Science, Innovation and Technology Committee

Wednesday 10th June 2026

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09:43
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Order, order. Welcome, everybody, to this, uh, hearing of the science, Innovation Technology Committee, looking into the neuroscience of child brain development. We're very pleased to welcome our guest this morning. Uh, we've already had apologies. I'm chairing this morning because our chair is away, uh, overseas on a visit. Um, but hopefully I'll do a passable job, uh, in her absence. Uh, so as I say, this is all part of our inquiry into the neuroscience and development of, of childhood and adolescent brain.

So we're very pleased that following our round table to welcome our esteemed guests this morning, uh, Professor Blakemore, uh, who we know. I'm sorry that I missed the round table, but good to see you again. Um, Birkbeck and, uh, Doctor Susannah Dorji, who's joining us online from, uh, York. Welcome to you all. And thank you. Just before we start, uh, Professor Blakemore, who we know. Well, I think this is our third encounter. Um, I'm sorry that I missed the round table, but good to see you again.

Uh, professor Dennis Marshall from Birkbeck. And, uh, Doctor Susannah Dorji, who's joining us online from, uh, York. Welcome to you all. And thank you. Just before we start, just so that we know best how to direct our questions to each of you, could you just explain to us the particular area of science that you're expert in, in this regard, so that we have a sense of, of where we're directing things, perhaps, Professor Blakemore, perhaps you could kick us off.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Um, I think one of the key things to understand about the brain is it is not a unified organ. It's a set of different functional systems that have co-evolved together to help us survive. And as a consequence, they work together, but they compete with each other for control of our of our behaviour. Um, and so that's really critical because if that kind of balance of competition gets unregulated or deregulated, the behaviour may not be as we might expect, the large kind of architecture of the brain, the different, the different parts go is essentially genetically predetermined.

So everyone has certain lobes in the same place. If they kind of develop them appropriately. However, the wiring between those parts and within those parts is environmentally driven. So some of the wiring, the long cables that connects, say, the amygdala, the emotional part with the cortical parts, the kind of higher knowledge parts, some of that wiring is done through experience. Um, but most importantly, the connections within the, the brain parts within, for example, the cortex, which is the outer parts, the part that is the latest to have evolved in which a lot of our sensory motor skills and our kind of deeper reasoning skills is situated.

The connections in those parts are very much driven by the experience that we have. This kind of plasticity of the human brain is a strength of the human brain. It is why we are so successful as a species. It means that we can adapt to changing environments. You don't know when you're born what the environment is going to be like. What that means is that it can be hijacked by, um, other. Inappropriate environments, let's say.

So children that grow up in very restrained orphanages without, without any enrichment and so forth, their brains are going to develop to reflect that environment. But again, that is a in some way a positive side of how the brain works. It adapts to what is available to it. Um, in terms of adaptation and plasticity, what we found in the brain is that there are usually, um, all the different parts of the brains, but at different times a kind of burst of, of connections that is made with some kind of peak, which then gets pruned off later.

So for example, in the back of the brain, the visual cortex, we get a peak of connections around two years of age to allow that part of the brain to kind of really embed all of the visual information in the world. And then the connections that are not being used get pruned away to save energy. Because having all connections is not very useful. So that happens in different places. So at different ages, in different parts of the brain as well. Um.

It should be understood that that, that all the parts of the brain, including the cortex, the higher level are functional even in newborns, but the cortex in the newborns is immature. The connections aren't made. It doesn't work in the same way as adults. So there's a lot of scope for change that happens in the first few years of life. In particular, behaviour is often controlled by reflex type systems. Subcortical parts of the brain, the older parts of the brain.

In the first six weeks to three months. But after that, the kind of volitional, um, what we call endogenous control of behaviour kind of kicks into place. A lot more kicks into place. I want to say that these are always gradual transitions. There isn't a moment boom. You know, we've changed the way the brain works. Right. And it varies a little bit from individual to individual. I want to mention two more things that are critical in brain development.

One is what's called myelination. So myelination is the covering of the neurons by a kind of fatty sheath, which is a bit like the electrical circuitry. The plastic covering on electrical wires. And this kind of develops from the back of the brain to the front of the brain from birth to early adolescence or early adulthood, I should say. And what myelination does is it improves the, um, conductance, the speed and effectiveness of processing of neurons. So that means a younger brains that are not myelinated.

They might be doing similar things to adult brains. They're just doing it more slowly and kind of losing maybe a bit of information. Um, yes. And I think that's a broad overview of what happens early on.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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If I may, I would like to describe, uh, the development of the capacities I have mentioned in childhood, because that can be instrumental for us when we will be thinking about the impact of devices on the brain, particularly in these age groups. So in the framework I mentioned, I particularly talk about two capacities. The first one is the self-regulation capacity. And you may know that self-regulation is a major predictor of children's outcomes across adolescents and actually adulthood as well. So self-regulation is children's ability to manage their thoughts, emotions and their behaviors in adaptive ways, in alignment with their goals.

Um, and this capacity, it has been shown, uh, predicts, um, children's mental health and well-being through, through life. Uh, it predicts how much they earn when they're adults earlier on. It predicts their academic success. It even predicts, um, crime levels in adulthood. So it's a central predictor of lifelong outcomes. Uh, and there's a lot of research showing strong research that particularly self-regulation in childhood, predicts these lifelong trajectories for children. So there is a good reason to focus on fostering self-regulation in childhood.

And from the neural perspective, self-regulation is underpinned by several brain networks. And there are three particular networks, uh, that work together in a way and gradually develop during childhood and beyond. So those are the salience network. And this network enables us to notice what is happening in our mind. It helps us notice our behavior and regulate our behavior based on that. Then there is the executive network, uh, which directs our attention. Uh, and this network helps us to decide to, um, to problem solve.

It helps us to choose the right emotion regulation strategies. It helps us sustain our attention. And then there is the third network called the default mode network. And this is the network that gets activated when we are distracted when we, um, daydream when we are not on task, basically. Um, and these three networks work together. So the salience network acts as a switch. So when we notice, let's say that we are not on task that we are distracted.

Uh, the salience network can signal to the executive network, uh, that it needs to take over and shift our attention on what we need to focus on in the moment. Now, there is a lot of research showing that, uh, how these networks, uh, develop and how they work together, uh, determines mental health and well-being across age groups. So particularly, um, these networks gradually separate during childhood and work more efficiently. And when they cluster together more, uh, that can actually predict children's problems later on mental health difficulties.

So the thing to remember about childhood is that even though most mental health problems, uh, we see manifesting in adolescents, um, a lot of these problems actually have their roots in imbalances in different networks. Um, in childhood and even in early childhood. So there are so-called programming and incubation effects where some adverse events and imbalances that happen during childhood sometimes manifest ten, uh, ten or even more years afterwards. So then we can see, for example, anxiety and depression, uh, in adolescents. Uh, so the development of these, of these networks in childhood is crucial.

And, and devices may have impact on them, but there are two other networks that they work together. I just mentioned them briefly. They work together with what we call the HPA axis. So this is a network of brain areas. And um and the adrenal cortex uh as well. Um that releases stress hormones in response to what we experience. So it's shaped by experience. And when children in childhood experience imbalances in functioning of the stress response and this axis, it actually can impact on the networks that I have mentioned.

It can even damage, uh, some parts of the brain that are involved, particularly in their cognitive control. So in the executive aspects of, of their functioning, and they also work together with the reward networks. So when we talk about digital devices, there's a lot of talk about the reward network. But again, we need to remember that this network works together with these other networks. And to some extent is is impacted by them. So that determines whether children go for the immediate gratification or whether they are able to delay.

Their, um, their action, um, and focus on longer term goals. Okay. Um, so, um, I know, uh, just, just one more thing I briefly mentioned there is a second capacity that is called the self world capacity. And I will be focusing on that one much less, but this capacity is about relational well-being and it's underpinned by, uh, mentalizing brain networks, empathy networks, social pro-social networks. So, so that one is about connections and development of children's purpose in life and their social functioning, their social competencies.

And that one also, um, quickly develops during childhood.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Um, I think some of them have been mentioned. So, uh, so I'm going to just focus on adolescent brain development. When I, when I speak about brain development, I'm really thinking about the period of life between 10 and 20 four. Um, the brain continues to develop during that period. It doesn't just stop in childhood, as Danny mentioned, and this is one of the mechanisms I think is really important to focus on. The brain is very plastic. And that heightened plasticity also is maintained in adolescence.

And what that means, the crucial consequence of that is that it's not just someone's genetics that determines how their brain develops, it's also their environment and their environmental experiences, which shape and mold the way their brains develop. And of course, environment includes everything, including social media. But the other thing to note, and this has been this has been mentioned, but I think the relevance to adolescence and in the context of social media, different brain regions develop at different rates. For example, the limbic system, which is involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing, develops relatively early and is actually hypersensitive to rewarding and exciting stimuli in adolescence.

In contrast, an area that's already been mentioned, the prefrontal cortex and other regions that are involved in cognitive processing, like self-control, undergo really protracted development right throughout adolescence, into the 20s or even the early 30s. So you get this kind of mismatch between the reward systems, which are highly active in adolescence, and the slow development of the prefrontal cortex. And if we think about that, so you asked about what we should particularly focus on. I think it's already been mentioned by my two colleagues.

Self-Regulation is really important in many ways in the digital world, but particularly if you think about the ability to regulate our digital behavior and put down our phones when they're bombarding us with exciting stimuli driven by the algorithms which tailor make our feeds to our own interests, even as adults, it's really hard to put our phones down if we're seeing constantly interesting things. But as a as a child or an adolescent whose prefrontal cortex is developing, it's even harder.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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So I'll start with the second one. How do we know that there is very little, if any, causal research in the early years, almost everything is correlational. So we observe two things happening together. And I'm sure this this audience is aware of the difference between those. But just to illustrate, ten years ago there was a hoo ha about the dangers of video games. And actually a researcher, fantastic colleague Jocelyn Bavelier, came out and said, actually interacting with these first person shooter games had positive benefits.

People who played a lot of these video games had much better visual attention skills, but we can't from that draw the conclusion that because they played the games, it had caused an improvement in visual attention skills. It could well be those who are good at processing lots of visual information, who are then good at the game and continue playing, right?So the causality, the direction of causality is never clear. Um, and just by observing, um, you know, co-occurrence of things and there's very little evidence about the use of digital media with young children, but what there is, is entirely, um, correlational.

My colleague Sam Wass, who was at the round Table, has been talking about um video or cartoon type stimuli presented to young children and particularly making a case that manufacturers have moved to having fast changing stimuli. And the reason for that, remember I said there were multiple systems in the brain. The brain has a lot of different things that we have a vigilance or attention capture system. You know, something rapid is happening. You want to turn and find out what it is.

And so this triggers the vigilance system. So the babies or young people are constantly attuned to that. Um, and learning requires a little bit slower, lots of repetitions and slower and so forth. So it's not necessarily the best form of teaching. It's Samuels goes on to say that this, this relates to, um, anxiety, this kind of rapid information and so forth has been found to relate to anxiety and later mental health issues. The evidence for that is entirely based on animal models, because you need to intervene, intervene directly on the brain to, um, you know, establish what the causal relation is.

So again, we have no causal evidence of this. I think his evidence is the strongest. Some kind of digital media are impacting on different parts of the brain differentially in young children. But again, there isn't this kind of causal, um smoking bullets, um sort of thing.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Um, so my professional and my personal opinion, um, so I think again, my professional opinion, there's very little work on this. This is all very new. So there are a number of studies that are now looking at the presence of a distractor, like a phone on word learning. So there'll be quite artificial studies where you're trying to teach a, an 18 month old, a new words, um, you know, this, this is a blog, this is a blog. And at the same time, in one condition.

The phone rings and mum picks up the phone while doing it. And then on the other condition, um, they don't. And then you compare, oh, did the phone ringing or interrupting?Um, have an impact on word learning?And there's some preliminary evidence that it does, but we need to be a bit careful. These are very short term studies in unnatural environments. In the real world mom might repeat the instruction. Right. Um, where, you know, in these kind of well controlled scientific things, they're designed specifically to try to get at the pure causal factor, but maybe not quite as natural as, as what happens in, in the real world.

Um, in terms. So that's, so to summarize very little evidence, it's all very new. My own personal opinion. And this is an opinion based on being a parent and having worked with parents is I think we need to be a bit careful not to hold up a kind of wholly version of what parenthood is. Um, which was never true. You know, the parent was never giving 100% of their attention to the child. Maybe the parent was busy dealing with the other six children or managing the household.

Um, an anecdote I often tell my students is my grandmother, um, in the 60s, I was cared for by my grandmother for a while. She used to wheel me out to the back of the garden in a pram and leave me for, for 2 to 3 hours there in the afternoon, because it was, you know, it was a done thing. It hasn't done me any harm. And I hate it when people say it hasn't done me any harm. I'm not suggesting we all go out and do that.

But the point is, this kind of mythical view that there will be 100% attention just doesn't happen. So I think it's detrimental to parents to basically guilt trip them about this. We can come on later to recommendations, but I think we should be thinking about providing better evidence to parents, a better story, support for how they should be dealing with this. But we'll talk about that later.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah. So what evidence do we have of the impact of digital devices or social media on, on the adolescent brain?Almost nothing. There are a few small studies, but they haven't been replicated and they are purely correlational. So I think your question about your question about can we make inferences?I don't think we have the direct evidence, but I do think we have a lot of evidence that we can make inferences from the evidence we've already talked about, about brain development.

We know a lot about that. We also know a lot, for example, in the context of social media, we know a lot about how the social brain develops in adolescence. The social brain, um, it was mentioned by Shoshana, is this network of brain regions that we use to understand and interact with other people, that network, that social brain network is undergoing very substantial and protracted development right throughout adolescence and into early adulthood. And at the same time, that's accompanied by a social reorientation where adolescents become more and more interested in their peers and their friends.

They're very motivated to think about their peers opinions and their peers evaluations, and to be included by their peer group, and to work out what the social norms are. These are sort of developmental needs that we need to go through in order to become an independent adult. And that's because if you think about adolescence, the period of adolescence, that the whole point of it is to become independent from your families and your parents and to become affiliated with a peer group and to learn about social hierarchies and to make your own social connections.

And that's what adolescents, most of them spend a lot of time doing. Now, if you think about social media, that provides them with a very easy way of doing all those, trying out all those different social needs, like making new social connections and affiliating with peers, figuring out social norms, and also developing their sense of self identity. So I think it's not really surprising that adolescents are very drawn to social media. They're the biggest users of social media and digital digital devices as an age group.

But the very same social needs that draw them to social media also make them vulnerable to the potential harms of social media through things like being excluded online by peer groups, being bullied. Unrealistic body norms and that kind of thing.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Uh, thank you for that. So, um, as my colleagues have said, uh, there isn't a lot of direct evidence that would involve brain scanning and where we could track changes in the brain structure and function. Uh, but there is some evidence, um, that evaluated, let's say, impact of screen time on children's executive function. So this is linked to development of the prefrontal cortex, the executive network. I spoke about. And there is evidence suggesting that, uh, excessive screen time, uh, is associated with lower executive function and also less social competency.

So, so there is some evidence of that. And perhaps the strongest evidence that I have at least found was actually an intervention study. So this was a study in Denmark. And as part of a randomised controlled trial, um they over two weeks reduced family, uh, screen time. So children, uh, were kind of the time they spent over a week on, on screens was, uh, was reduced to less than three hours. And as part of that trial, they found that this reduction in screen time resulted in lowering of emotional difficulties in children after two weeks.

So, uh, quite quickly. So that is the strongest evidence I know of that this kind of causal, uh, in, in a sense that implies that excessive screen time might be, uh, problematic. And I would like to come back to something that Sarah Jane said. So, um, as she said, it is not necessarily always about, um, whether the device is as such, um, cause harm, but what children would have been doing instead. Right. And this is particularly important in childhood because of this fast neurodevelopment, neuroplasticity establishing of the brain networks I've talked about, because these shaped the lifelong trajectories of mental health, well-being, cognitive performance, and so on.

So what would children do if they were not on their devices is that they would interact with others. Uh, they would play, uh, they would have multi-sensory input that digital devices can provide, uh, all the range of, let's say, think of touch, smell, and integration with the other, uh, sensory modalities. Um, and also, um, they would not be able to, um, to basically receive immediate feedback. So how do they learn?How do they develop self-regulation through turn taking, let's say in a conversation when they know when it is the time for them to speak, when it is time for them to listen and sustaining their attention on listening, uh, they also learned through play, pretend play planning, right?Pretending to play to, to, to be someone and then planning steps in in different activities.

They learn through playing team games in sports. So, uh, the bigger worry actually is that this, uh, excessive screen time may prevent them from engaging in these activities that are instrumental for healthy development of the networks that I have mentioned, and the type of activity also matters. So there is some research showing that even with excessive screen time, if the screen time is filled with educational content, then it has much less of a negative impact on children's mental health and well-being, on their emotion regulation, uh, than, um, than if they basically, uh, are exposed to poor content.

So the type of content and the type of activity matters too. And of course, whether it's active or passive. So, um, my colleague, uh, talked about it a bit already. So we know that video games, they tend to have um, effects on improvement of visual spatial skills, even though it's a question whether these skills actually transfer into everyday life, whether they are just specific to playing a video game. So, so that kind of should be kept in mind, uh, when interpreting those results.

So in comparison scrolling, uh, on, on social media or children being on YouTube, uh, provides them with brief bursts of stimulus that they can't put together in a meaningful way. Compare that to watching a TV where there is a story unfolding. So that's also passive, but they can follow a character, they can follow their reasoning, they can think through their journey. Right?So that sustains children's attention, their executive, uh, network and their salience network in a more meaningful and less overstimulating way than, let's say.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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It is it is a quick one. It's almost a repeat of of what I've asked earlier. To be truthful, I'm just reading here that there's this fast moving, attention seeking, um, type of, of content that we have. Um, it's the sort of thing when you've got a toddler in full, full tantrum mode. So again, the 3 to 5 range, when emotional regulation starts to really start to fine tune, um, and you get them out of that, you see To really start to fine tune.

Um, and you get them out of that. You see parents giving the phone to, to, you know, it distracts them, it calms them down. It's this fast moving. Um, and, but that also creates a fight or flight response because they're looking at the way that it, it, it activates the sympathetic nervous system. So when you take the phone away, they are now in this heightened of, of agitation because, you know, they're in this, this fight or flight response and this creates this real sort of, you know, negative feedback loop, doesn't it, of, of, of wanting it.

So going back to what I've said to you before, if self-regulation is a key predictor of future outcomes, and if, if parents are using these tools and I, I take don't criticize parents, but, you know, to put the phone in front of them, to keep them quiet while they're in the pub or doing something quiet or in a meeting or something like that. We're creating this, this, this, you know, situation of this, this negative feedback loop where the child is not developing that self-regulation. And I was getting a heightened sense of agitation.

So my quick question is, if we were to give out guidance to parents or guidance to content developers, you know, to say this is going to be the practicality of it, but this is the potential impact. I hear that there's no no studies on this. What would your simple answer be as to what guidance we could give?
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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So, um, I know this is a recurring mantra that there's very little information, but we know how important, certainly imagination and, uh. Curiosity. I would use the word curiosity rather than boredom. I think the reverse side of that is that we have intrinsic. So there's quite a lot of neuroscience evidence suggesting that seeking out of new information, new experiences is intrinsically rewarding. It releases dopamine, that magic word, which is part of how the brain works. Um, so, you know.

Boredom is a state of reduced, uh, information. Seeking identification. So you get reduced dopamine reward. And so the brain, the body wants to increase that pleasure. And the way to do that is to seek out new information, curiosity, explore new experiences and so forth. So that's critical. It's part of the way we discover new parts of the world. Um, so in the learning, uh, literature, there's this distinction between what they call exploits and explore.

So if you have a bit of knowledge, you know, um, that I'll generally find trees. Um, sorry, I'll generally find apple trees in Mrs. Smith's garden and I like apples. Should I always go to Mrs. Smith. So exploit my knowledge or should I explore more widely because there might be someone who has much better apple trees down the road and so forth. So part of the one of the things that the brain is constantly doing is, is kind of balancing the need to exploit what we already know and versus explore in the hopes of discovering something even better.

And part of training that exploration thing is during those boredom, boredom periods, it kind of lets the child or the individual, um. Figure out how to gather new information. So how to satisfy their curiosity. Um, so I think if that's completely lost, it's not good for development, but you can have curiosity within a digital medium as well. So it is not the essence of digital media that they're going to numb you. It's how they're used and what content they.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Or they.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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Both relevant.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Thank you for that. So so I agree with my colleague, um, in saying that, um, quality absolutely matters and often what children, uh, see particularly online is poor quality content. So we know that educational content can have protective effects even if actually their exposure to digital media is excessive. So having, uh, having exposure to, high quality educational content is the key. So I like to think about this question actually in, in three ways. So the first one is the amount, and we've established that excessive amount.

If it is regular, it is not, uh, good for children. If it's occasional, it is okay. Uh, when it comes to the content, I think we, we are quite on a solid ground saying that the type of content matters. So flashy, addictive content that is not necessarily age appropriate, um, is likely detrimental. Whereas educational content is likely to have some positive effects, uh, or neutral effects. And then the third thing is the active versus passive engagement. So the mode of engagement.

So, and there is some evidence that we've mentioned that if children are more active, if they are interactive. So let's say, uh, I remember evidence from one study that showed that, for example, messaging, uh, was supportive of mental health and well-being, whereas being on social media was not. Uh, so the type of engagement, whether it's active and or passive also matters. So I think those are the three things we need to keep in mind. Uh, in primary school age and probably across ages.

Yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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So when I say active, I mean, there is, uh, we know that use of apps for educational purposes. Children are growing up with that now. And we know that those apps can have positive impact on their academic performance. They're engaging, they support their learning. So that's an example of active use and active engagement with digital devices that that is helpful. Uh, when it comes to social media, again, you're right. I do mean active versus passive, whether they are automatically fed content versus whether they are choosing and deciding.

And I can come back to some of the neuroscience evidence and maybe extrapolate a bit based on what we know from studies, mostly with adults. So if you remember I talked about the three networks, the salience executive and the default mode network, and what happens when children scroll or we know adults and likely children too, when they scroll automatically, we establish that their reward network becomes overactivated, but also the default mode network. So they are more in this kind of, um, uh, daydream, distracted state of mind.

Um, and what is needed is for them developmentally to be able to establish a balance across these three networks. So actively choosing what they are engaging with actually activates the executive network and salience network signals when that switch should happen. And this is the key for them to actually being able to regulate their emotions and their behavior later on. Because if they are running on that autopilot of just being fed information without actively choosing, then it is kind of, um, creating or introducing an imbalance in activity across these three networks.

And we know from studies that particularly, uh, diminished activity or, or not sufficient separation across these networks, um, predicts mental health problems later on.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Well.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Okay, so, so some, you know, young people use, uh, digital devices to learn new information. There's a massive wealth of knowledge out there. I feel like it would be. Uh, arguably not fair on them to just completely cut them off from all that information that we have online that that's accessible to them, particularly possibly, um, young people from certain backgrounds, like more deprived backgrounds, but on the other hand, there is content that is that is clearly harmful, like violent content or content about eating disorders or content about self-harm or suicide or pornography.

I mean, you know, that is, I don't know many people who would argue that that's not harmful, at least to some children. Um, so, so. That's a quantity and quality content. Yes, yes. Quantity and quality. Both, both matter. Um, the passive active distinction I think is really interesting. It's not something that I know a lot about. So I don't really want to add much to what Darshana has said, but what I would say is that in the context of learning.

So one of my colleagues in my lab, Sarah Davis, works on, um, learning with others compared to learning from books or screens. So, so learning with others means, you know, you're teaching me some information and there's synchronous and collaborative feedback. And that kind of learning is more efficient at all ages, actually, from very, very early on in babies, uh, right. Throughout childhood, adolescence, and even in adulthood than learning passively from a screen or a book. I mean, it's not surprising. We've evolved.

We're very social. We've evolved to learn from other people. And it requires that synchronous live interaction. And one thing we don't know about, actually, you mentioned AI. And I think that's really interesting because we don't know how whether AI can replace humans in terms of that, uh, superiority for teaching other people. We just don't know. And it might, it might very well be possible.
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None Portrait Speaker 10
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It's it's, um, this whole conversation is fascinating and terrifying. I think I probably come from a similar generation of, as Professor Marshall and I too was left underneath the apple tree in the pram for hours on end in the garden, which was supposed to be good for you. Perhaps that's why I hate apples. Um. What's coming through quite strongly to me is that we have very different parts of this world, and I think we often make a mistake of lumping everything together.

I think I've heard that sometimes digital devices can be good. Sometimes they can be excessively used and bad, but then it depends more about what is not. The fact that a digital device. When I was young, I was told watching too much television would rot my brain. Exactly the same arguments then. Absolutely. But sometimes they are useful. Sometimes they're not so useful. Social networks clearly have more value, perhaps, than less.

The thing that seems to be keeping on coming back up is this maximized digital content craving for attention, perhaps driven by an advertising model. Active and passive content. But the other things I keep on hearing is we have no evidence for that. The other things I keep on hearing is this may be a causality, it may be correlation. We hear that there is limited evidence in many of these areas. So how do we start to interpret these links when there is this confusion about what we are talking about and whether it is doing things to the brain or we're correlating activities?Um, I don't know who'd like to start that.

Um, a, perhaps a professor Dorji you'd like to, uh, like to. PIN with that one.
11:01
None Portrait Speaker 3
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Thank you for the question. So, um, I know we as scientists are naturally very careful in, in saying what we know, what we don't know, what the nature of the evidence is. Now compare that to the approach of the companies that are making money on digital devices. Uh, they don't worry or care about any of that. Uh, so I would have the tendency here to apply a little bit of a pragmatic approach and try to think about or grasp onto. If we can't say for sure, at least what is most likely and build on that evidence.

So be careful not to infer something, but also not to be stuck in this kind of limbo with regards to what we just don't know. So we can't do anything. So there are things that we do know and that we can do. I think there was a consensus across all three of us that consistent, excessive, um, time spent on social media at minimum, makes children and adolescents miss out on real world interactions that they need from the perspective of neurodevelopment and healthy development of neuroplasticity and brain networks.

So we know that. The second thing is that I think we have pretty much established that sometimes some types of content are more harmful than others. And I think we should, um, put into, into place some sort of guardrails, uh, or, or try to regulate or label different types of content. So we will get to the recommendations. I can speak about that more. And then, you know, actually hearing helpful to think about something you mentioned. So 20, 30 years ago, we had somewhat similar debates about regulating, um, regulating exposure to TV or regulating, um, videotapes when they came out.

Right. So learning from history of, of what we have done back then, how we establish standards of the content and so on might be helpful in this regard. That's what some of my colleagues in the education sector have been highlighting. And finally, we do know that active use is better than passive use as well. So it depends on the passive use. So we're talking about watching a movie and all that. Uh, but so what I'm trying to say, yes, there is limited evidence.

Yes. We don't know so much. And we need to invest in research to know more. But there are some of these, uh, basic things that, that I think we can think about and we can start thinking about a possible implications for regulation of, of, of the companies, uh, possible things about guidance for parents and actually some things that we can do in education, uh, that I may get to at the end because we know that children who have higher self-regulation to start with, they're actually less likely to be negatively impacted by digital devices.

So my argument would be for strengthening, uh, developmentally children's self-regulation through school curricula. So that will be another thing to talk about.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Well, I'm always going to be on the side of saying we need evidence. On the other hand, the kinds of content we were just talking about earlier, the kinds of content that we we clearly know that are not good for children, like, uh, seeing violence or pornography or, or self-harm. Do we really need evidence that that's bad for children's developing minds and brains?I'm not sure. I think there we need to act very urgently on in terms of more regulation of social media companies, uh, in terms of content, in terms of other things, like you mentioned earlier, what age, if we, if we, if there, if there are any kind of regulations imposed that are age limited, what age do we impose them at that?I think we really don't know from an evidence point of view.

And there we can contribute information about brain development and the development of cognitive and social processing. But we can't tell you the precise age that will be true for all children at at that point, they will be able to cope with the digital world so that that requires other kinds of, uh, sources of information to, to be able to pinpoint that age. I also think we can think about there's a lot we don't know, but there's also quite a lot we do know. And the huge focus we have on social media and digital environments, environments sometimes I think draws us away from areas where we really do have a lot of information about how they are risk factors or, um, or protective factors for development of cognition and the brain and mental health in adolescence, for example.

And the digital environment, of course, is always relevant. But for example, we do have quite a lot of data on the importance of sleep for development and mental health. And we know, for example, that lots of young people use their phones late into the night and sleep deprived as a consequence. That is some that's an area that we could probably act on because there's so much data on the importance of sleep. Another area is, um, the, the negative or potentially harmful effects of things like loneliness and the benefits of other things like exercise and having access to green space in, in, during adolescence, I'm focusing on adolescence is probably true at other ages too.

And that makes me think is that it's not directly related to social media, but we need to provide alternatives to social media for young people. What do you mean?Why do young people turn to social media?For all the reasons I said earlier, but also what else?What else do they do?There are very few places where they can go and hang out with each other. Um, there's a lot of people live in urban environments with very little access to green space.

The reduction in sports and exercise provision for young people. I feel like we don't only need to focus on the harms of social media, but we also need to focus on the benefits of other things and provide them with that.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Right. So, um, coming back to the brain networks, um, I would like to highlight that let's say children with the add with ADHD have due to neurodevelopmental reasons, uh, and imbalance, uh, in, um, in these three networks that I have mentioned to start with. So these networks separate later, they need to class, they tend to cluster together. So they have pre-existing vulnerability that makes them more susceptible to the negative impacts of digital media engagement that we have mentioned. And that's what the research shows as well, that they are more likely to engage in problematic use of digital media, that they are more likely to have negative effects from, uh, higher exposure to digital media and even from video games.

Actually, they are more likely to, uh, to kind of, uh, go into problematic use of video games because of these pre-existing vulnerabilities. So it should be super careful, particularly when interpreting and considering the evidence for them. And something similar holds for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, but for different reasons. So, uh, poverty is one of the main stressors. And I have spoken about the stress response and how it links to the executive control, but there is research showing that actually stress hormones are neurotoxic.

And they particularly impact areas in the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus that we have spoken about. So areas in the brain that are involved in self-regulation, in emotion regulation and increased stress response also negatively impacts sleep. So children coming from low socioeconomic status, again have a pre-existing vulnerability in the system in these systems that impacts on, um, development of these networks that we have talking about, we have been talking about. And that's why, again, there is some research evidence suggesting that excessive, let's say, amount of time spent on digital media, uh, for children from high socioeconomic status versus children from lower socioeconomic status has different effects and it affects children from lower socioeconomic status more.

And more negatively.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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These are my views, and they're not the views of the universities or the academies or societies I'm associated with. But in my view, we have enough evidence that some content is harmful to young people, and we need to protect young children and young people from harmful content. The question is, how do we do that now?How a social media ban sounds really simple and I hear it all the time. And of course, it's being carried out in Australia and many other countries are considering it, but it's actually not simple for young people.

And that's because if I can just summarize it in one sentence, that's because if young people's friends are online, they're going to be online. For the reasons I talked about earlier. They're very driven to be connected with friends and included in their social groups. They don't want to be the only one, not online. That's what we're seeing in Australia that the adherence to the ban is very, very low. It's about a third. So so two thirds of children under the age of 16 are still online.

It's very easy to kind of game the system by using VPNs and making up false birth dates and other other ways. And if there's a study I read this week, uh, on a small group, but it makes sense in terms of what we know about the social needs and social norms in adolescence showing that, um, they. They asked children under the age of 16 in Australia, why aren't you adhering?And they said, because all my friends are online, so why would I go offline?And then they asked, okay, how, what percentage of your peers would need to adhere to the ban, comply to the ban and go offline for you to go offline?And they said about two thirds.

So we have this problem where until at least two thirds of young people are offline, then none of them are going to be. It's a kind of tipping point problem. And that brings me to the idea of social norms in adolescence being really important. I think the only way we can sit around here as adults saying bans should be imposed on children, but that's not going to work if they don't. If they're not motivated to, to comply with the ban, the only thing that or the main thing that will motivate them is the changing the social norms of their age group.

And they have the power to do that themselves. An example, I don't like the analogy with smoking. I think it's really problematic. And this is not an analogy with smoking. I'm using smoking as an example of where social norms have changed over the last 30 years. 30 years ago it was very, very fashionable and very common for teenagers to smoke as a teenager 30 years ago, I remember it was very normalised. Now it's not. It's smoking rates have come right down in teenagers, both in this country, but particularly in places like particularly places like California.

Almost no teenagers smoke cigarettes now. And that's because of a change in social norms. So it is possible.
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09:24
None Portrait Speaker 9
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Oh, great.
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09:25
None Portrait Speaker 3
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So I have recommendations in three areas. So the first one is about regulation of, uh digital content and social media companies. So we haven't spoken about this much, but I think it would be very helpful if across platforms, there was a requirement to clearly label AI generated content. And perhaps also the possibility of opting out of AI generated content. So we haven't spoken about blurring the the kind borders between reality and what is not real. And I think that can have impact on children and adolescents as well.

Um, I would also recommend that, um, social media companies introduce into their algorithms compulsory breaks. So if someone has been scrolling, let's say for, uh, for 10 minutes or 7 minutes, there should be an automatic kind of break that asks them about the content. They want to see. That would kind of shift the activity towards the executive network. And what we have been talking about, uh, in terms of better executive control. And I would also suggest that social media companies are required to introduce into their algorithms digital literacy content, engaging digital literacy content.

That again, is shown to, uh, to users who are auto scrolling at regular intervals. Um, I agree with my colleagues with regards to the need of, um, having a solid parent oriented app with recommendations for parents that are age specific with regards to the things we have been talking about, uh, concerning the amount of time on digital media type of content and passive versus active engagement with actionable recommendations. So where to go to change the settings, how to interact and talk to children about social media and so on.

And finally, my last recommendation is to strengthen, uh, basically mental health and wellbeing curricula in schools so that we increase children's capacities as protective factors, particularly the self-regulation capacity in this digital age. I think our minds have to evolve with, with some of these challenges too. So, um, that's my final, very good recommendation.
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This debate has concluded
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