A span of attention: Your child’s basic foundation for success in school and in life

“I can have your attention?” With that request made daily in thousands of classrooms, teachers make an important assumption: attention must be given from within the child. The ability to mentally focus, pay attention and stay focused is an internal process within the human brain-mind. Because it is an internal skill, the human attention span must be protected, stimulated, and nurtured throughout childhood and adolescence. The correct ingredients from the external world will ensure the development of the attention span. The wrong ingredients can hinder its development, and even extinguish it.

The wrong ingredients are too many hours in front of a 2D flat screen surface. In her now classic contribution to understanding the impact of media on brain development, Dr. Jane Healy writes in Endangered Minds: “A ‘good’ learning brain develops robust and widespread neural highways that can quickly and efficiently map different aspects of a task to the most efficient system…Such efficiency develops only through active practice in thinking and learning which, in turn, builds stronger and stronger connections.It also induces habits of using the wrong systems for various types of learning”.

Today, more researchers are coming to the belief that prolonged exposure to television and video games may promote the development of brain systems that scan and shift attention at the expense of those that focus attention. Dimitri A. Christakis of the University of Washington and Children’s Hospital conducted a study on the relationship between screen technologies and ADD/ADHD, Christakis’ research clearly demonstrated that young children face a 10% increased risk of having attention problems at the age of 7 for every hour of daily television they watch. He said the fast-paced visuals of television programming can permanently overstimulate and “rewire” the developing brain.

The extremely fragile nature of the developing brain seems lost on many parents. Like wet clay or concrete, young brains are easily molded by the information they receive. Incorrect input at crucial moments of development sets the child up for a life of misery, like being confined in a prison, her brain unable to break the “mold” that has been set. Four to five hours of screen time, the national average, doesn’t give kids the right experiences to fully develop attention skills. And, at the same time, that cumulative time spent looking at rapidly changing images overstimulates certain brain centers at the expense of developing crucial parts of the brain that are needed to sustain attention. It’s a downward spiral from there. If we hyperactivate the lower brain centers, they will eventually “take over.” Instead of the thinking cortex being the executive director of the brain’s functioning, the reptilian function of rash reactions runs the show.

To understand how too much screen time is the wrong basic ingredient for increasing attention spans, there are three important considerations.

First, the visual images must be noticed. Do an experiment. At night, with the lights low, tilt your head toward the TV. Wait for a commercial. So try not to look. Try as hard as you can. What you soon discover is that it is virtually impossible not to look. Image changes activate the “orientation response” of the brain, discovered by Pavlov in 1927. Humans are programmed to observe changes or novelties, even in our peripheral vision. This cannot be avoided. We cannot lose this instinct from our low brain function. It is an integral and important component of our survival mechanism. Therefore, colorful commercials or images of sex and violence cannot be resisted. If they’re there, we’re going to look.

After noticing the visual images, they are remembered. Not always consciously remembered, but stored in our memory nonetheless. How this works remains a mystery to researchers. The enormous effect that advertising images have on purchasing decisions, for example, is not even clearly understood. But it seems that once we see images, repeated very frequently and associated with strong emotional appeal, those images become very powerful influencers of behaviors. A study, published in the October 14, 2004 issue of the journal Neuron, is the first to explore how cultural messages penetrate the human brain and shape personal preferences. Is there a direct path from image to action? Science writer Sandra Blakeslee, writing in the New York Times tells us: “Some corporations have teamed up with neuroscientists to find out. Recent experiments in so-called neuromarketing have explored reactions to movie trailers, car options, the appeal of a pretty face and visceral reactions to political campaign advertising, as well as the power of brand loyalty… (IRM) are being used to shed light

about the brain mechanisms that play a central role in consumer behavior: circuits that underlie reward, decision making, motivation, emotions and the sense of self. Researchers have discovered that anything novel engages the brain’s attention system by directly accessing reward pathways. “Being able to see how the brain responds to novelty and makes decisions is potentially a huge step forward for marketers,” said Tim McPartlin, senior vice president at Lieberman Research Worldwide in Los Angeles. “Corporations have always been a few decades ahead of the average person in understanding how the human brain can be conditioned, mutated or restructured.

As novel visual images are recalled, the brain naturally wants to search for similar visual images. In other words, the more images of sex and violence are stored in the brain, the more images of sex and violence the brain searches for. And less does the brain want to think, deliberate, ponder, evaluate, discern, question. The cerebral cortex can’t get “a singing word” when the lower brain has been conditioned to look for quick, arousing images.

Since very few mental drifts can occur without a functioning attention span, it is quite imperative and urgent that parents really understand the role that overuse and misuse of screen technologies play in shortening attention span. They can then turn their attention to those ingredients that work to increase attention span:

1. Limit all screen time to one hour a day or less.

This is in line with the recommendations of many professionals. Do this for a month and see for yourself the difference in your children!

2. Provide mental challenges on an ongoing basis.

These may seem simple to adults, but parental choices, such as asking children questions and providing materials for self-directed, imaginative play, require children to be attentive. Every time they make decisions, they are attending to factors and practicing metacognition, internal thought processes that feed into selective attention processes. A puzzle instead of a video game, a trip to an art museum instead of a movie, an aquarium for the child’s bedroom instead of a television that balances children’s activities supports brain growth.

3. Leave some time for your child to experience his inner world.

Not experiencing boredom does not serve our children well. Boredom is a necessary and integral downtime for developing intrinsic motivation, along with an understanding of one’s own creative processes. By concentrating and thinking slowly, wit and inventiveness flourish. As the poet Eve Merriam writes: “It takes a lot of slowness to grow up.”

4. Choose screen content that has a slower pace.

Look for TV shows, movies, and video games that more closely mimic the rhythms of the real world. The late Mr. Rogers and even Barney were laughed at for being so slow. However, this pace requires children to use their attention span. What could make more sense?

Young people can develop the mature attention spans they need to think and problem solve effectively in today’s world of screens and machines, if they are given the time and space to do so. The normal course of human brain development naturally leads to a well-developed attention span. After all, our brain knows that the attention span is a fundamental human requirement for learning and creative achievement.

Copyright, Gloria DeGaetano, 2010. All rights reserved.

References

Jane Healy, Minds in Danger: Why Our Children Don’t Think and What to Do About It, Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Sandra Blakeslee, “If your brain has a ‘buy button,’ what pushes it?” The New York Times, October 19, 2004.

Dmitri Christakis and. al., “Early Television Exposure and Later Attention Problems in Children,” Pediatrics, Vol. 113, no. 4, April 4, 2004.