If your attention gets diverted in different directions by smartphones and other digital devices, take note: Media multitasking has now been linked to obesity.
Digital device overload linked to obesity risk
Let’s order lunch in!
Technology
Association Between Screen Time and Children’s Performance on a Developmental Screening Test
Results Of the 2441 children included in the analysis, 1169 (47.9%) were boys. A random-intercepts, cross-lagged panel model revealed that higher levels of screen time at 24 and 36 months were significantly associated with poorer performance on developmental screening tests at 36 months (β, −0.08; 95% CI, −0.13 to −0.02) and 60 months (β, −0.06; 95% CI, −0.13 to −0.02), respectively. These within-person (time-varying) associations statistically controlled for between-person (stable) differences.
Conclusions and Relevance The results of this study support the directional association between screen time and child development. Recommendations include encouraging family media plans, as well as managing screen time, to offset the potential consequences of excess use.
JAMA article here.
Quit Social Media – Dr. Cal Newport
Put The Phone Away
Published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, the most recent study linking poor mental health conditions to social media use has added even more evidence to back up the theory. The researchers from the University of Pennsylvania intentionally designed their experiment to be more comprehensive than previous studies on the topic. Rather than relying on short-term lab data or self-reported questionnaires, they recruited 143 undergraduate students to share screenshots of their Phone battery screens over a week to collect data on how much they were using social media apps including Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram.
Earlier this year I felt it was important to Put The Phone Down….
With increasing scientific evidence you need to put the phone away.
Unless you want a self-imposed endless cycle of depression and misery.
There’s always Wellbutrin.
Amazon patents Alexa tech to tell if you’re sick, depressed
Only two percent of teens read newspaper, one-third have not read book for pleasure in last year
“Think about how difficult it must be to read even five pages of an 800-page college textbook when you’ve been used to spending most of your time switching between one digital activity and another in a matter of seconds,” she added. “It really highlights the challenges students and faculty both face in the current era.”
My random thoughts:
- ADHD
- Bad parenting
- Technology addiction
- Social media is not social
- Social media is evil
- The slow agonizing death of newspapers
- Colleges and universities will be challenged
- Put the cellphone down and keep your hands where I can see them.
There is a link to the full study in the source article.
Social Isolation Transforms the Brain
In mice.
Confirming and extending previous observations, the researchers showed that prolonged social isolation leads to a broad array of behavioral changes in mice. These include increased aggressiveness towards unfamiliar mice, persistent fear, and hypersensitivity to threatening stimuli. For example, when encountering a threatening stimulus, mice that have been socially isolated remain frozen in place long after the threat has passed, whereas normal mice stop freezing soon after the threat is removed. These effects are seen when mice are subjected to two weeks of social isolation, but not to short-term social isolation — 24 hours — suggesting that the observed changes in aggression and fear responses require chronic isolation.
Though the work was done in mice, it has potential implications for understanding how chronic stress affects humans.
Get out of the house. Socialize with friends and family. Leave the cell phone at home.
Social media is not social. It’s a serious public health problem for the brainwashed masses with addictive behaviors.
Read the source article here.
When Teens Cyberbully Themselves (another reason to take the phone away)
Recent research and clinical psychologists now suggest that some adolescents are engaging in a newer form of self-aggression — digital self-harm. They’re anonymously posting mean and derogatory comments about themselves on social media.
Digital self-harm.
Parents – take the phone away.
Very interesting article. HT to naked capitalism.
When the product is “free,” WE are the product
There are many people who think nothing of it. They laugh at us. For them, we’re fossils that just cannot grasp the modern world where private life takes place on the Internet and is stored forever in the cloud. Formerly innocuous devices like toothbrushes, dolls, TVs, thermostats, fridges, mattresses, or toilet-paper dispensers, that are everywhere around the house, will see to it that more and more personal and even intimate data gets uploaded to the cloud as the Internet of Things invades not only our home but our body cavities…
But there will be a day when we will be forced to surrender our data to get health insurance, drive a car, or have a refrigerator and a thermostat in the house. This is where this is going. Why? Because data is where the money is. And because many consumers are embracing it.
A toothbrush that sends your personal usage data to “The Cloud”.
The Pleasures of Life without Social Media
The fact of the matter is that we do not need the Internet, we do not need social media, and we certainly do not need “smart phones”. What are you, a brain surgeon, that you always have to be available in case of an emergency call? Listen to what people say when they use these “essential” gadgets, as I listen to the hordes on campus—the most typical utterances are: “Hey, what’s up? Yeah I’m on the escalator. Ok, see ya later”. Impressive. Clearly, it’s money well spent. It is almost as if individuals have become afraid of a moment of silence, possibly because they intuitively fear discovering that inside, they are empty…
If you are a professor, you learn that the years (or decades) spent acquiring knowledge in a subject area, plus all the resources devoted to the task, not to mention the training that went into preparing you, are worthless: everybody else always knows better, with their deep knowledge gained on the fly. Anti-intellectualism does not just come from outside the university’s walls. You get lectured at by snarky graduate students with deep insecurities who fashion themselves as activists, called “stupid” by barely literate undergraduate students who misspell their protest signs, and are immediately denounced as “racist” for the mere act of disagreeing with one of these imbeciles.
HT to WordPress and the Fabius Maximus websites.
This is the best essay I’ve read in a long time. Please take the time to read the entire essay and share with family and friends who actually possess critical thinking skills.
And I thought that Twitter as a porno platform was bad…
lifeunderwriter.net 
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