It's like the brain stops doing anything

Everyone was here for much of the day to celebrate June birthdays. There was badminton and volleyball and water balloons and slip and slides. We only missed TM. No, we didn't take any pictures. We're not always good about that. Someone is going to have to step into TM's shoes while he is gone or whole months will cease to be documented. I feel incredibly blessed that all of my children get along so well together. 

But that's not really what I want to write about tonight. I was reading the book, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon, when I came across the results of a study that I find stunning. I'm not surprised, but the degree to which they support what I have been advocating for years is significant. 

The set-up for the study was that researchers had children hooked up to a fMRI machine to see what their brains were doing when being read to in various forms. The first had the children listening to a book read by the author, but without looking at the pictures. The second was listening to another book by the same author, read by him, while looking at the pictures which accompanied them. The third was watching a cartoon made about yet another book by the same author. Here are the results:

"The results were breathtaking. Dr. Hutton walked me [the author] through a chart displaying the team's preliminary conclusions. Rectangles in red showed the greatest activity of statistical significance, those in pink indicated somewhat less, and those in pale and dark blue showed the degree to which the brain networks had faded or appeared idle.

We looked first at the data showing what happened when children were listening to a story without seeing anything. There was one red rectangle. 'You're getting a little bit cooking, a few networks are up,' Dr. Hutton said, 'but really the one that stands out is the connection between the introspective areas, how does this relate to life and understanding. There's not much visualization yet.' This makes sense: young children have limited experience of the world and haven't built a large library of images, feelings, or memories to draw on.

He slid his finger over to the second column in the chart, the one showing neural activation as children looked at pictures while listening to a story.

'Bam!' he said. 'All these networks are really firing and connecting with one another!'

You didn't need a medical degree to see meaning in the serried stack of bright red boxes. When the children were listening to the story while looking at pictures, their brain networks were helping each other, reinforcing neural connections and strengthening their intellectual architecture ...

Dr. Hutton was still pointing at the graph. 'But then if you compare that with the video, everything kind of drops off,' he said.

We sat in silence for a moment, looking at the third portion of the graph. All the red had turned blue.

'It's like the brain stops doing anything,' I said.

'Except for the visual perception,' he replied. 'They're seeing the story and watching it, but nothing else is going on in terms of these higher-order brain networks that are involved with learning. What seems to be happening is the decoupling of vision, imagery, and language. The child is seeing the story and watching it, but not integrating this with other higher-order brain networks. The brain just doesn't have to do any work. In particular, imagination -- supported by the default mode and imagery networks -- falls off of a cliff.'" (pp. 12 - 13)

Videos and screens, in neural terms, are no substitute for actual interactions in the real world. It is as simple as that. The implications for education particularly are huge. There is just no way that internet, screen-based curricula can have anywhere near the same impact on actual brain development as interacting with a live person in the real world. As much as those who are proponents of it would like it to be otherwise, it is hard to argue with what is actually going on in developing brains. As much as homeschooling parents would like to outsource their children's education to a computer, it doesn't change that it is not actually creating brain connections. 

And let's take this one step farther. Our brains are plastic, meaning that we are constantly doing things to change them. The more we do something, the more it increases the connections in that area of our brains. If we do not do things which require concentration, the areas of our brains responsible for that will lose neural real estate. While the effects of staring at a screen are disastrous for developing brains, I can't believe that it is really any better for adult brains. I cannot tell you the number of times I've heard in the last five to ten years an adult saying something along the lines of, "I used to enjoy reading, but I just don't find it easy to do anymore." 

Phones and computers are just so tempting. I get it, it is something I struggle with. It is especially difficult when much of day to day life requires the use of screens for just about everything. What are we doing to our brains? I cannot imagine that it is terribly good. Technology is here to stay, the trick is to figure out how to manage it and still find time to do things which require interacting with the real world and real people. This is particularly important for our children whose brains are still developing. Children do not need screens. They just don't. They need to run and play and explore and experiment and to sit in laps and read stories with adults who love them.