Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill [HL]

Baroness Greenfield Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greenfield (CB)]

I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on introducing this timely and vital Bill. I declare an interest as CEO and founder of Neuro-Bio Ltd, a biotech company pioneering a novel approach to Alzheimer’s disease. However, having taught all aspects of neuroscience at Oxford for many years, I also have a keen interest in the impact of digital technologies on the young mind. My book in 2014, Mind Change, summarised what was known at that time of the unprecedented effects that digital technology could have on how young people think and feel.

There are only so many hours in the day and night, and it is not just the effects of not sleeping, not escaping the crowd and not having time to exercise that might be bad for young people hooked to their mobiles. The digital lifestyle can in and of itself prove deleterious. When you meet someone face to face, only 10% of the total impact is dependent on language. Most depends on tone, volume of voice, eye contact, body language and physical touch, none of which is available via social media. If you do not rehearse these skills, the brain will not be very good at them. Direct social interaction will be ever more aversive, resulting in ever greater preference for the screen as an intermediary and a decline in empathy, increasingly described as “virtual autism”.

Since I wrote Mind Change seven years ago, the situation has become ever more stark. For example, in 2018 a paper in Preventive Medicine Reports demonstrated a negative, and most importantly linear, association between screen time and a decline in psychological well-being: the longer a child spent in front of a screen, the worse the effect. The impact on schoolchildren is particularly worrying. Two seasoned teachers in Washington, Joe Clement and Matt Miles, set out in their 2018 book Screen Schooled the evidence and arguments that too much screen time has now resulted in lack of focus and critical thinking skills.

We are becoming all too familiar with the statistics and stories in the media on the burgeoning screen lifestyle. Particularly worrying, as recently reported to the US Senate by the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, is an addiction to video games and social media deliberately crafted to that end. Neuroscience can help give insights into how this digital environment impacts on the brain, and hence the mind, and how it can be addictive. We humans occupy more ecological niches than any other species on the planet because of the superlative ability of our brains, compared with those of other animals, to adapt to the environment.

Even if you are a clone, an identical twin with the same genes, the individual brain becomes personalised through the development of unique configurations of connections between brain cells. They, in turn, will characterise the growth of the brain after birth, curating it into a highly individual and unprecedented mind that is in constant dialogue with, and updated by, your daily experiences. Everything that happens to you and everything you do will in some way leave its mark on your brain.

Digital technology is offering an environment that is completely new to the human condition. Although the printing press, the car and the TV had profound influence on everyone’s lives, it was after all on our real lives. In the 20th century, people still dated, worked, played and shopped through face-to-face interactions with each other in a three-dimensional space enriched by all five senses. Now, for the first time, you can carry out all these activities via a screen, living effectively in a parallel universe: recreation via video games, friendship via social media and learning via search engines. These activities all could and should be subject to age assurance.

The brain of someone under 18 is not the same as that of an adult. Yes, brain cell connections are growing, atrophying and transforming every moment of our lives in response to experiences, but the older we are, the more these now accumulating unique pre-existing neuronal connections will be able to offer a sales resistance, a greater potential for evaluation, comparison, frames of reference and inner reflection. The effects of life in front of a screen, and perhaps even more so in Zuckerberg’s dream of the all-enveloping metaverse, might well endanger such thought processes in an adult, but such considerations are even more urgent for the welfare of the literally impressionable immature brain. The World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics have both categorised addictive internet gaming as a psychiatric disorder. Most recently, China has enforced limits for under-18s of a maximum of three hours a week—surely clear recognition of the power the screen can exert over the young mind.

The neuronal mechanism of addiction is an enhanced release of the chemical messenger dopamine, which underlies the anticipation of reward, raises arousal levels and indeed is the neurochemical hallmark of recreational drugs of addiction. Moreover, we know that dopamine inhibits a part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that is singularly dominant in humans. This region, just behind your forehead, becomes fully operational only in late teenage years and the early twenties. Until then, a characteristic profile of the hypofunctional prefrontal cortex is one of recklessness, short attention span and, most significantly, over- dependency on external stimulation. Therefore, a combination of such an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex and surges of inhibitory dopamine released during gaming or social media could result in the perfect storm—a mindset readily driven to have literally a sensational time.

Supporting this prediction, a study in 2011 in the high-impact journal Science showed that many of the participants, college students, rather than just being left alone to think, opted instead to give themselves electric shocks. How much more now, 10 years on, might such a mindset be prevailing?

The Bill does not seek to remedy the perils of digital culture in one fell swoop; that would be a complex, challenging and long journey. Rather, it is a simple first step to embark on that journey and to make it possible for future measures to minimise the threats and maximise the opportunities that the screen world poses. The rationale of the Bill is based on the undeniable fact that age is a key factor in how the brain will respond to, and be affected by, the immediate environment. As such, I urge the Government to assent to the Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron.