You need to grow a brain

We’ve just had a half term and it was good.  The weather conspired to keep us indoors a fair bit, but we found things to do and as always with Florence, I had a good time, and so did she.  And we didn’t just sit around watching telly.  This is in part because I don’t let her; in fact I’m very restrictive on how much she gets to watch.  I have certain brain development issues, or I would have if I could make any damn sense out of the science.

Now, if you ignore Susan Greenfield, and every living being on the planet should, then it is not at all clear cut what effect, if any, exposure to all this technology has on young minds.  Unlike Greenfield, a number of proper scientists have published the results of studies about brain development in very young children and the impact of screen time.

The summary is that in early life a number of behavioural traits are established, and that expectations about stimulus are set.  If a toddler has lots of television and computer games, then this interaction sets a pattern of dependency, reinforced by the dopamine released by the colourful, fast moving, sound tracked, stimulation on the screen.  If a child can watch as much telly as they want, they will want more and more leading to damaged behaviour and poor concentration skills; the digital babysitter gives your child ADHD.

Only that doesn’t seem right, not completely.  It’s too simplistic, and even though I am not a behavioural neurologist, I know that is not how dopamine works in detail.  This relates to what I have said before about science been a framework of ideas that all interlock and interact.  Sometimes, I find that when research focuses on one aspect of one effect in one group, the results when considered in a wider context don’t ring true.  Dopamine has a range of functions in the brain, but its main one appears to be as a motivator, not as a reward in itself.  If you eat food, and it’s nice, then you release dopamine.  If you fall down the stairs and break your leg and it hurts, you release dopamine.  In the first instance it is to encourage you to eat, and not starve, in the second it is to be more careful in future.

Animals altered not to produce dopamine will starve to death in the presence of food, as they make no effort at all to obtain it.  We think of eating as the most basic and powerful of instincts, but instinct doesn’t exist; it’s just the name we give to chemical pathways that evolved so long ago everything has them.

Interestingly, if you receive a reward you expected then you get no dopamine.  Children like to watch the same thing over and over; they are famous for it.  All parents have a DVD they can cite as having seen a hundred times.  Once you have learnt all the songs in a Disney film and jump and sing to them all, you are not getting dopamine, you getting something else, they used to say serotonin, but that’s in doubt now too.

And indeed there are published studies which say screen time does not damage social skills and emotional development.  These studies still recommend restricting screen time, but only because they highlight it’s not the screen, it’s the lack of socialising that causes problems.  The screen is a symptom as much as the short attention or bad behaviour.

Florence is very social.  She loves to talk to anyone, and will play with any children she comes across give even a small chance.  In Tesco she likes to wait for me on the benches they have behind the checkouts.  If there are any other children around, she will head straight to the bench they are on and sit down next to them with her big grin in place.  I’ve seen a few surprised kids in there, but they all seem to get it in the end, and make a game of running between benches, then waiting so they can climb on together, before running back to the first one.

At the moment Florence totally loves Snow White and has seen it dozens of times.  I have to admit that sometimes she has watched the whole thing on her own, as the reality of single parenting makes it almost unavoidable.  But normally she is only allowed to watch half of it, and I will watch parts of it with her.  When Snow White is running through the scary wood, Flo likes to tell me ‘it’s ok daddy, the animals aren’t scary’.  We both shout ‘Boo’ at the queen every time she appears as the wicked old lady, and we cry ‘go Grumpy!’ when the dwarfs rush to her rescue.

Another favourite is dancing to the start of the Octonauts.  I love the Octonauts, and I wish I could be more like Captain Barnacles; I’m not awesome enough, but I’m trying.  During the half term I took her swimming.  I try and take her swimming every weekend, but I have to say it is more an ambition than a reality.  This time, when we got to the pool we found it closed for maintenance.  Presumable somebody, a genius of some sort, decided to close it during half term as no one could possible want to use it that week?  I was going to go home, but then I realised Captain Barnacles wouldn’t go home, so we drove forty minutes to a bigger better pool.

‘Florence, let’s do this!’

Over the last week her nap has gone all over the place.  It is meant to be at one o’clock, and my child-minder manages this with almost perfect regularity, but with me, one can sometime mean two, or three, or ten past four on the train back from the Natural History museum.  To her immense credit, she doesn’t seem to mind, and as she gets older she gets more and more adaptable to events around her.

The next big adaptation is dropping the nap, which I had been thinking about until recently.  But now I have decided to keep it going as long as is logistically possible, in to school even.  She clearly still needs it as she almost always goes off with no trouble at all in the afternoon, and if we have a day with lots of people or actions, then she’s even quicker to drop off.

Learning and sleeping are intimately linked.  There is significant evidence that sleep directly affects the performance of long term memory, which is in essence where we store our learning.  Evidence of changes to short term memory seems less conclusive, although if children are taught a new skill and then asked to repeat the action later, if they’ve had a nap meantime, their reliability consistently increases.

Florence is, in a very real sense, tying to grow a brain.  One that I hope will eventually blow the doors off my feeble efforts at cogent reasoning.  This is why I would like to understand more about what is potentially happening in that most fascinating and impenetrable of organs.

Until recently I would have said, along with most others, that our best way in would be observing the brain working directly through fMRI.  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging can detect areas of the brain that are consuming more oxygen in near real time.  By devising psychological tests for volunteers to perform while inside the MRI machine, it is possible to see which areas of the brain are associated with different cognitive activates.  As ever when it comes to the brain, it’s not that simple.  fMRI only gives you useful information if you can remove the noise from the signal you are looking for.  The brain is a noisy place with lots of totally unrelated activity going on during your experiment.  Removing the noise is essentially a statistical process, and it seems to have gone wrong.

Returning to the interconnectedness of different parts of science, as the techniques and possibilities in one area grow they run in to other areas, and whole new fields of research spring up.  Quantum biology is a good example, where biologists have found problems only quantum physics can solve, and physicists have found new ways to perform their experiments biologically, rather than cryogenically.  Well fMRI has started attracting researchers from other areas who bring their own mathematical tools with them.  Unfortunately rather than expanding what fMRI can do, it has mainly served to highlight errors the subject may have been making all along.  This culminated with a rather public demonstration where established neurological statistic tools where used to show activity in the brain of a fish.  The fish having been bought from the fish counter of a supermarket a few hours earlier.  Some estimates suggest that as much as ninety percent of existing data may be corrupted.

For me there is a clear historical parallel.  I have seen fMRI used to make some very bold claims about very specific but complex mental processes.  A few years ago this was common in genetics.  We were subject to regular headlines about the gene for crime or the gene for autism.  Now we know enough about the scale of complexity of interaction of the proteins and enzymes our genes code for, to know that such black and white statements are nonsense.  The claims made by fMRI recently are like someone claiming to have found the gene for speaking French or for parallel parking.

As ever with science, if existing hypotheses are shown not to work they will be replaced with superior hypotheses.  Until then I will have to keep reading the literature and applying common sense.  Make sure that Florence’s experiences and situations are as varied and interesting as I can reliably manage.  And treat studies saying how I’m harming my child with a healthy dose of scepticism.