Hello, and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. So glad you could carve out this little 10, 10, 12 minutes again, this week to tune in. I've been, I was struck by some research I was reading this this week, into the question around dopamine.
And dopamine, as we know, as many of us have been reading articles about this, it's coming up more and more as a question and a dynamic around the use of screens. Dopamine is a neural transmitter in our brains that activates a feeling, and we've long known this, a feeling of pleasure and reward. And it's a necessary and it's a wonderful part of just being a human being to have that pleasure and to feel rewarded.
But what video games, social networking, and much of this of the online and screen world is doing now, is that it's very deliberately designed to give the dopamine neural transmitter a boost. It's deliberately designed to actually bathe a child or a young person's brain in dopamine. So they start to get a very high level of pleasure, reward, pleasure and reward.
This cycle sets up. And even to the point where it becomes troubling at how a child's system is starting to be wired to expect this. I went to a conference a little while ago where there was a workshop and a very well known neurologist and a neuropsychologist, the two people were presenting, and they put up 12 slides.
And these slides were of brain imaging of various kinds, and they asked the people in the room to have a guess at what they would diagnose this brain activity as, what was going on. And there was a bit of conversation about it. And the basic consensus was that this was the brain images of a person suffering from the illness of addiction.
And they said, absolutely right. Any more information? And a couple of people there said, well, I specialize in this field, and that really looks to me like cocaine addiction, because the dopamine centers are transmitting so heavily, are lighting up so much. And the presenter says, you're absolutely right.
You are right. So what are the other six? Now, remember, there were 12, right? So there were six other slides, six other cross sections, other images. And it turns out that they were images of children who were playing video games.
And this group of people who are very knowledgeable about, who are neuropsychologists, most of them, and had specializations in addiction, some of them, had not been able to tell the difference between cocaine use and gaming. The whistle was being blown for a long time on the gaming industry, the social networking industry, and so on, that they have studied the psychological data, they've studied the neuropsych data, and they absolutely know how to flood a child's system with dopamine. So much so that screen addiction is now a formal diagnosis in many countries.
But the thing that I wanted to mention was a little bit more to do with us as parents, so that this does as well, is that dopamine has a deeper aspect, and it's not talked about quite enough. And I want to raise it, there's some articles about this, but I want to raise this up a little bit, about consciousness. And it answers the question of why kids react sometimes with such upset and even aggression when we shut off the device.
Why do they do that? The answer lies in the deeper aspects of dopamine, in that dopamine isn't just pleasure and reward, it's desire and safety. And there's an aspect of safety involved in this, so that when a child is using a device, because of the flooding of dopamine, they get this very primitive message that you are safe here. As long as you're in my environment, in the gaming, in the social networking, in the computer environment, you are safe.
You have enough. And very primitively, the brain is interpreting this as, I have shelter, and I have food, I have safety. And this is a sort of a baseline translation of dopamine for the brain.
So therefore, when we take the device away from a child, we're removing their safety, we're removing their nutrients, we're removing, in a sense, what the brain thinks of as what I need to survive. So one comment, one parent commented to me, I feel like I've become the screen police and I'm sick of it, but it's more serious than just the police. We're not just the police to the child's brain, we're a predator.
We're actually posing threat. We are taking away, on a very primitive level, a child's feeling of safety, of nurturance, of shelter. And some kids can react badly.
Other kids can react very aggressively to us doing that. And this is partly the answer as to why we encounter this kind of aggression, because we've now set ourselves up in this predatory role, or in this invader role, where we're invading the shores and burning down their neural village. And my deep concern about this is it is exactly the opposite to what us all, every parent wants to have a loving and deep connection and attachment with a child.
And how can we do that as well as we could and realize that as fully as is possible, if we're regularly being seen as a predator or an invader? It runs counter to what we're actually, our long and deep held wishes are for our family. And you know what? It's not the children's fault. It's not their fault.
But it is a dynamic. And it is happening on a daily basis. If we put these devices in our kids' hands, they get bathed in dopamine.
And then we try and take them away. So this aspect of what's going on with screens, I think, you know, in this whole conversation around screens for kids, it's the best we can do to simply inform ourselves, to get as much information as we can. But, you know, it's hard if we look around and everyone else is doing it and all these kids and they're 9, 10, 11 years old and little ones, little babies have got iPads.
And we look at the new normal of that. And a lot of that, the decisions around to do that, perhaps have needed more information. And I think before we put screens in our kids' hands, or even after we've done it, if they've already got access to all this stuff, it's important to know that closing the screen down is a way in which we are unwittingly disconnecting ourselves from our children over and over.
So what to do? If you don't have screens in your child's lives, then you're good to go. You know, if you do have screens in your children's lives, then you maybe want to do a screen detox, a 28-day brain reset. Victoria Dunkley, D-U-N-C-K-L-E-Y, Victoria Dunkley, M.D., has one of the very best websites and books called A 28-Day Brain Reset on this.
But if you don't want to go down that route, at least before taking the screen away from a child, sit with them, rub their back, be with them. Maybe speak to them a little bit. Start pulling them away more slowly from the screen.
They won't like it. And they'll go, Mom, just leave me alone. I'm playing.
Sit with them. Be with them. Touch them.
Rub their shoulders. Stroke their hair. Just establish some kind of connection.
And then you can have a better chance of not being seen quite in that predatory role. Or perhaps less, less so. So I hope this has given a little more information and has pulled back the curtains on why kids react so badly when we try to take the screens away from them.
As always, I sure hope that was helpful, particularly in your decision-making around screens. Bye-bye for now.
