Children’s Screen Time and Brain White Matter: MRI Study

Can you see the screen alright?

This is five-year-old Rose

She was one of 60 kids to undergo an exhaustive study in the u.s.

Using an MRI machine to scan the brains of kids aged three to five years old the results

truly shocking

Interactive screen time causes a loss of white matter in the brain

Well in the simplest terms we could actually refer to as some measure of brain impairment or brain damage

Professor Mike Nagel from the University of the Sunshine Coast has spent a career

studying child brain development

So white matter in the brain is a material called myelin

So what myelin does is it wraps around the axons of neurons and acts like an insulator conductor?

Not too dissimilar to the plastic coating of a wire

So if we're seeing definites in myelin production early in life, we're probably seeing deficits in neural connectivity

The study shows the more screen time a child is exposed to the greater the loss of white matter

Can you remember your first reaction to those results not only as a professional in this field, but as a father?

My gut reaction was Wow. I

Was not anticipating seeing anything like that

It hadn't occurred to me at the time that something as little as and it said two hours a day

Was having such a profound effect on the white matter associated with sort of language development and by association literacy

It was a shock to be honest