Parenting in the Digital Age

Maybe the smart phone's hegemony makes perfect evolutionary sense: Humans are tapping a deep urge to seek out information. Our ancient food-foraging survival instinct has evolved into an info-foraging obsession; one that prompts many of us today to constantly check our phones and multitask.



Monkey see. Click. Swipe. Reward.

A new book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World explores the implications of, and brain science behind, this evolution (some might say devolution). It was written Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and research psychologist Larry D. Rosen.

Our friends at NPR's Shots blog recently spoke with one of the authors about distraction's impact on productivity. I wanted to talk with Dr. Gazzaley about what his research tells us about teaching, learning, studying and screen time in the age of digital distraction.



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You write about the positive impact that things like exercise have on alleviating the distracted mind, and not far behind are cognitive exercises, video-game training and meditation. What, if anything, can teachers do to enhance learning using some of those tools? Or are those really for parents and the students themselves to activate?

That's a great question. To first just pause on those approaches, many of these are ancient — like meditation, mindfulness practices. Exercise has been recognized for a long time in terms of its value on our health and now its value on our brains. What we present here is a picture where technology is not evil. It didn't create these problems or these challenges of interference. It has aggravated them. It doesn't necessarily have to be dismissed. As a matter of fact, that's impossible. We have to wrap our heads around how we can re-imagine technology as a positive force on our minds.

We are now exploring at UCSF, at our center, creating video games, which we know young people certainly enjoy playing, that are not just entertaining and engaging but take principles like meditation and exercise and music and bring them into a game environment to help improve these very fundamental abilities of the mind.

Let's end with strategies for parents to optimize performance given the distracted-mind reality. Tell us some tips. Model good behavior?

There needs to be some positive acceptance that young people are going to use this technology. I don't think that just denying it is reasonable. I also don't think an extended period of removing technology is likely to be helpful. I think that it is reasonable to take technology "time outs," to have environments and maybe even times where the family interacts with each other and not the outside world through texts. It's sort of a return to the dinner table as a place where you learn how to engage in face-to-face, meaningful contact. Put your tech aside. You can return to it afterwards.

And I think to lead by example is critical because we now know that parents are as guilty as their kids in pulling out a phone during a dinner conversation and texting. I think that that is really critical just to say it has to be balanced and we're going to practice how to balance it as a family.

Source: npr.org