The addiction to electronics, and especially cell phones, has become a world wide problem even though the majority of people refuse, as do all addicts, to understand and realize that they are addicted. One of the world’s leading researchers and experts on addiction in general, and electronic addiction in particular, Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, posits in his new book, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids, how neurological damage is being done to young brains who are constantly addicted to some sort of electronic screen.
Dr. Kardaras said of the new addiction that, “I’ve treated hundreds of heroin and crystal meth addicts and what I can say is that it’s easier to treat a heroin addict than it is a true screen addict.”
Through years of experiments and treating addicts, he states that young children are damaging their ability to grow as humans and to be able to properly function as an adult in our society. For Kardras, constant screen time is no different from the heroin addict who is constantly shooting up.
Dr. Kardras also reveals in his book how game designers constantly test the action in their games while constantly monitoring their human test subjects’ levels of dopamine and adrenaline. The object, for the game companies, of course, is to make their games as highly addictive as possible. Just like the pharmaceutical companies and the street drug dealers. In addition, he noted, these game companies hire the best neuro scientists and behaioral psycholgists they can find so that they can help to make the games as highly addictive as they can possibly be. It is hoped, he says, that society will finally recognize the electronic addiction to the point where children will not be allowed to become addicts before their brains are developed enough to process it all.
Dr. Kardras has clinically worked with well over 1,000 children and teenagers and says that, “One of the most amazing things I observed was that kids raised from an early age on a high tech/high screen diet seemed to suffer from what seems to be a digital malaise. They were… ‘uninterested and uninteresting’. Bored and boring, they lacked a sense of wonder and imagination… they didn’t know, or care to know, about what was happening around them in the world. All that seemed to drive them was a perpetual need to be stimulated and entertained by their digital devices.”
When children are naturally engaged in normal childhood play, Kardras says, that is when neurons are most developed and integrated into the brain. When however, children are sitting passively before a screen, the neurons are not only not developing, but the ones that are there are not being strengthened. They are being eroded.
“Kids are so habituated,” Dr. Kardras says, “to their hyper stimulating and dopamine activating immersive screen reality that they choose to stay in their electronic matrix. The reason this effect is more powerful on children than adults – although we all know of many adults who are screen addicted – is that children still don’t have a fully developed frontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls functioning, decision making and impulse control.”
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