TikTok a 'candy store' for children's brains

The torrent of fast-paced social media is likely reducing children’s attentions spans, reports The Wall Street Journal.

New research from China suggests that the type of short, fast-paced videos that young people consume today is at least partly to blame for why they struggle to maintain attention in longer activities.

The paper studies the effect of Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, on the brain with neural imaging. MRI scans of participants showed that the reward center of participants brains was highly activated, so much so that some struggled to control when to stop watching.

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, impulse control and sustained attention.

“If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast,” said Dr. Michael Manos, the clinical director of the Center for Attention and Learning at Cleveland Clinic Children’s.

The neurotransmitter dopamine is released by the brain when it is expecting a reward, reinforcing cravings for anything enjoyable – food, a drug or a funny video.

Algorithms on video sites like TikTok and YouTube are designed to feed viewers more of what they watch most – find most interesting.

“TikTok is a dopamine machine,” said John Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

“If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention.”

Experts say that depriving kids of tech alone doesn’t work. It must be reduced while also building up other, non-digital activities.

“It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables,” said James Williams, a tech ethicist and author of “Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy.”

“We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”