6:10AM

Posting is going to be a bit of a challenge today. I don’t expect I will have much content, but I always think that at the start of the day. Today is Saturday, and I have a Harley ride, my Board Appreciate Dinner, and everything is pretty much back-to-back, back-to-back. My only time to write will be this morning. I did spend some time publishing today’s post. It takes a while to proofread, load up the images, and then re-paste them into the article. However, I’ve noticed that if I keep up this sort of pace, I might end up with a close-to-a-book-length manuscript. Then I need to edit it into something reasonable.

Human’s are Unique

I have no idea why I have put this part off for so long, but the most interesting thing I usually share with people is why protecting kids from the hook loop is so important. And it’s not just the hook loop. Human children need specific kinds of experiences to develop what we used to consider normal, healthy social interactions. To become well socialized, they need experiences of agency and community. If that sounds familiar, it is because it is two of the three parts of Self-Determination Theory. And of course, they want to improve their skills in a wide variety of areas, so mastery will come along.

However, there is something special about human children compared to the youth of all other mammals. Several things actually, and they directly affect how our brains and therefore ourselves develop.

Number 1: Human Brain Growth.

According to Gabor Maté, the author of Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté is a renowned physician and author known for his expertise in a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development. He is particularly well known for his work in the area of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. According to Dr. Maté, humans are the only mammal whose brain quadruples in size after birth. An elephant or a whale may be born with a brain that is larger at birth than a human; however, they never get much bigger. A human brain will increase in size fourfold. And this is important because so many neural connections will be formed after birth. The next closest animal is the chimpanzee with a doubling.

Now, the typical human child will see their brain reach 90% of its final size by age five, but according to Haidt, they will have more neuronal connections than an adult. That means, their neurons could be said to be “over-wired” with an abundance of connections. Why? Because little kids are nothing if not bundles of potential. They are primed and ready to go.

Number 2: The Long Pause

The second reason that humans are unique is that we do something no other mammal does (that I know of). Every other mammal races from birth to reproductive age as fast as possible. Our neighbor’s dog Roxxy had our Lab puppy when she was three years old. Think about that for a second. How old was the mother of your cat when she was a kitten? Probably only a few years old. I suspect that even accounting for lifespan differences, the difference with humans is unique. Humans, you see, do not race to reproductive maturity as fast as possible; we pause for seven years. Yeah, for most human children, they do not enter puberty until 12 or 13.

Why the pause?

What is happening for us in that window? You have a lot of new, unimproved, or unstrengthened neural connections, the most we are likely to have in our lifetime, and seven years to do what? The answer appears to be absorb our culture. Yesterday, I wrote about how humans won the public good’s game, or the prisoner’s dilemma. We learned how to work together, and work together in ways that benefitted the whole tribe. So learning how to be a part of, and contribute to our social group is essential.

A Japanese professor of psychology, Yasuko Minoura, who taught at Okayama University in Japan, studied the children of Japanese businessmen. Specifically, she studied children who moved to California when their fathers had been transferred there in the 1970s. She wanted to know at what these children developed their sense of self and how living in America influenced their ways of interacting with friends. In particular, she was interested in the kids who retained the influence even after returning to Japan. She found the critical window appeared to exist between 9 and 14.

If you moved a child to America during that window, they would come home feeling American. However, if they came home before 9, they would often forget and revert to Japanese culture. And if they moved to Japan after 13 or so, they would always feel like a foreigner. But during that critical window, if the child lived in the United States, they saw themselves as American. They more than spoke English like a California native; they got the jokes, the facial expressions, the music, the food. In summary, they absorbed the culture.

In principle, the same thing would happen in reverse. If we took kids before nine and dropped them in China, if they stayed until they were fourteen or fifteen, they would come home “feeling” Chinese. It would be a part of their identity.

Therefore, Professor Haidt and others conclude that our long pause is really about becoming integrated into our clan, our community, our culture. This is an important developmental window for children where they are seeking experiences that will help them develop into competent adults. At five, a child is entering kindergarten. Think about their handwriting. Now what does it look like a few short years later? You can see how their brains have become wired to go from a crayon to a pencil to a pen. Their brains are wiring up incredibly fast to master the tasks of life, one of the most important of which is to fit into their local community.

There is one other very important thing about this 9-14 window. Around 12 years old is when the human brain seems to complete laying the emotional foundation of someone’s life. When psychologists talk about the “inner child”, very often, that child is the one whose memories cover this window. Also, the part of the brain that holds the executive function, the prefrontal cortex, does not begin to develop in earnest until high school, right around 14-15. When you layer in the insight that human brains grow from the inside out. I call the three “stages” the lizard brain, the dog brain, and the primate brain; a brain develops from the brainstem out toward the outer layers that look all foldy and squiggly. It is these last layers that develop. In practice, what this means is that children do not have the same distraction protections as adults. On top of that, their emotional systems have not fully developed. This is important because of what we have been doing for the last ten years.

Now imagine you interrupt this development by sticking a device in a kid’s face to keep them entertained (likely so you can be on your device). Here’s the trouble. That kid is likely, if current trends continue to have that screen or some variation of it, for the rest of their life. What’s more, that device now has unfettered access to your child’s mind and behavior loops without having to battle through the prefrontal cortex.

What could possibly go wrong?

DDevelopmental psychologists agree that children need to seek experiences that have these key elements:

  1. They are in person, face to face.
  2. They are synchronous (we are doing the same thing at the same time).
  3. They are high commitment (hard to join, hard to leave).

The face-to-face part, I think most of us understand; however, this brings in a third major way that humans are unique.

Number 3: The Sclera

Humans are the only animal who has readily apparent sclera, or “whites of the eyes.” This is another oddity of being human. It is supremely important that we know what other people are looking at. Cognitive Neuroscientist and author of the book Journey of the Mind, Ogi Olgas pointed out that humans are only one of five animals who can sing duets. Singing a duet requires a crazy amount of mental and neural synchronization.

And Homo sapiens have another superpower, which may explain why being able to see what another human is looking at is so important. We have shared attention. While chimpanzees and other primates can look together at an object one primate is holding, they (so far as we can tell) are unable to direct the attention of others by pointing. It seems so simple, yet it is astoundingly powerful. Shared human attention may be the foundation of our storytelling capability and perhaps one of our greatest superpowers. We can work together in groups. But more than that, we can become extremely synchronized.

Note: okay, there are technically six, I suppose… two kinds of monkeys, two kinds of birds, frogs, and us…

Six Animals that Sing Duets.

In the book Super Communicators, journalist Charles Duhigg shared the result of research done at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany in 2012. Scholars studied the brains of guitarists playing Scheidler’s Sonata in D Major. When guitarists played by themselves, separately, their neural activity looked dissimilar. However, when the musicians played guitars in a duet. The electrical pulses within their craniums began to synchronize. To the researchers, it appeared as if the guitarists' minds had merged. What’s more, the linkage showed up throughout their bodies as their breathing began to fall into similar rates, and their eyes dilated in tandem while their hearts beat in similar patterns.

Breaking the Connection

When kids spend too much time staring at a piece of glass, it breaks, or blocks the development of the skill of seeing how our behavior affects other people by the look in their eyes. Since founding GameTruck, and working with kids and video games in a number of areas, I have been shocked by the number of times a parent has come up to me and introduced their child and said, “They are not autistic, I had them tested.” What a completely weird way to introduce your child.

My cousin who is a school teacher described to me a phenomenon she has been seeing that she called, “Synthetic autism.”. Amy Adams, who is one of the founders of the Healthy Screen Habits podcast, called it “Virtual autism.” The effect is the same. The kids treat people like things. In his book “Blink”, journalist Malcolm Gladwell writes about an experiment held by Professor Ami Klin. Klin teaches at Yale University’s Child Study Center in New Haven and is a leading expert on autism. They ran an experiment where they asked participants to wear a special hat that contained powerful eye-trackers. They then had them watch the play Who is afraid of Virginia Wolf? You average person would focus on the characters and their faces, looking for meaning in the emotional expressions of the actors. The autistic participants in contrast, tracked objects, a light switch, a button, a lapel, the fake gun that plays a key role in the scene. The link between facial expression, emotion, and meaning did not seem to exist for the autistic participants. They looked for meaning in the things they saw. The subconscious tendency to focus on faces appeared to be absent, and as a result, they frequently missed the emotional charge of the play.

I share this story because this is what we are seeing happen with kids. They are becoming “face blind,” and Sherri Turkle, the Harvard Professor who has written about the deteriorating state of conversation in our country, has also pointed out in her book, Reclaiming Conversation, that the emotional age of most children is slowing dramatically. I think you can ask any teacher this who has been in the classroom for 15 years or more, and they will agree. Twelve-year-olds now have the maturity of eight-year-olds, and the slip goes right on up the chain.

Instead of learning how to read each other, our kids are learning how to read screens, that instead of giving them what they need:

  • Face to Face
  • Synchronous interactions in
  • High Commitment Communities

The tech is giving them anonymous, asynchronous interactions which happen in high fluid communities (anyone can join or leave at any time). This is quite literally the opposite of what they need. And this is even before the kids get hooked into staying on those platforms virtually every waking moment.

In this section, I wanted to share the reasons why our children’s experience with technology is very different from an adult’s, and to help you understand the impact we are seeing from children losing access to the kinds of experiences they need to develop.

Humans learn by watching each other. I never taught my children to walk. The mirror neurons on their heads and their natural inquisitiveness drove them to copy me. In fact, that is how we all learn physical movements, by copying another and trying it ourselves. But to learn social and emotional skills, we have to talk and interact with each other. We need to play and discover, because the one thing none of us can do is see into the other person’s mind. Olga posited that humans are special not only because we can sign duets and share attention, but we do something more. When we learn our language and our culture, we become part of a supermind. Minds in sync, thinking, and working together. To be able to do that, we have to train young humans how to integrate into our community. This is a totally natural and wonderful, and necessary process.

Except, we seem to be disrupting this process with technology. Sadly, the two core needs of kids, agency and relatedness, are both being subverted by applications which promise fake agency and fake communion. It’s like junk food for the developing mind, and we’re seeing the effect of it play out in the anxious generation.

07:25 AM

Okay, wow, I need to get ready for this crazy day. And I am again surprised at home how much content there is to share on this topic, and the support I find for this across a wide range of other books, research papers, and experts.

You know, when I started looking into the downsides of “screen time”, it was before the smartphone. It was before kids had the internet in their pocket 24/7. We used to worry about kids sitting around and getting fat. It was their physical condition which garnered all the concern. Today, however, screens are not simply emptying kids' heads, they are rewiring them in ways we do not fully understand. You can exercise and diet to reverse the physical effects of inactivity, but how do you restore to full health a mind that has been wired toward fear, uncertainty, and caution?

Tomorrow, I’ll have to dig more into discover, vs defend mode.