Speaker 1does this sound like your child they sit at the homework table for an hour the worksheet is still blank the pencil has been sharpened three times there's been two trips to the kitchen and when you finally ask them what's going on they can't quite explain it they just couldn't get started or your eight-year-old is doing fine in most areas but the teacher keeps noting that they lose the thread mid-task that they're looking out the window when they should be working that they're easily distracted and you don't know if that's just who they are or if it's something worth worrying about or your teenager says that they've been revising for two hours the notes are out the highlighters have been used their phone is technically in another room but when you ask them what they've actually covered the answer is vague because something that looks like concentration isn't always concentration at all or maybe your child has already been assessed they have a diagnosis adhd or something on the spectrum and you've been given a handful of strategies that sometimes work and sometimes don't and what you actually want is to understand what's happening inside their brain when they're struggling to focus not the label but the mechanism if any of that sounds similar this episode is for you today i'm joined by professor sam vass one of the uk's leading researchers and i'm going to give you a little bit of an introduction to leading researchers on children's attention and concentration sam has spent his career studying how focus develops in young brains and what actually gets in the way in this conversation we get into what concentration actually is and why it's more complex than we tend to think how the developing brain builds focus over time and what stress and anxiety do to a child's ability to concentrate and what the research tells us about screens environments and what parents can realistically do to help what you will come away with is a genuinely different understanding of why your child struggles to focus one that moves past willpower and effort and into the brain science that actually explains it and the beginning of a very different approach i'm dr mary hann psychologist and parenting expert this is how not to screw up your kids podcast so pour yourself a cuppa find a comfy seat and let's do this
Speaker 2hi mary and nice to be back oh
Speaker 1so excited to have you here this is a huge one and there's so much that we can talk about so i think we've got a bit of a sort of a way of going about it but can i just ask with a bit to sort of from a fundamental perspective is that how do neuroscience how does neuroscience describe what concentration is and then what are those sort of traditional ways of thinking about it
Speaker 2yeah so i guess one of the this kind of goes straight to one of the big areas i think it's really important to be thinking about with concentration so so i guess what most people think about when they think about concentration is no like i was i was 147 and the way i learned when i was in preschool was we i mean it must have been quite old-fashioned even then but we had a teacher who literally spent a whole lesson just writing up on the blackboard in chalk a whole passage about the tyrannosaurus rex and then we had to sit and copy that passage out into our notebooks and then i like i was terrible at sitting still i always have been terrible at sitting still and then i always i remember this but my sister says this didn't happen but i always remember that if we if we were naughty if we turned around and and look um she would come to the front and she would hit us on the hand with a ruler that's part of it so so we used to think of this idea of concentrating is how well uh can i keep myself online how good am i forcing myself to tune in to this task um or doing it even you know if it's not a task i'm particularly interested in like i don't care about dinosaurs so that's kind of a traditional view of concentration i mean i when i do talks i think you know the road and the thinker that statue of the guy sitting there doing that with his fist to his elbow um you know he's sitting there like and it's something really hard and really really effortful yeah so that's one way that we're going to be talking about thinking about concentration and how we used to think a bit like that and that is in some ways still true and in some ways we know it's more complicated than that but then there's another way that is thinking about it which is more something particularly in earlier so i work in early years and this idea of concentrating through doing so that first example i gave was very much concentrated through listening and the idea of concentrating through doing is another thing and you know so to give an example of that you know say for example i wake up on a saturday morning as has been known to happen and the first thing i hear is my six-year-old saying daddy i'm doing a poo like he really deserves to get some praise for dinner he's very excited he always tells me he needs to do the poo very excited but then the next thing i hear is oh and by the way daddy we might have loo paper like that so then what i have to do is i have to put a goal in my head yeah this is this idea of concentrating through doing so i have to get a goal in my head uh which is um to go and get some new paper and then you have to hold that gold in mind through a series of what we call nested sub goals yeah so i've got to go and find my car keys and i've got to go and get in the car i've got to turn right turn left go to the shop get shopping this paper basically this is um the idea of uh it kind of concentrating through doing yeah so it's basically it's the same part of our brain that does both of these forms of concentrating the listening forms of concentration like tuning into information that comes at you but also holding in mind what i'm trying to do like concentrating through doing and now both of those are quite hard forms of concentrating uh you know even our adult brains i very regularly walk into a room and say why did i walk into this room or why did i walk into this room you know what i just almost i hope everyone does this you put the number of times i pull out my phone and i'm like and then you pull out your phone to message someone or to look up something and then someone else has sent you a message and you read that and then you're like why does that get my phone and then you end up putting it away and then a few minutes later exactly the same thing will happen again again and so that is your goal your frontal cortex goal just dropping out yeah and so it happens it happens all the time to adults too but both of these things yeah happen as i say very coarsely put um in this you know part of the brain under the forehead here the frontal cortex and and we know that of all the parts of the brain uh that part of the brain is the slowest to develop so different parts of the brain develop at different rates of like very roughly put you know the bit of brain right at the back with the back of the neck comes into the thing that does early stage vision is kind of relatively mature quite early on the bits right at the top that do a lot motor control they mature quite early on but particularly the frontal cortex that does these kind of effortful processes like listening concentration and doing concentration um is slow to develop and no it it makes sense with what we all know about children yeah they're i think a nice example of the doing thing is the the teletubbies and there's this it happens all the time like all the tests is incredibly well insightful into how children pay attention and there's this lovely bit where you're in like po the red teletubbies walking up the hill and you're in the middle of a story about po and then i rabbit just jumps in front of the frame and you know as an adult your natural instinct is to say get out of the way rabbit and my frontal cortex is tracking this story about poem in the middle of the story about the pope but the camera behaves as a two-year-old would which is it says oh rabbit and then follows off the rabbit and then you're going to and you forget that you're halfway through this story about a poem yeah which is you know beautiful in a way because you it's how children pay attention yeah so they don't have so much frontal cortex they don't have so much goal focus actually yeah so that is you know beautiful it it but it's also something that is obviously a focus of you know a lot of educational work uh to help children to get better at behaving with a goal in mind like it wouldn't surprise you to to know that uh you know all the studies that have you know how well can i keep this goal in mind while i'm achieving a series of goals on the way to sub goals on the way to that main goal and it's very predictive of education outcomes and health and wealth like all the basically long-term outcomes and that's what i've been doing for the past year i've been doing for the past year and that's what i've been doing for the past year and similarly the kind of listening forms of concentration it's the same idea that i mean it's not quite listening but i notice this when i walk my kids uh to school every day that when i'm walking into school i'm you know i'm only seeing stuff that i'm looking for so i'm very goal focused yeah so i'm looking out for lampposts i might bump into i'm looking out for cars the mike squashes they said etc yeah and my children aren't like that they actually notice what's there in front of them so you know every day they'll notice a new bit of graffiti um on the uh pavement or a little butterfly or something like that and like our adult brain's ability we're very good at concentrating we're very much more vulnerable and our adult brains ability only to see what we're looking for um is really amazing and it's lovely you know i love it when my kids notice something i haven't noticed on the way to work and i hate the fact that i would have just stepped over it with things but also can i can i just
Speaker 1ask you a little bit about that because i'm sort of i don't know whether i'm looking at this in the wrong way but i often wonder if there's a if nature in lots of ways has designed young children to for that distractibility oh there's a rabbit let me go and have a look and for noticing all of those things it almost makes me wonder whether there is an almost like an adaptive reason why they do that but then there's is there like an optimal time where it then switches because obviously in lots of ways because children are so engaged in what they see in the present that help or is it is there a sweet spot where they've got a transition from the distract to the focus and the attention
Speaker 2so there's a really good um uh research called allison gottnick um who's done some work on it and she actually did a beautiful ted talk uh on this yeah so she talks about this very specifically so so she's very much into the science of learning yeah and basically there's two ways that we kind of structure learning tasks one is it where I've got a very clear idea what it is that you want to learn yeah so say I'm trying to teach kids what insects are yeah and I say all the insects have six legs and three body parts and then you give them a load of animals yeah and you say some of them have got three and some have got six and so on and you say circle the ones that's a picture of an insect yeah so that's very much a frontal cortex I know I want to teach you something yeah but what she and that is very much the more you can concentrate the more you can do that form of learning yeah but she talks about this earlier form of learning which is very very different yeah so say for example I'm a baby and I'm just starting to learn language yeah so I've got a six-month-old baby at home and so she's just at the stage where she can't do any language yet but she's her brain is getting exposed to a lot of language in the home yeah and picking up the way that we think that they're learning languages they just pick up that pattern some regularity yeah so so we don't leave gaps between our words when we talk so if you look at the acoustic pattern of speech it's just a continuous even broken problem yeah and one of the big problems that's much studied is like the word segmentation so how do I even work out where one word ends and the next word starts before I can even work out that you know this this word for glass is this yeah and then we do it by spotting these patterns there are certain things that happen more often around the edges of words and that's how we start to chop it up yeah but that type of learning is a very different form of learning because it's not you don't have a clue what it is specifically that you're looking for yeah you just get this big messy data set and you just have to spot a pattern in it it's called kind of statistical learning and it's key not just for language it's key for all forms of early learning like how do I learn to make sense of the light information hitting my eyes to so I can construct a 3d map of the world in my brain to allow us to move around how do I learn to move all learning happens to this way and she's got this idea that that this form of learning this kind of pattern spotting works better when we can't control it and we can't control it when we can't control it when we can't control it when we can't concentrate so it's exactly what you just said that there's there's a reason why children are born unable to concentrate and it's because this pattern spotting ability it doesn't work when we can concentrate when we've got a gold mine and I've tried it doesn't make sense so my mate was doing this when I was doing my PhD my mate was doing a PhD next to me on on this topic and he gave some babies all this pattern it's kind of a fake language like it was like pa ga ha la fa sa ka la looking at their ability to spot patterns and I spent ages myself you know trying to listen to it trying to spot these patterns but the only way I can do it is gonna say maybe the pattern is passed followed by ga or passed followed by rap and I just can't do it like my brain can't do that type of task so so it doesn't make sense to me that there's a reason that I always talk about this but you know for early years practitioners that there's so much emphasis on like reading writing and arithmetic but that's easy learning the much harder learning is like how do I learn that words stand for things you know how do I it's like 70 muscles needed to coordinate reaching out for something and growing up and I don't know how to do that but I don't know how to grasp it you know all these different light sources hitting this tiny little flat your bit of skin at the back of our eyes our retina how do we convert that into a 3d model of the world you know all that stuff's way way way harder forms of learning than learning to read and write that comes later in you know that's a form of learning that probably you do better when you can't concentrate so well so yeah it's a good question
Speaker 1right okay brilliant but I'm assuming that there comes a point where there is a natural shift yeah yeah so there
Speaker 2comes a point where there's a natural shift yeah and I think it's a good question I think it's a good question I think it's a good question I think it's a good question I think it's a good question I think it's a good question and also you know it's that transition you know it's what we love about children but also our we what we love about children is how they're different to us but also our job is you know parents and educators is to get them to you know behave in a more adult-like way and there's one particular area where it makes a big difference and we're doing a lot of work on this at the moment which is um uh kind of tuning in in noisy settings yeah and so basically when we're in what we call a multi-talk environment so there's lots of different people talking and there's a lot of people talking and we spend you know a fair amount of time in those types of settings as adults you know anytime you're at a restaurant or a cafe or out about yeah basically what what often happens is your your mate who is talking to you is like making these like sound pressure waves that are hitting your ear but at the same time lots of other sound sources from lots of other places other voices you know noises that type of stuff are also kind of hitting your ear at the same time so it's just like one really really dense intermingled like sound pressure and our adult brains are incredibly skilled at teasing apart these sound pressure waves working out which of them came from the voice of your friend kind of pay more attention to them and blanking out the other distracting voices in the background and you know this is an effortful process yeah this is the same part of the brain the frontal cortex it does it and you can choose like who you pay attention to so you know for example when we were at a restaurant uh as perennial story of my childhood as we were at a restaurant and then I'd be chatting like over dinner family my mum would say I can't believe he said that to her like that and she had been tuning into some conversation happening at the next table behind us yeah so you can tune out your family's conversation and tune in some conversations so so this process of like tuning in and tuning out to particular things in a noisy setting yeah that as I say it's very much fun to cortex but the reason that that is something that kids really need when they start school is the early year settings like a lot of educational settings are super noisy yeah for reasons we like you know we like interactive learning you know all that stuff's good but at the same time it poses a big challenge that children who can't do this so well they they often struggle a lot with that tuning into a teacher speaking in a noisy setting and so that's one of the first areas where you know it does gets really important that you can do this you know old-fashioned form of concentrating
Speaker 1yeah and I'm guessing are some children just better at it than others is it just simply the more effortful that they've done that yeah I think that's a good stat or are there differences in terms of our brains that make some children find it easier to do that effortful concentration
Speaker 2than others so there are yes but they're much much more complex than we kind of first thought when we started to look at this yeah so the classic idea of 20 years ago maybe as recent as 10 years ago that the classic idea of ADHD the classic explanation for ADHD was just that in children with ADHD like their frontal cortex doesn't talk as well to the rest of the brain yeah so they're less in control of their behaviors if you think of the you know traditional idea you think of it like as a homunculus so so inside this bit under a forehead a bit of a brain under our forehead the frontal cortex there's someone who tells us what to do yeah so we've mentioned it's the like the goal directed the concentrating through doing it keeps our goal in mind through lots of stuff but it also is this process of my mum at the restaurant who's choosing to tune out our conversation and tune into the conversation yeah so frontal cortex does both of these things yeah and the traditional view of ADHD is that it's a problem with the frontal cortex it doesn't talk so much the rest of the brain but that's really quite extensively discredited now from lots of brain scans that show that often there's very little that's atypical about the frontal cortex but you also get kind of atypicalities over in the rest of the brain and you know that fits really with what kind of every parent of every child with ADHD would say which is yeah but they've got no problems concentrating on stuff they're interested in yeah um and this traditional view that is just the frontal cortex sending signal brain doesn't really explain this yeah it doesn't explain why I find it easier to pay attention to stuff I understand yeah and why I I feel easy to pay attention to stuff that I'm interested in and that's forcing us to think about it in a little bit more kind of realize it's a little bit more complicated than the traditional view so part of it is to do with kind of this idea that when that this effortful stuff yeah is only in situations where there's nothing in the outside world pulling my attention towards it yeah so I've just been working a lot on this and the Department of Education in the UK their screen time advisory and this is something that is important to be thinking about that we have in us like inbuilt pay attention to movement mechanisms yeah and they're really really strong they're really hardwired in our brain yeah it was a threat detection yeah so like 10 000 years ago 5 000 years ago our environments were pretty dangerous there were predators out there that used to eat it so if my brain has evolved to automatically pay attention to movement anywhere in our field of view I'm more likely to survive because even if I'm thinking about something else and then something walks into my field of view if I automatically get my attention drawn to it you know it just makes me want to survive possibly nowadays of course it's not useful anymore there's no predators certainly in the UK at least there's no predators um out there who want to eat us but our brains are hardwired to do this and it's a real pain because advertisers for example have learned to remorselessly exploit this uh so now you know I'm going to sound like a crusty old man again but uh like I remember when you could go on the internet and you could just read a page of text and that was it but now every time you go on the internet there's a page of text there's all these credit cards like flashing at you out the corner of your brain yeah and it's the same with screens yeah so screens are easy to pay attention to um because there's always movement happening yeah so speaking as a recovering Candy Crush addict you know it's very relaxing for our brains to pay attention to Candy Crush because there's just a constant stream of movement yeah if you can't find the gem that it starts flashing you know that type of stuff so so that's one way in which it's slightly more complicated than that that one of the things with ADHD is that these attention capture mechanisms can be fine but it's these effortful control mechanisms that are different but then there's also another thing which is another way in which is more complicated which is this idea of understanding yeah so everybody finds it easier to tune in to things that they understand yeah and basically we're getting through a lot of news sites but basically the neuroscience reason for that is that one of the things that our brains are doing is it's not just that our frontal cortex is sending signals to the rest of the brain saying pay attention to that it's also predicting what you're going to see and hear next yeah like every word as i'm talking your brain is generating a moment by moment guess for what i'm going to say next and if i say a word that you expect me to say it is actually easier for you to hear that word yes whereas if you like mask the words whereas if i say an unexpected word that you weren't expecting to you're less likely to hear it yeah so that that kind of prediction helps us concentrate but it makes us easier to tune into things that we expect yeah so this is one of the reasons why all sorts of disadvantaged learners yeah if they don't understand the content so well they find it harder to concentrate in the sense that they need a quieter setting yeah so so in children who don't understand so well they're more distracted by background noise yeah so like children with all sorts of even children's additional language yeah find this speech noise separation like listening to a teacher in a noisy classroom they're more affected by background noise and any type of you know any kind of atypicality in any area in what i understand yeah means i can't concentrate so well so that's why it's easier to concentrate on stuff that we understand yeah and that is one of the big neuroscience reasons why kids with adhd if they know a lot about you know their favorite topic yeah their computer game whatever they're really interested in they've got no problems focusing on that but it's the stuff that they're not interested in so so that's one way in which you know this idea that it's all just front and center cortex is a bit too simple
Speaker 1because that's brilliant and i guess as a parent because i would imagine you know we've got parents that are going to be listening to this with all ages of children children who are really young all the way up to children who are older but do you think that one of the sort of the challenges i get asked about all of the time is when you know parents are pulling their hair out because they're trying to get children to revise whether that's for end of year exams whether it's for tests whether it's for gcses and would you say that that when when they are procrastinating which we know is about the feedback that they're getting from their parents they're getting feedback that they're getting feedback that they're getting feedback that they're getting feedback but could that also be simply i just don't understand what i'm supposed to be revising and therefore it is supremely effortful and therefore something i'm much less likely to
Speaker 2actually do yeah definitely and there are ways in you know at all ages now but it's actually less focused on older children and it definitely should be more focused on it's quite well developed in the early years this idea that you know you build on interest and you know you build on interest and that's just simply for this reason the more i understand about something the more i have like in my brain a strong kind of representation of that the easier it is to focus on it and tune into it and it's easier to build on knowledge that we already have so that's one of the things that can definitely help with that similarly one a lot of my team i'm quite adhd um we're certainly very hyperactive hyperactive subtype and um you tend to hire people like you so about half of my team are quite adhd to the point where we have all these guest speakers in and i have to warn them now at the start of the session you might get some so you'll get a lot of very enthusiastic comments you might sometimes get some interruptions when you're halfway through a sentence with a question that might seem like it's got nothing to do with what you're in the middle of talking about but please do take it as a sign that the listeners were very interested and they were thinking about something else so but one of one of my team actually says who's great adhd actually says he specifically finds hard to start things and but then once he started it he finds it easy to continue doing it yeah so um what he actually does is you know if he's got a script like a pro we write a lot of stuff like data analysis scripts or something like that if he's got something he's struggling to get himself to do he'll just say can you just start it with me for five minutes and then get into it and it's for that same reason once he's into it and he's already got the map and then he's got the basis and he's managed to get into his head these are my goals this is the first thing that i've got done and he's got some basic understanding of what he's doing and he's got some basic understanding of what he needs to do then it's easy for his brain to focus on it yeah but when it's just a blank piece of paper and it's all just that getting from you know nothing to a blank piece of paper then um then that really helps i mean incidentally that is now why like most people i'm sure rather than starting with a blank document yeah you get chat gpt to start write a document and then you go around and revise the document yeah it's much much much easier to focus when you've got something in something with you and it's for that same reason that you know it's not just the frontal cortex it's the our understanding and if there's something there to pay attention to it's much easier to tune into it than a blank piece of paper yeah
Speaker 1definitely and it would speak also to what you were saying earlier on about when we've got young children if we can sort of almost bootstrap things that they know already and relate new learning in some ways whether it's an analogy or some form of extension of what they know already i'm guessing that also helps
Speaker 2yeah definitely and that's also one of the other reasons why again i've been talking a lot about this with the these screen time reviews that we've been doing and one of the most important evidence-based things is probably one of the reasons that screen a lot of screen exposure tends to associate with less good concentration later on which is there you know it's a reliable effect that's been found in a lot of studies it's not a massive effect but it is there as an effect consistently is probably we think because it takes away from shared engagement so the the strongest literature by far is if you want a child to be you know good at paying attention to stuff later on just the more time you can spend on it the more you can spend on it the more you can spend on it when paying attention to the same thing at the same time as them um when they're young um uh all like throughout development you know that there's a really really strong evidence base that this like shared engagement shared interest is really predictive of how well a child can understand for themselves concentrate for themselves later on and we think it's probably for that same reason that when you're paying attention to something in the same child at the same time as a child you're putting a lot of word labels on uh the stuff that they're doing you're helping to build their understanding in the moment yeah i might be like sticking staring at this particular fart button that's on the table in front of me but then if i'm interacting with this fart button with my four-year-old who just got it given it for a birthday present then i can be telling her putting words on it i can be describing you know what it is how it works and that type of stuff and that kind of deepens their understanding and it's this idea that the deeper the understanding you have of something uh then the easier it is to tune into it kind of in the moment and and so yeah so that's that's a like a couple of easy wins for concentration it is not something that's just about effort if you can get some knowledge there to start with and the brain finds it easier to tune in yeah
Speaker 1and so that it's that's almost like we mediate we provide the scaffolding for whatever it is if we're watching a television program if a child's just watching it on their own they're not getting the same benefit as us then watching teletubbies and labeling and and laughing and when the rabbit sort of comes across the table and they're like oh my god i'm cross and their attention shifts to the rabbit we can then be asking like what's happened to poe so it becomes much more of a collaborative
Speaker 2process all the literature on screen time is yeah co-viewing is great and you know it's practically impossible to do i mean i've got three kids you know you need they do my my two definitely get sat down in front of a number of lots while i'm cooking something you know you but the idea is that co-viewing and shared engagements is a good idea and it mitigates a lot of the uh all of the evidence for you know negative effects i mean it's all mitigated by co-viewing so so that's why yeah
Speaker 1sam can we talk a little bit about you know what we're hearing a lot is that we've got lots of children struggling at school in terms of concentration and i think we know that levels of anxiety are on the increase and other aspects and obviously that sort of brings with it a certain sense of stress and hypervigilance and how do those stress levels with young children affect their ability to pay attention and to
Speaker 2understand what's going on so i think that's a really really good question and it is a really really important um thing to be thinking about and i also think it's a thing that people don't think about enough so we do some stuff with a department of education in early years and a lot of it's still very much focused on what they need to learn but the we there's a lot of evidence that they're like moment children are very emotional and their emotional state really affects you know how they how well they can concentrate so so we know that kind of stress levels as a whole are going up over time i'll get back to explaining why that is um later but first of all how does school concentration affect stress so so we know that both of the forms of concentration that we talked about this doing forms of concentration yeah what what's my overall aim and the listening forms of conversation you know where do i want to be paying attention in my environment yeah both of those are very effective by stress and we know that both is actually kind of an an optimal mid-range where halfway between you know what we call very under aroused so that's kind of sitting there droopy falling off to sleep over around you know bouncing off the windows yeah so somewhere in the middle is where we do our best concentrating both these doing forms and the listening forms of concentration and look for adhd for example there's adhd is typically diagnosed much more often in girls and boys and we think increasingly um it's quite under diagnosed in girls when it's in boys it tends to be accompanied by what we call hyper arousal so you're down there like constantly bouncing off the walls constantly moving constantly fidgeting that type of stuff which is obviously very easy for a teacher to pick up so it tends to get diagnosed quickly but what we do is we do a lot of work with our teachers and we do a lot of work with our teachers so what we think is quite often a cause of adhd in girls is what the at the other end of the continuum so what we call hypo arousal or under arousal yeah and people with that will sit children with that will sit very still in class and they'll look that they look like they're looking at you they won't be fidgety they'll be kind of you know staring at you but internally they're decoupled yeah so we call it coupled over and covert attention becoming decoupled yeah so it's mind wandering yeah and this we know to the extent that we don't know what's going on in our body we don't know what's going on in our body we don't know what's going on in our body we don't know what's going on in our body we sense that happen at this under when i'm not around not awake enough yeah where i'm sitting you know extreme is falling asleep but when i'm in that you know feeling sleepy or lethargy or kind of under aroused or under awake we know that mind wandering is more prominent we know there's some papers coming out now that it's there's some girls is very common and it is definitely a form of adhd but it's very very hard for teachers to pick up in class yeah because they're sitting still looking at you it's only if you ask them a question you realize that they're not paying attention so so that's something that is um kind of important and then but there's something also specifically about high um stress which is that when we're in a high stress state we're particularly any movement or any kind of any anything anywhere in our visual field we're much more likely to pay attention to it yeah and you remember i said about the it's a threat detection mechanism originally this is like paying attention to movement and obviously when we're stressed you go into threat detection even more so when i'm calm our brains have evolved that when i'm calm i can focus on something doing a job and set out and do it yeah but when i'm um you know anxious i'm just constantly on the lookout for threat so that's why children who who are very wired um come in um uh to uh kind of nurseries and schools and they find it really really hard to focus so so that's a little bit about that but can we just get back to the thing i said i was going to talk about which is why stress is going up over time so so again i've been thinking about this a lot in the context of this screen time work that i've been doing for the education in the uk and one of the things that we know is in so we so there's good quality evidence that screens short exposure to screens but also long term associates with increased bodily stress yeah so like a short burst of playing a computer game or watching particularly a fast-paced show kind of increases your stress yeah and one of the things that we think drives this is that when i say our brains are prediction machines you're trying to guess at what you're trying to see next and um we know that tv is kind of tv is getting faster and faster over time yeah faster and place to paste over time like particularly recent years with like shift to short form content youtube you know youtube shorts now tick tock you know it's much much faster paced content but even you know if you look at an animus this is hollywood cinema you know cutting speed like the rate of stuff's going fast over time yeah and what we think is happening is that our brains are wired to seek out stuff that is right on the edge of the maximum that we can understand so if something is too easy for my brain i don't learn so much from it yeah so i don't find it rewarding it's dopamine it's all dopamine release yeah and if it's way too hard i don't learn from it so it doesn't trigger much dopamine release yeah but when stuff's hard enough that i can just about work out what's going to happen i can guess what's going to happen at some of the time but not all the time that's when we find it rewarding yeah so one of the ideas that i find is quite weird is that for people who are spending a lot of time on screens yeah and watching more and more fast-paced content yeah it's actually their learning mechanisms they're like wanting to keep themselves right on the edge of what they can learn that is driving them to it yeah so if i'm doom scrolling on tick-tock yeah it's my dopamine you know learning mechanisms this is just this is really challenging for my brain to keep up with all this information i'm just at the level of we can do it yeah it's driving is that but we also know that when we're at that level like the maximum that my brain can cope with we go into like fight or flight so we go into hyper arousal yeah if i'm in an unpredictable situation which is too much for my brain to be coping with yeah one of the other like hard wire things it does is it puts our bodies into kind of fight or flight mode i can't predict exactly what's going to happen there so i need to be able to respond at a moment's notice so that we think is why you know children are ratty when they come off screens yeah but it we also think it's why you get these quite robust in the literature uh associations between like screen use and behavior dysregulation and then there's quite a few looking specifically at correlations between early screen use and later kind of anxiety and depression so you know my i just was at a house department last week trying to persuade the mps of this that they're teenage mental health crisis a lot of teenagers with mental health everyone assumes that the causation must be during their teenagerhood so everyone's very focused on teenage social media but in fact you know that's not my area but my colleagues who are experts and that say in fact the evidence of that's much more mixed than you think but there is really good quality evidence that uh lots and lots of kind of early time exposure to screens gets us into this kind of high arousal particularly this kind of fast-paced content um so i think that's kind of possibly a strong case for explaining how environments are affecting that kind of teenage mental health yeah
Speaker 1and in fact actually i saw somebody had shared a couple of videos on um linkedin that was showing television programs basically through the you know the kind of television programs that are fast-paced that young children are watching now compared to the winnie the pooh and eeyore and all of that being a much slower and so would you sort of be saying that even if we as parents would be scaffolding that and sitting next and having a joint experience that we ought to be mindful of the amount of time that this young children particularly are spending and the type of content that they're exposed to
Speaker 2yeah definitely yeah for sure so i think that's a really good point and i think that's one of the reasons i think the most important thing is like understanding and you know we play in my house we play a lot of zelda tears of the kingdom it's this like massive open world exploring game and it's really nice even instead of my six-month-old we try and get them involved too but uh the kids and my wife and they're all we all like plan you know we're like a team and we're going around and then we go out like my son honestly we're running this like seven hour walk and he was talking about it like most of the time out of knowledge and like tactics spends a lot of time thinking about tactics yeah so that type of stuff you know it's quite stressful for him when when we're playing he's really you know he's very sensitive and like he gets a jiggery leg and you know and that type of stuff so uh uh and i you know talk about it with him but obviously i'd say there's a lot of benefits from that because it's building understanding yeah and it's generally stimulating a lot of conversations and also you know the stress and i'm modeling you know i make sure to show that yes we're in the middle of fighting this big monster but i'm really calm yeah so we're stopping and pausing and discuss tactics and show that you know you don't just get flustered and do it yeah so that type of thing i think is fine as a way of doing and co-viewing but that's i'd say the most important thing for effects of stress is is this too fast pace my brain to keep up with at my particular age yeah what we don't have a good understanding of we're doing this at the moment we're doing lots of studies where we show different types of screen time we track children's abilities to track the content that's in the brain but we don't know how far too fast yeah we know that you know young brains are much slower and that they need kind of slow pace repetition and much more and but we don't know you know what's the speed we're too fast too fast but now do they understand the content is a good way of testing it yeah can they tell you what they were watching afterwards yeah if they can tell you watching afterwards they were understanding it yeah amazingly i would do with my kids said watch something and they sit there staring at it yeah remember it's that attention capture they automatically look at the movement yeah so i remember rose my daughter should sit there and stare at content and even when their language was quite good she wouldn't be able to explain to me what she'd watch afterwards because she can't understand it so that's the bad stuff but also there's some other research about threat so a lot of the time even on octonauts even on cbb's there's quite a lot of like worlds in peril type telly and there's also evidence that if my if i'm watching someone in imagined danger as a child my body can't tell the difference in fact also as a grown-up my wife watches all these murder mysteries in there and she's sitting there with an ipad prompt and she's going grabbing my arm like her heart's going faster so even as adults our bodies get tricked you know between watching someone in imagine danger and us actually being in danger so her fight or flight stress system which you know as i was saying it evolved to help us to actually fight or flight is kicked in even though i'm not actually engaging myself i'm just watching someone in danger so so those are in other areas that i think about thinking about with kids but yeah the really important thing i think you know and this is what we've been in a lot of with early years is you know it's back to like and wood and in the night garden and just the there there's a not too much movement drawing their attention yeah not too fast like really really kind of simple like pared down not overwhelming and sensory environment and like really really minimal story and then watch how that goes but yeah it's definitely like an area that we don't have nearly enough research in like what types of tv are good for kids and how it affects them in different ways it affects them you know we know it's affecting them massively you know i can't you know i'm pretty i've got there's pretty good evidence base that it is associating with increases in you know the stress and kind of anxiety and that type of stuff but there's a lot more that we need to do to find out more about it but
Speaker 1it gives parents at least a little bit of a framework when they consider some of this because of course as parents so often you know when you're raising children you're being bombarded with lots of sometimes conflicting evidence about you know what we should be doing in order to ensure that you know we optimize our children in order to make sure that you know we optimize our children in order to make sure that you know we optimize our children in order to make sure that you know we optimize our children in order to make sure that you know we optimize our children's academic success later on we're told to keep the phonemes and all the different sounds from all the different languages of all the countries which is why you know there's been a proliferation of the whole kind of mozart things and um little mozart and then you know you're told you know watch these television programs which will help build their recognition of letters and numbers and of course as parents you're constantly navigating this you know should my child be watching this and certainly i've from observations that i've seen i'm seeing more and more really young children in high chairs watching devices at younger and younger ages yeah
Speaker 2yeah there's a lot of evidence you know the department of education study just came out that average two-year-old watches two hours 20 minutes a day and the top 20 percent two years watch five hours a day and it is i think that it tells what you're saying about lots of ideas out i would say the strongest idea like particularly for early years is young brains learn best through predictable doing the same thing over and over again you know with prediction machines i said earlier we work by guessing what's going to happen next yeah but young brains don't have so much prior knowledge they don't have so much prior experience so so what the types of learning that we can actually seek out when we're very young are just doing the same thing over and over again yeah and that's how we first start to make predictions and we can only start to make a prediction if it's i'm doing the same thing and then i do it again then i do it again and again that allows my brain to start learning how to predict so this idea of like enriching development yeah so so we've done quite a lot of work about this you know why is it you know in a parent where their families where there are a lot of screen time going on partly obviously it's just practical you know little kids are high maintenance and croons have this amazing ability to strip all movement out of a even if they're what we call hyper kinetic then you put a screen on and all that goes yeah so it's partly just a practical thing like a like a button i used to fantasize with my wife about button you turn on to put them to sleep and it's basically the same thing as abundance they stop kicking off yeah but in terms of how parents think about it for their child development i think like for young children that is the point i'll be really keen to get across that it it's not good for them in the sense that it's stimulating and things yeah yeah and it's not this idea that we should be enriching early development by giving them lots of stuff to learn from very early on in life you know like baby eyes and all that that that i'd say the neuroscience is pretty clear now that that's not what young children need they need repetition and familiarity they don't need a lot of fast based screens they need the same thing the same type of interaction over and over again so yeah
Speaker 1and often why the kind of the old games like peekaboo and you know pulling the muslin and finding something underneath it just works so well because actually over time there's that predictability that something is underneath and yeah someone's behind something yeah and
Speaker 2a lot of the predictability comes uh yeah through these interpersonal interactions and you know that's obviously something that's even more you know children are getting a lot of fast-paced unpredictable screens but they're also getting very different interpersonal interactions because you know the mum or the dad who was responsive you know my mum and dad's responding to me and then suddenly mum and dad gets a text message and then they become non-responsive yeah and from a child's point of view that's very unpredictable because they don't know what you know for example you know from an adult's point of view it makes sense because i'm shifting from interaction my kids are shifting to thinking about this so it's a continuous our consciousness is continuously linked yeah but from a child's point of view it's just mum and dad were talking to me and now suddenly they're not they haven't got a clue what phone is they can't see what you're looking at on the phone so it's just really discontinuous it's really unpredictable
Speaker 1yeah so it's maintaining that predictability yeah yeah you you you you you you
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