronic Learning: The Effects of Electronic Media on a Developing Brain
By Robert Sylwester
Electronic media can powerfully affect the developing brains of children and exploit the brain’s analytical and response systems. But caring, enlightened parents and teachers can help avoid damage to developing minds, and lead children to achieve balance and individualism in an electronic world.
Apportioning Time and Energy
We have about 150,000 hours of living to expend between the ages of one and
18. We sleep about 50,000 hours of this time, and we dream about two hours
of the eight we sleep each night. Sleeping and dreaming appear to be positively
related to the development and maintenance of the long-term memories that
emerge out of daytime activities, because they allow our brain to eliminate
the interference of external sensorimotor activity while it physically adds
to, edits, and erases the neural network connections that create long-term
memories.
We spend about 65,000 of our 100,000 waking hours involved in solitary activities and in direct informal relationships with family and friends, activities that play a major role in the development and maintenance of important personal memories.
We spend about 35,000 of our waking hours with our larger culture in formal and informal metaphoric-symbolic activities—about 12,000 hours in school and about twice that much with various forms of mass media (TV, computers, films, music, sports, nonschool print media, churches, museums). Mass media and school thus play major roles in the development and maintenance of important cultural memories.
So on an average developmental day between the ages of one and 18, a young person sleeps eight hours and spends 10 waking hours with self, family, and friends, four hours with mass media—and only two hours in school. Our society has incredible expectations for those two hours!
Young people tend to spend much time and energy on such electronic media as video games, TV, and computers—at the expense of nonelectronic media and socialization (although new forms of socialization are evolving around watching TV and playing video games).
The attentional demands of electronic media range from rapt (video games) to passive (much TV), but this is the first generation to directly interact with and alter the content on the screen and the conversation on the radio. These “screenagers” emotionally understand electronic media in ways that adults don’t (somewhat as a virus that replicates cultural reality, instead of as a mere communicator of events). For example, portable cameras have helped to shift TV’s content from dramatic depictions to live theater that extends (and often endlessly repeats and discusses) live coverage of such breaking events as wars, accidents, trials, sports, and talk-show arguments. What occurs anywhere is immediately available everywhere. And like a virus, such events move from electronic depictions into next-day conversations everywhere. Our world has truly become a gossipy global village where everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Emotion drives attention, which drives learning, memory, behavior, and just about everything else. Our brain’s key emotion-driven questions when confronting something new are: do I eat it? do I run away from it? or do I mate with it?
Given the ready availability of channel changers, mass-media programmers often insert strong primal emotional elements into their programming to capture and hold attention. Since violence, sexuality, and consumerism in media trigger primal emotions, most young people confront continuous consumer-driven commercials (eat it), thousands of violent acts (run away from it), and heavy doses of sexuality (mate with it) during their childhood media interactions. This comes at the expense of other more positive and normative experiences with human behaviors and interactions. Mass media tend to show us how to be buyers not producers, powerful not peaceful, and sexy not sexual.
Commercial sponsorship in mass media has led to a distorted presentation of important cultural and consumer-related issues. For example, TV commercials tend to be short, superficial, and (understandably) factually biased. Further, computer programs and TV editing techniques tend to compress, extend, and distort normal time-space relationships, a critically important element in the creation and use of effective long-term memories. Most of our memories are context-driven, and these electronic distortions can seriously alter the natural context of the experience.
Our Brain and Electronic Media: Biological Systems, Cultural Issues
Brain Development
Our awesomely complex yet elegantly simple brain is the best-organized three
pounds of matter in the known universe. Decidedly human but individually unique,
it is a wary, curious, and exploratory organ that actively experiences and
interprets its environment, applying a variety of cognitive models and systems
that it develops (within established limits) to the reality it perceives.
The brain, as a basic animal organ, developed in three successive layers over
evolutionary time to meet survival, emotional, and finally rational challenges.
Our rational cortical forebrain is unique among animal brains in its size
and capabilities, but our subcortical survival and emotional systems play
very powerful roles in our thoughts and behavior.
Our brain is composed of tens of billions of highly interconnected neurons that interact electrochemically with surrounding and distant neurons through a complex system of tubular (dendrite/axon) extensions that receive and send messages. Cortical neurons are organized into a vast number of dedicated semiautonomous columnar modules (or networks), most of which are modifiable by the experiences that wire up our brain to its environment. Each module processes a very specific function, and groups of modules consolidate their functions to process more complex cognitive functions. So, for example, sounds become phonemes become words become sentences become stories.
Genetics plays a much larger role in brain development and capability than previously believed. Because biological evolution proceeds much slower than cultural evolution, we’re born with a generic human brain that’s genetically tuned more to the pastoral ecological environment that humans lived in thousands of years ago than to our fast-paced urban electronic environment.
Our curiosity and inherently strong problem-solving capabilities allowed us to develop such tools as autos, books, computers, and drugs that compensate for our body and brain limitations, and very powerful portable electronic computerized instruments are now rapidly transforming our culture. We can thus view drugs and technology as a fourth technological brain—located outside of our skull but powerfully interactive with the three integrated biological brains within our skull.
Motivation, experience, and training can enhance generic capabilities (for instance, infants can easily master any human language, but they aren’t born proficient in any of them), so brain development is a dynamic mix of nature and nurture. Thus it’s important to choose our parents carefully, because they provide us with our genes and our jeans (the home environment that introduces us to our culture). Done right, it’s an appropriate mix of biology, technology, and society. Trying to determine whether nature or nurture is developmentally more important is like trying to determine if length or width is more important in computing area.
Our brain is designed to adapt its cortical networks to the environment in which it lives (to master the local language, for example). A socially interactive environment that stimulates curiosity and exploration enhances the development of an effective brain. Thus excessive childhood involvement with electronic media that limit social interaction could hinder the development of a brain’s social systems. Conversely, denying a child easy and extensive exploration of electronic technology helps to create an electronically hampered adult in an increasingly electronic culture. Surfing on the Internet (or on anything else electronic) is the screenagers’ version of beginning the process of learning how to drive a car by first getting on a tricycle.
Memory Systems
Our short-term (or working) memory is an attentional buffer that allows us
to hold a few units of information for a short period while we determine their
importance. Since the system has space-time limitations, it must rapidly combine
(or chunk) key related bits of foreground information into single units by
identifying similarities/differences/patterns that can simplify an otherwise
confusing sensory field. The appeal of computerized video games may well lie
in their lack of explicit instructions to the players, who suddenly find themselves
in complex electronic environments that challenge them to quickly identify
and act on rapidly changing elements that may or may not be important. Failure
sends the player back to the beginning, and success brings a more complex
albeit attractive challenge in the next electronic environment.
Our short-term memory processes frame the segment of the environment that we perceive. We attend to the things that are inside the frame, and we’re merely aware of the context, the things that are outside of the frame. Mass media often eliminate a proper presentation of the context of an event and so distort its meaning and importance. The result is that a rare isolated event is presented as being common. A brutal murder in a park may empty all the parks in a large region. Parents and teachers must help children to develop a sense of the context of the electronic media world they experience. Unfortunately, too many adults equate rare with common if the event is emotionally charged, considering data to be the plural of anecdote, as it were.
The efficiency of our dual long-term memory system depends on our ability to string together and access long sequences of related motor actions into automatic skills (procedural memory) and related objects/events into stories (declarative memory). Thus storytelling activities dominate our culture through such communicative devices as conversations, jokes, songs, novels, films, TV, ballets, and sports. Young people must master various storytelling forms and techniques, and electronic media can both help and hinder this process through their range, editing techniques, and interactive potential.
Response Systems
Our brain uses two systems to analyze and respond to environmental challenges,
and electronic mass media often exploit them. One is a relatively slow, analytic,
reflective system (thalamus-hippocampus-cortex circuitry) that explores the
more objective factual elements of a situation, compares them with related
declarative memories, and then responds. It’s best suited to nonthreatening
situations that don’t require an instant response—life’s little
challenges. It often functions through storytelling forms and sequences and
so is tied closely to our language and classification capabilities. User-friendly
computer programs and nonfrantic TV programming tend to activate this rational
system. The other one is a fast, conceptual, reflexive system (thalamus-amygdala-cerebellum-stress
circuitry) that identifies the fearful and survival elements in a situation
and quickly activates automatic response patterns (procedural memory) if survival
seems problematic. This fast system developed to respond to imminent predatory
danger and fleeting feeding and mating opportunities (eat/run/mate). It thus
focuses on any loud, looming, contrasting, moving, obnoxious, or attractive
elements that signal potential danger, food, or mates.
The system thus enhances survival, and so it’s the default system. But its rapid superficial analysis often leads us to respond fearfully, impulsively, and inappropriately to situations that didn’t require an immediate response. Stereotyping and prejudice are but two of the prices we humans continually pay for this powerful survival system. Regrets and apologies run a close second. Worse, the neurotransmitter or hormonal discharges associated with fear can strengthen the emotional and weaken the factual memories of an event if the stressful situation is serious or chronic. We’ve become fearful of something, but we’re not sure why, so we’ve learned little from the experience that’s consciously useful. LeDoux (1996) discovered that chronic activation of the fear pathways can result in physical deterioration within our memory systems.
All that is serious business, because people often use mass media to exploit this system by stressing elements that trigger rapid irrational fear responses. Politicians demonize opponents; sales pitches demand an immediate response; zealots focus on fear of groups who differ from their definition of acceptable. The fingernail-size amygdala, the area of the brain that triggers this system, has appropriately been called the fear button.
The fast pacing of TV and video-game programming and their focus on bizarre/violent/ sexual elements also trigger this system. If the audience perceives these elements and the resulting visceral responses as the real-world norm, the electronic media must continually escalate the bizarre/violent/sexual behavior to trigger the fast system. Rational thought development would thus suffer. Those who are still looking can now see this escalation in the mass media.
Conversely, if a person perceives these electronic-world elements as an aberration and not normative of the real world, such electronic experiences can often actually help to develop rational thought and appropriate response. Those who understand the normative center of a phenomenon must also know about its outer reaches—and mass media provide a useful metaphoric format for observing the outer reaches of something without actually experiencing it (an escape, for instance, from a dangerous situation one might confront).
So perhaps it’s not what electronic media bring to a developing mind that’s most important but rather what the developing mind brings to the electronic media. Children who mature in a secure home and school with adults who explore all the dimensions of humanity in a nonhurried, accepting atmosphere can probably handle most electronic media without damaging their dual memory and response systems. They will tend to delay their responses, to look deeper than the surface of things. Furthermore, they will probably also prefer to spend much more of their time in direct interactions with real people. They will thus develop the sense of balance that permits them to be a part of the real and electronic worlds—but also to stand apart from them.
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Illustration by Brenda Grannan.
Robert
Sylwester, Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, focuses on
the educational implications of new developments in science and technology.
He has written several books, including A Celebration of Neurons: An Educator’s
Guide to the Human Brain, and dozens of journal articles. The Education
Press Association of America gave him its Distinguished Achievement Award
for 1994 and 1995 for his syntheses of brain research published in the journal
Educational Leadership. He has made hundreds of conference and inservice
presentations on new developments in brain/stress theory and research. Contact
Sylwester at: bob_sylwester@ccmail.uoregon.edu or telephone 541-345-1452.