Are We On The Verge Of The Dumbest Generation?

[Longstreet]

I read this today and it had some interesting insite to the cost of allowing children to be so 'tech' savy. Yeah they can multitask like never before, but at what cost? Have a read and see what you think.

Macleans Magazine November 7, 2008

Dumbed Down
The troubling science of how technology is rewiring kids’ brains

For almost three decades, the Arrowsmith School, a small Toronto private school housed in a converted mansion on the edge of Forest Hill, has been treating kids with learning disabilities. When its founder, Barbara Arrowsmith Young, developed the school’s patented program in the late ’70s, it was with a first-hand knowledge of the frustration and stigma of living with cognitive deficits. Growing up, Young struggled with dyslexia. She had difficulties with problem-solving and visual and auditory memory. Finding connections between things and ideas was a challenge, and telling time was impossible—she couldn’t grasp the relationship between the big hand and the little hand. Traditional learning programs taught her tricks to compensate for her deficits, but they never improved her ability to think. “I walked around in a fog,” she says. But as a young psychology graduate, Young came across the brain maps created by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who studied soldiers who had suffered head wounds. Using these maps, she identified 19 unique learning dysfunctions and the brain regions that control them. Her theory was that a person can transform weak areas of the brain through repetitive and targeted cognitive exercises, and she was right. Today, this notion of brain plasticity—which she intuited three decades ago—is established wisdom in neuroscience.

Over the past decade, the Arrowsmith program has been proven so effective that schools throughout Canada and the U.S. have adopted it. In 2003, a report commissioned by the Toronto Catholic District School Board found that students’ rate of learning on specific tasks like math and reading comprehension increased by 1½ to three times.

These days, though, Young has noticed a new development: increasingly, she’s seeing a great many young people having difficulties with executive function, which involves thinking, problem-solving and task completion. “It looks like an attention deficit disorder,” she says. “The person has a job or a task and they start doing it but they can’t stay oriented to it. They get distracted and they can’t get reoriented. When I started using the programs, I really didn’t see a lot of this. I would say now, 50 per cent of students walking through the door have difficulty in that area.” The second thing she’s noticing is more frequent trouble with non-verbal thinking skills. These kids struggle to read facial expressions and body language—which can make dating and friendships, and indeed, most social situations, tricky.

Both of these skill sets relate to areas of the prefrontal cortex, or what Young calls “mental initiative.” It’s the area of the brain that drives us to go out and investigate the world, she says. When a person has deficits there, it’s hard to participate in the world. When they try, a wall comes up.

Young’s students face more extreme problems than the average teen, but her observations mirror what neurologists and educators are seeing in the general youth population—those in their 20s and younger, often called Digital Natives. The first to be born into and come of age in the digital age, they use their brains differently than any generation in history. At any given moment—or so the cliché goes—they’re wielding an iPod and a cellphone; they’re IMing a friend, downloading a Rihanna video from iTunes, and playing Resident Evil 4 with their thoughts. And that cartoonish caricature isn’t that far off: a study from the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people absorb an average of 8½ hours of digital and video sensory stimulation a day. By the age of 20, the average teen has probably spent more than 20,000 hours on the Web, and over 10,000 playing video games, according to Toronto-based business strategist Don Tapscott’s new book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World.

The average youth brain is accustomed to a continuous bombardment of information bites. And in the process of navigating so much frenetic brain activity, kids are rewiring their brains, customizing them for speed and multi-tasking. But in reinforcing the neural pathways for these skills, some neuroscientists suspect they’ve been suppressing others—creating the very kinds of problems, albeit in a subtler form, teachers are seeing at the Arrowsmith School.

Every new technology—from books to television—has brought with it fears of a resulting mind-melt. The difference, in the case of digital technologies, says Dr. Gary Small, a renowned neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the unprecedented pace and rate of change. It is creating what he calls a “brain gap” between young and old, forged in a single generation. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool,” Small writes in his new book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, “has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically.”

Earlier this year, Small and his colleagues devised an experiment to determine what the adult brain looks like on Google. Using fMRI imaging, they studied the brains of two types of computer users —“savvy” ones who’ve spent lots of time online, and “naive” ones who’ve spent virtually none—as they conducted simple Web searches. Among the savvy users, they observed plenty of activity in the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, a region associated with decision-making, integrating complex information and short-term memory. In the naive users this area of the brain was quiet. For five days, one hour a day, both groups repeated the simple exercise. On day five, the savvy group’s brain looked more or less the same. But in the naive group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts.

“Five hours on the Internet, and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small marvels. The experiment serves to highlight how quickly the brain can be trained. But while Digital Immigrants—those over 30, who came to the Web with brains fully formed—can acquire attributes of the New Brain, becoming quite proficient, the impact is limited because their early wiring was different.

Teenagers’ brains are much more vulnerable. There’s a reason we don’t let 14-year-olds vote or drive or drink vodka, and it goes beyond their apparent physical or emotional maturity. “Normal” adolescent cognitive development follows a certain arc. During the teen years, empathy skills (the amygdala region in the temporal lobe) and complex reasoning skills (the frontal lobe) are not yet fully developed. This is why, physiologically anyway, teens are predisposed to being self-centred, seeking instant gratification and not being able to always put themselves in others’ shoes—an attribute they develop over time, through social contact.

But brain scientists are speculating that too much technology may get in the way of normal frontal lobe development and stunt this maturation process—ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode. A controversial 2002 study out of Tokyo’s Nihon University found that the more time teens spend playing video games, the more they suppress key areas of the frontal lobe associated with learning, memory, emotion and impulse control. The study’s author, Dr. Akio Mori, a cranial nerve specialist, says chronic players—identified as those who play two to seven hours a day—can sometimes develop what he calls “video game brain,” a condition that essentially turns off the frontal lobes, even when kids aren’t gaming. In other words, because their brains are still maturing, an excessive amount of stimulation in one area can literally leave them lopsided.

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[Longstreet]

And so the so-called brain gap is not just about intergenerational name-calling (although there is some of that going on, too). Instead, it’s about what the human brain of the future will look like—and whether or not we’re making good cognitive trades. “Are we developing a generation with underdeveloped frontal lobes—unable to learn, remember, feel, control impulses,” asks Small, “or will they develop new advanced skills that poise them for extraordinary experiences?”

In Grown Up Digital, one of several new books that explore this question, Tapscott takes the optimistic view. He sees young people using technology to develop ingenious and hyper-efficient new ways of finding, synthesizing and communicating information. New technologies present Digital Natives with “a giant opportunity,” Tapscott writes, “an opportunity to fulfill their intellectual potential and be the smartest generation ever.”

And if we understand intelligence as the ability to react quickly to visual stimuli, sift through large amounts of information, and decide, quickly, what’s useful and what isn’t, then he’s right; Digital Natives are miles ahead. Studies have shown that regular use of the Internet, video games and other digital technologies can even improve these cognitive abilities in adults. Groups from the military to laproscopic surgeons have turned to video game training to improve their peripheral vision and reaction time, and reduce error. Some brain scientists believe technological facility has contributed to the Flynn effect—the phenomenon that has seen young people’s IQ test scores climb steadily every decade since the Second World War.

But the important question we have to ask ourselves, according to Dr. Michael Merzenich, an international expert in brain plasticity and co-founder of San Francisco-based brain fitness company Posit Science, is this: if I’m spending lots of time doing these sorts of online activities, what am I not doing? Am I not reading a book (engaging the hippocampus, involved in learning and remembering)? Am I having fewer face-to-face interactions (engaging the area linked to empathy skills, the amygdala region)? “What are the cognitive tasks we’re ignoring?” he asks. “And what are the consequences of not doing those things?”

As techno-skeptics are quick to point out, among the great paradoxes of modern life is that people have more information at their fingertips than at any other time in history, and yet we’ve never known less. Examples of just how little the average person knows abound. Last year, Ipsos Reid and the Dominion Institute conducted a survey comparing what Canadians know now to what we knew in 1997. The results were dismal: 10 years ago, 72 per cent of us could name all four political parties then represented in Parliament. Last year, only 38 per cent could.

In The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein has compiled a host of such studies and reports to build his case that “kids today” are the dumbest ones ever despite a wealth of external resources. Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, says that compared to previous generations of students, “they don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvass a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said that they compose better paragraphs.”

Does this matter? Or is it Old Brain thinking? In Grown Up Digital, Tapscott writes: “It’s not what you know that counts anymore; it’s what you can learn.” Until now, he says, “the educational model was to cram as much knowledge into your head as possible to build up your inventory of knowledge before you entered the world of work where you could retrieve that information when needed.” Now, information becomes obsolete quickly—and because it’s always retrievable at the click of a mouse, a well-educated person is not necessarily one who stores great amounts of knowledge, but rather one who knows where to find what he needs when he needs it.

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[Longstreet]

The problem, Merzenich says, is that memory is a crucial part of learning. “It’s only when your memory is engaged in the learning process that your brain is really challenged,” he says. “It’s when I’m dealing with the details and really struggling with it that I learn it.” In other words, the more we depend on machines to do our thinking for us, the less we’re able to rely on our own mental resources. While we’ve always engaged in some forms of mental outsourcing—jotting down a grocery list so you don’t forget to buy milk, say—the extent to which we now depend on computers and other digital devices to find, store, analyze and communicate information for us is unprecedented.

The mental shortcuts the Web lets us take, in other words, aren’t always a good thing. A study of how we read online, conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm headquartered in California, found that only 16 per cent of subjects read text linearly online, word by word, sentence by sentence. Tracking their eye movement, Neilson found that users scan pages quickly, jump around, fixate on key words and phrases that interest them, and pass over the rest. In this sense, the Web promotes cut-and-paste learning. “It allows us on some level to be intellectually lazy,” Young says, “because that’s what’s out there on the Internet—other people’s information, pre-thought, pre-digested.”

All of this is why Bauerlein insists his English classes memorize poems. “The students groan,” he says, “but acquiring information means you store it in your mind. You think it through and you remember it. That’s a slow reading pattern, a slow analysis process.”

It’s a very different process from the one involved in mental multi-tasking—having five applications open on your computer, with a cellphone standing by. By necessity, our attention in this mode is shallow and diffuse. Small and others call it “continuous partial attention,” and it turns out to have costs of its own. “When paying partial continuous attention, people may place their brains in a heightened state of stress,” Small says. “They no longer have time to reflect, contemplate or make thoughtful decisions. They exist in a sense of constant crisis—on alert for a new contact or bit of exciting news or information at any moment.”

The brain isn’t built for this sort of protracted strain and eventually, over the course of hours, a condition sets in which Small calls “brain fog.” “Over time,” he says, “[it can] actually impair cognition, lead to depression, and alter the neural circuitry in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex—regions in the brain that control mood and thought. Chronic and prolonged techno-brain burnout, which we are all good candidates for, can even reshape the underlying brain structure.” Without the continual mental rewards that accompany interactivity, it becomes hard to hold the attention of someone with perpetual, low-grade brain strain.

Not surprisingly, one-third of Digital Natives, according to Small, use other media—particularly the Internet—to stave off boredom while they’re watching TV. Reading a book is even harder. “Why spend time staring at a dull and stagnant string of words,” he writes, “when they could be entertained and informed with fast-paced visual and auditory computer images instead?” In fact, Bauerlein believes it’s partly students’ discomfort with single-focus learning that’s created a generation of bibliophobes. In 2004, as director of research and analysis with the National Endowment of the Arts, he was involved in the report that found that leisure reading across all age groups had dropped significantly over 20 years in the U.S.; the biggest drop was among young people ages 18 to 24. In 2002, only 43 per cent voluntarily read anything outside of school, down from 60 per cent in 1982.

“They are entirely averse to books,” he says. “The percentage of them that read more than four books in a year on their own time—and this includes Harry Potter, romance novels, sports books, anything—it’s only 25 per cent. And 25 per cent of them don’t read any books. And these are the best kids, not the ones who don’t go to college or who drop out.”

Of course, this implies that previous generations were reading Dostoevsky in their free time and not watching Happy Days. But the point is not that Digital Immigrants necessarily read more Dostoevsky, it may be that more of them had the mental capacity to get through it if they so chose. Reading is something you need to practise doing, and Bauerlein says Digital Natives simply don’t get enough practise slogging their way through difficult texts, particularly as more technology is integrated into classroom learning. “It’s a big modern problem,” says Merzenich. “Getting through an actual book requires a certain level of persistence. It’s a long-term attention to something in which the rewards are maybe not coming every two seconds.”

This is true of writing, too. James Côté, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, argues that the university essay is barely worth assigning anymore—even though the investigative skills and in-depth critical thinking skills it teaches are as relevant as ever. Students just can’t do it, he says—their language skills are depleted, they are indiscriminate with source information, they have a hard time focusing on things for too long, and they don’t particularly care to improve. As a teacher, it’s demoralizing. “In the old technique of assigning the essay, the student would pick the topic, they would go to the library to research it to determine if it’s a topic you can actually write something about,” he says. “Now most students can’t pick a topic. If you tell them what to do—okay, here’s a selection of three topics, pick one—they can do it, but on their own, most cannot come up with a topic that they can write meaningfully about.”

Technophiles say what we’re losing in memory we’re gaining in productivity. Every time we don’t have to memorize a phone number or take a trip to the library to research, we’re freeing up our brains for other tasks. But what other tasks? And are we even doing them? Studies tell us multi-tasking itself is a myth. We expend valuable time and energy transitioning from one interface to another. A recent study of Microsoft employees found that each time they responded to an email or instant message, it took them 15 minutes to return to the work they were doing.

All of the things that technology was supposed to make us better at—communicating, understanding, doing many things at once—we’re doing worse. Even though Google will always be there to provide us with answers in a pinch, Merzenich says, “I still have to believe that the invention, the creativity, these fabulous human assets, are absolutely dependent upon having rich resources and content in our very own brains.” The alternative would be to argue that we don’t need to be intelligent anymore because we’ve got machines. “Is that what we want?” he asks. “Is our goal to create a brainless society?”

[Richard]

"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation."
- Pearl S. Buck

And so it goes.

Richard's $.02

[modgod]

Originally Posted by Richard

"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation."
- Pearl S. Buck

And so it goes.

Richard's $.02

"Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds." Pearl S. Buck

[Ret10Echo]

I'm sure those who stood by and watched the first person hunt with a bow-and-arrow thought they were going soft.

We do joke around at home about the idea that we would also be doing advanced math in High School if we could use a programmable, graphing calculator to take tests.

I don't think this is specific to the younger kids. Try holding the attention of a 50-year-old whose Blackberry starts to vibrate.....

[Go Devil]

I believe there is a direct link between Short Attention Span/ADD and Sesame Street.

The amount of research and money poured into the development of the show is staggering.
The progress of the program is based on a child brain functions and tailored to shift with their Short Attention Spans.

Granted, knowledge is instilled, but by taking advantage of quickly shifting brain functions; a development of focus is never achieved.
Essentially the Short Attention Span is cajoled and the ability for long mental processes is shoved aside.

These early studies have progressed and are used to develop adult television as well.

No, I'm not wearing my tinfoil hat.

[Dozer523]

My darling daughter is a Sophmore in High School. She is taking Algebra II and Chemestry. I didn't take those until my Senior year.
She took Algebra I in 8th grade (me -- Sophmore).
She took Geometry as a Freshman (me -- Junior).
Junior Year she is scheduled for Calculus and Physics (I took neither -- In "College Prep Track". God help me! I'm trying to learn them now on-line) .
I teased her that in her Senior year she'll have to choose betwen String Theory and Chaos Theory . She knew what both of them were.
No this is NOT the dumbest generation. And they are movin' FAST!

[Richard]

Originally Posted by Dozer523

No this is NOT the dumbest generation. And they are movin' FAST!

Based on my personal experiences, I agree with Dozer here. Learning does come faster and often at earlier stages of life...which sometimes presents problems developmentally...but different doesn't necessarily mean wrong, bad, or destructive. I think the fact that they don't have to remember everything...but know where and how to retrieve it...yet must know how to learn is an important point to remember in a high-tech world. IMO, there's not too much difference between that and having to maintain all those TMs/FMs with pertinent sections you've tabbed for quick reference when you needed the info.

I've watched my own youngest son who is in college work on papers while back home. He usually lies or sits on the floor with his laptop so he can have more room to lay out all his high-lighted notes, reference books, etc. He will have the Word program open for the paper he's working on, several web browsers with info he's looking to include or for further research if he finds something he's failed to fully explore, and 2-5 IM windows where he's monitoring/corresponding with several friends/groups at the same time. He always asks me to read and proof his papers, and they are very well done and correctly cited.

He also draws and paints, spending hours with no e-stimuli when working on such a project, and is a voracious reader of classical literature and history. He also has an amazing memory...unlike his father.

I am a bit surprised that the MacLean's article failed to mention some of the corrective brain-functioning programs such as Rutger University's Fast-Forward program which uses specially developed software programs to stimulate specific brain language functioning processes and correct developmentally delayed language skills.

FWIW, I'm of the crowd which remains generally skeptical of both the "sky is falling" and the "panacea" approaches to life and the 'new'...especially from the academic, scientific, and political worlds. Guess I'm becoming a FOG after all.

Richard's $.02

[Slantwire]

Originally Posted by Dozer523

My darling daughter is a Sophmore in High School. She is taking Algebra II and Chemestry. I didn't take those until my Senior year.
She took Algebra I in 8th grade (me -- Sophmore).
She took Geometry as a Freshman (me -- Junior).
Junior Year she is scheduled for Calculus and Physics (I took neither -- In "College Prep Track". God help me! I'm trying to learn them now on-line) .
I teased her that in her Senior year she'll have to choose betwen String Theory and Chaos Theory . She knew what both of them were.
No this is NOT the dumbest generation. And they are movin' FAST!

There is a penalty in that, also. In the haste to move to more advanced topics, schools often compress the fundamentals. Foundation work is touched on, providing name recognition but not mastery.

Your daughter's schedule is pretty similar to what mine was, in the late 90s. I paid a price for it in college. I simply couldn't grasp linear algebra and vector calculus because I didn't truly understand basic calculus. I could "plug and chug" the standard derivative and integral forms, but that was about it. Signal processing was worse still. While in high school, I knew "what" chaos theory was, but I couldn't begin to articulate the "how" because I lacked the underlying knowledge of statistics.

I am currently finishing a semester of electromagnetic field theory. My professor frequently comments that it should be a two semester course: one to properly "get" the material and lay the groundwork for future classes, preceded by a semester reinforcing the basics that are glossed over in freshman calculus and physics.

I see that issue as a parallel to the original article's position. American students are developing their "pools of knowledge" to be miles wide and an inch deep.

[Sigaba]

The issue I have with the article provided by Longstreet is the editorial bias of the piece. The article privileges an interpretation of what it means to be educated that is situated in a set of cultural values. These values, as useful as many have proven to be, are constructs.

If we define intelligence as the ability to learn, if we define education as a domain of knowledge that allows people to make informed decisions, and if we define a meaningful life as a life in which a person develops a sense of self-efficacy, the question is not "Are today's youths learning what we think they should know?"

Instead, the question is "Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they want to live?"

The first question is about indoctrination. The second question is about education.

In my view, the two challenges are:

1. finding an appropriate balance where students accept the assumption that learning what we think they should know will prove at least as helpful to them as their learning what they want to know. And,
2. understanding that today's learning environment offers a slightly different set of opportunities and challenges than the learning environment we experienced (or even prefer).

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Instead, the question is "Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they want to live?"

Well put, but I take slight exception to your question.

Kids would "want" a diet of candy and to have no school, if they could have it. Similarly, most adults want complete and immediate fulfillment of every desire, with little or no effort expended in obtaining it.

Wants are not the same as needs.

Self-discipline is a part of life, despite our recent departure from the concept. Delayed gratification may be better than immediate gratification.

The real question is, ""Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they NEED to live?"

TR

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Well put, but I take slight exception to your question.

Kids would "want" a diet of candy and to have no school, if they could have it. Similarly, most adults want complete and immediate fulfillment of every desire, with little or no effort expended in obtaining it.

Wants are not the same as needs.

Self-discipline is a part of life, despite our recent departure from the concept. Delayed gratification may be better than immediate gratification.

The real question is, ""Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they NEED to live?"

TR

Sir--

I agree that the "want to know" issue is problematic. The first time I encountered the concept was in a graduate class at USC's School of Education. I found the implications troubling. What if a person wants to know things that are potentially self destructive? What if a student seeks knowledge that, when practiced, may be harmful to the broader interests of his or her community?

As the professor was a psychologist, he was ethically correct to respond repeatedly to my questions and scenarios (some of which were very provocative) that the objective remained individual self efficacy. If a domain of knowledge stopped working for a person, that person could decide to learn a new set of skills.

For me, the 'need to know' is a part of the acculturation/indoctrination process. In my view, an issue here is that within our lifetimes, the learning environment had a much higher degree of overlap between the 'need to know' and the 'want to know.' I believe that in this environment, there was an unarticulated understanding of the concept that anything worth having required hard work to earn.

I think we need a national conversation on how such an overlap could be re-established. To use the ugly parlance of the private sector, we need to re-establish stakeholder buy in.

[The Reaper]

Exactly.

When I was 13, I wanted chemistry books and classes, because unbeknownst to my parents, I wanted to make nitroglycerine in my bathroom lab.

While this might have fulfilled a personal WANT, it was hardly a need, and represented a significant hazard to myself and others.

TR

[Kyobanim]

When I was 13, I wanted chemistry books and classes, because unbeknownst to my parents, I wanted to make nitroglycerine in my bathroom lab.

Why doesn't this surprise me?