Jj is for Jottings 28. A Neuroscientist’s Comments on Children’s Development.

Baroness Greenfield, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, maintains that technology is re-wiring brains, particularly for young people growing up knowing nothing else. She asserts that a young person who hasn’t yet developed a clear and strong sense of identity and social skills will respond differently to the influx of technology in its various forms – and particularly the social media – quite differently from older people who have grown up with only television. The older people will have experiences and memories to draw upon, will have developed conceptual frameworks and attitudes, and will have a much more robust sense of who they are – all of which will offset whatever other influences come in.
There’s a seemingly endless stream of information and facts coming at us from the internet, but information isn’t knowledge, and you need to have a basis for understanding and interpreting facts and to make connections between them. I know a young man of about thirteen who frequently begins a sentence with, “I learned on the internet that…” and he trots out a so-called fact or idea (which is generally unrelated to our topic of conversation anyway). Frequently they sound unlikely or are half-baked or downright wrong, but he accepts them all as gospel truth because he hasn’t developed any filters to question and weigh up what he has read or heard. Baroness Greenfield says that an inspirational teacher or parent could be the key to young people developing the skills to “join up the dots” to make sense of the world around them. Unfortunately this young fellow doesn’t seem to have a home environment with much conversation, and therefore nobody to engage with him, challenge his information and help him make connections and develop the ability to question and think about what he is taking in.
As a neuroscientist, she is very aware that the brain adapts itself to whatever input it receives (i.e. neuroplasticity), and she is concerned that , if you’re placed in an environment which encourages, say, a short attention span, which doesn’t encourage empathy or interpersonal communication, and which is addictive, then these things are shaping our younger generations.