Dimitri Christakis on Media and Children at TEDxRainier (Transcript)

It’s the connections between those brain cells, we call synapses, that account for that brain growth. And those synapses form based on early experiences. If you will, the mind is fine tuned to the world, the babies and habit and to give you an example of that, that you can all relate to any child born anywhere in the world can learn to speak any language fluently. But if she isn’t exposed to certain sounds early in the first few years of her life, she can learn to speak another language later but she’ll never sound like a native speaker. So baby born today in mainland China as amazing as it is can learn to speak fluent Mandarin but if she doesn’t hear English sounds early in her life she can learn to speak English later but as we all know we know such people, she’ll struggle making certain sounds, it wasn’t because she wasn’t born with that capacity, it was because her early experience didn’t condition her mind to learn them.

Now this graphic actually shows just that. What you see is the brain and you see the neurons and the synapses connecting them. We’re born with about 2,500 synapses; by age 3 we have 15,000 and then over time those connections are actually pruned in response to the external stimulation, the external world that we live in.

And to give you another example of that. This is the breathing pattern of a one-day old infant listening to music. And you can see here that he’s listening to Mozart and then Stravinsky is put on and then Mozart again. Now I show you this not to present some kind of an infantile critique of classical music but — and those of you in the audience who are classic music aficionados might have a hypothesis about why Stravinsky did this to his breathing pattern. But the point is — the point is that even at one day of life there is a discernible physiological reaction to what babies are actually hearing.

Now we know from decades of research that too little stimulation early on is bad for brain development. I show you here two PET scans. Now PET scans are measures of brain function; the brighter colors show more brain activity. And on the left is a PET scan of a normal kindergartener and on the right is a PET scan of a child who was raised in a horribly neglected environment. This is actually a PET scan from a child who was raised in a Romanian orphanage and was profoundly neglected early in life. And you’ll notice that the areas of his brain that show no activity at all, it didn’t develop as a result of too little stimulation.

Now this is a horrific example of too little stimulation and the untoward consequences of it. But the question we’ve had in our lab for some time is: What about too much? Is it actually possible to over-stimulate the developing brain or more appropriately to inappropriately stimulate the developing brain in ways that are actually not beneficial but harmful? And this is important, because we’re technology-izing childhood today in a way that’s unprecedented.

In 1970, the average age at which children began to watch television regularly was four years, like this cute little girl here. And today based on research that we’ve done, it’s four months. It’s not just how early they watch but how much they watch. A typical child before the age of five is watching about four and a half hours of TV a day; that represents as much as 40% of their waking hours, which brings us to Baby Einstein.

Many of you probably have not seen Baby Einstein but I will show you a random 20-second clip from Baby Einstein day on the farm and here it is.

[Video Clip]

In that 20-second clip, there were seven scene changes, about one every three seconds. It’s about the most exhausting day on the farm since John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. And of course, it’s nothing like being on a real farm, right? Adults watching this find it discombobulating, because your mind is trying to make a coherent narrative out of this, and there is no coherent narrative. It jumps all over the place. But babies aren’t trying to make a coherent narrative out of it; they’re not capable of doing that. It’s all of that screen change, all of that stimulation that’s keeping them actually engaged in the screen.

So we’ve had for a while, what we call the overstimulation hypothesis, which is that prolonged exposure to this rapid image change during this critical window of brain development would precondition the mind to expect high levels of input, and that would lead to inattention in later life. So you watched enough Baby Einstein day on the farm as a baby and when you go to a farm as a school-age child it’s boring; it’s too slow: how come there’s no sheep suddenly popping into my face? How come there’s no marionette going back and forth? Why do I have to walk from here to there? That’s the general idea that you’re conditioning the mind to that reality which doesn’t actually exist.

And we tested this some years ago and what we found was that the more television children watched before age 3, the more likely they were to actually have attentional problems at school age. Specifically for each hour that they watched before the age of three, their chances of having attentional problems was increased by about 10%. So a child who watched two hours of TV a day before the age of three would be 20% more likely to have attention problems compared to a child who watched none.

Now what else did we find? We found that the more cognitive stimulation children received, and we measure cognitive stimulation in terms of how often parents read to their child, how often they took them to the museum, how often they sang to them, we found that cognitive stimulation reduced the chances of attentional problems later in life. In fact, each hour of cognitive stimulation reduced them by about 30%. So if you will, these are two sides of the same coin. There are certain things that we can do early on in our children’s lives that enhance their ability to pay attention and certain things that we can do early on that actually impede them.

Now if our hypothesis was right that it’s based on the pacing of the programs, then you might imagine that what children watch actually is important. And so content would be key. And I’ll give you two examples of content to illustrate that point.

The first is The Powerpuff Girls Movie, the right mix of sugar and spice for satisfying rush. I don’t know how many of you have seen that but here’s a scene from that.

[Video clip]

Okay. So that was again — you can see a lot of rapid sequencing. In fact, this was the first movie that was ever rated PG for non-stop frenetic animated action. I’m not — I’m not making it up, that’s the back of the box there. I want to contrast that with something that I’m sure you’re all very familiar with, really needs no introduction but this is a clip from Mr. Rogers for you to watch.

[Video clip]

So Fred Rogers invented reality TV, he’s not credited with. Actually it’s not reality, right? It’s even slower pace than reality. But the waitress says ‘I’m awfully busy’ but she doesn’t seem the least bit hurried. So you can see that there are very very real differences in pacing and when we followed up our study with a subsequent experiments to look at what children actually watched; what you see is that educational programs like Mr. Rogers posed no increased risk of attentional problems. Entertainment programs like The Powerpuff Girls Movie increased the chances by about 60%, and violent programs and which I didn’t show you increases it even by more than 100% and violent programs are typically even more rapidly sequencing.

Now in the last year we’ve been building actually a mouse model of television viewing in my lab and you are now watching Now TV — the sounds are from the Cartoon Network and the lights are basically photo rhythmically generated by those sounds. This is what it looks like. These are the TV lounges here that the mice live in and they have speakers above and lights around them and what we do is we start about 10 days of life and these mice watch TV six hours a day for 42 days. It’s basically the entire childhood spent in front of the television which is not uncommon these days for some children even. And then ten days later we actually assess their behavior in a few ways I want to show with you.

The first test we do measures their activity and risk-taking. Now we do what’s called the open field test. Now mice have two kind of competing instincts, you’ll see them here. One is to avoid being in the middle of anything, because of course mice have very few friends and being in the middle of this open field is risky. But of course, they have a competing interest — instinct to forage for food. So at some point they do need to go into the middle and explore their environment.

Now we put these mice in here and test them and we exploit the fact that it’s a white mouse on a black background and with a computer above we can actually track their movement. And you can see it on the left is sort of a normal mouse spending most of its time around the perimeter. But look at the one on the right, notice how much time it spends in the middle but also notice just how much general activity this mouse is actually exhibiting. So this is both a hyperactive and a risk-taking mouse.

And when we look at our over-stimulated compared to our controlled mice, we find that the over-stimulated mice spend more time in the center and they enter the center more than the regular mice do.

The next test we do is what’s called a novel object recognition and this tests short-term memory and learning. We put a mouse in a box with two objects, and the mouse will explore both of them, get to know them, if you will. And then we take the mouse out and an hour later we replace one object with a novel object. And we see how much time the mouse spends on each object.

Now the mouse that is learning that has good short-term memory will spend more time on the novel object, and you can see that here, as opposed to the one on the right which is spending the same amount of time with both objects.

And what did we find? Well, we found that our controlled mice, our normal mice, spent 75% of their time with a novel object. But look at what our TV viewing our over-stimulated mice did. They spent the exact same amount of time. It was as if they couldn’t distinguish the two objects or they didn’t care but one way or another they were not learning, they were not acting like normal mice.

And I want to talk a little bit about a study we did with children as a building block study. It was a randomized trial here in a low-income clinic in Seattle. We took 200 children who were 18 to 24 months of age and we gave half of them blocks at the beginning of the study and half of the blocks at the end. And their parents got, we call, blocktivities monthly. These were ways to play with your children with blocks, sort the blocks, stack the blocks, count the blocks, really simple things that come naturally to a lot of parents but what a lot of low-income parents don’t do with their children regularly.

And here’s what happened. The children who got the blocks, 59% of them played with them on a typical day, as opposed to 13% who didn’t get the blocks initially. They played for about 20 minutes a day, about one-and-a-half episodes a day and about 65% of the time was with their parent.

And then six months later, we assessed their language, and see on the right here that the kids who got the blocks late scored in the 42^nd percentile which is below average but unfortunately not uncommon in low-income populations in Seattle and for that matter around the world. And the kids who got the blocks, they actually scored 56 percentile, significantly better and slightly above average. So promoting that kind of interactive play actually promoted language development in these young children.

So I want to conclude by impressing on you that early childhood is very important for children — and for mice — and it’s critical to their development. And we need more real-time play today and less fast paced media particularly for young children. It’s vitally important that we have that, because if we change the beginning of the story, we change the whole story.

Thank you very very much.

Related Posts

• Transcript of Bryant Lin’s Commencement Speech At 2025 Stanford School of Medicine Graduation
• Transcript of What is Fair and What is Just? – Julian Burnside
• Transcript of Why Do Our Brains Love Music? – Dr. John Rehner Iversen
• Transcript of Pope Leo XIV Remarks To U.S. Audience For First Time In Chicago
• Transcript of Angela Duckworth’s Commencement Speech to 2025 Penn GSE Graduates