Are screens rewiring the brain: New study finds how experience shapes it

There may be one more reason to rethink how much time your children spend on screens. It can permanently alter their brains, according to a new paper that reviewed current literature.A groundbreaking framework from neuroscientists in Switzerland and the United States explores how screens, trauma, and early experience literally shape the developing brain, and why some windows for learning slam shut and cannot reopen. The conceptual paper is published in the journal Brain Health.What is learnt in the cradle lasts to the tomb could be true after all. The developing brain integrates experience until the age of 25. Researchers at Lausanne University and SUNY Upstate Medical University found that our sensory experiences, movement and social relations growing up, along with our culture and environment, profoundly and sometimes irreversibly determine who we become. They named it the criticome, which is the complete record of sensory, motor, social, cultural and environmental experience the brain integrates during critical periods of synaptic plasticity, from before birth through approximately age 25.What the brain takes in during these early years has a lasting impact. If something is missing or goes in the wrong way, it is hard to fix later.“The main takeaway is that there is a critical window of development that goes from birth all the way up to 25 years,” Dr Julio Licinio, coauthor of the review and a distinguished professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, said, adding that what is imprinted on the brain then will “determine who you are for the rest of your life.”So what does increased screen use during this critical window mean? The researchers don’t know what screen-saturated childhoods are producing. According to Licinio, that insight will require decades of research. However, he doesn’t want parents to wait until then.Not just children and adolescents, but also youngsters are using screens at scales no previous generation has known, during the precise windows when the criticome is most malleable. The researchers don’t know exactly what effect this will have, but they are urging that the question should be addressed scientifically, not debated emotionally.“We wrote this for the clinician asking the right questions without quite having the vocabulary. It is also for the educator wondering why second-language instruction works so much better at five than at fifteen, and for the policymaker trying to understand why early-childhood investment yields the returns it does. They are the same question,” Dr Julio Licinio said.