AoW: “Wired for Distraction: Kids and Social Media” Name: ______________
By Dalton Conley Saturday, Mar. 19, 2011 Time Period: __ Date: ______
Read the article carefully and make annotations in the margins. Your annotations (notes) should include: comments that show you todateunderstand the article (main ideas, summary statements, etc.); questions that show you are thinking about what you are reading; notes that differentiate between fact and opinion占比怎么计算; and other obrvations, comments, connections and thoughts.
Most parents who worry about their kids' online activity focus on the people or content their children might encounter: Are they being cyberbullied? Do they have access to age-inappropriate material? Can xual predators reach them? What I worry about, as a sociobiologist, is not what my kids are doing on the Internet but what all this connectivity is doing to their brains. Scientific evidence increasingly suggests that, amid all the texting, poking and surfing, our children's digital lives are turning them into much different creatures from us — and not necessarily for the better.
流行音乐
For starters, there is the problem of what some rearchers refer to as continuous partial attention, a term coined by former Microsoft executive Linda Stone. We know the dangers of texting or talking on the phone while operating a motor vehicle — but what about when forming a brain? A Kair Family Foundation report relead last year found that on average, children ages 8 to 18 spend 7 hours and 38 min. a day using entertainment media. And if you count each content stream parately — a lot of kids, for example, text while watching TV — they are logging almost 11 hours of media usage a day.
You (or your children) might think the people who have had the most practice dealing with distractions would be the most adept at multitasking. But a 2009 study found that when extraneous information was prented, participants who (on the basis of their answers to a study questionnaire) did a lot of media multitasking performed wor on a test than tho who don't do much media multitasking. In the test, a trio of Stanford University rearchers showed college students an image of a bunch of rectangles in various orientations and asked them to focus on a couple of red ones in particular. Then the stud
ents were shown a cond, very similar image and asked if the red rectangles had been rotated. The heavy media multitaskers were wrong more often — becau, the study concluded, they are more nsitive to distracting stimuli than light media multitaskers are.
美容顾问We have parate circuits, it turns out, for top-down focus — i.e., when we t our mind to concentrate on something — and reactive attention, when our brain reflexively tunes in to novel stimuli. We obviously need both for survival, whether in the wilds of prehistory or while crossing a street today, but our saturated media univer has perhaps privileged the latter form and is wiring our kids' brains differently. "Each time we get a message or text," Anthony Wagner, one of the Stanford study's co-authors, speculates, "our dopamine reward circuits probably get activated, since the desire for social connection is so wired into us." The result, he suggests, could be a forward-feeding cycle in which we pay more and more attention to environmental stimuli — Hey, another text! — at the expen of focus.
春节旅游去哪里好
Constant distraction affects not only how well kids learn but also how their brains absorb t
he new information. In 2006, UCLA scientists showed that multitaskers and focud learners deploy different parts of the brain when they learn the same thing. Multitaskers fire up their striatum, which encodes the learning more like habit, or what's known as procedural memory. Meanwhile, tho who were allowed to focus on the task without distraction relied on the hippocampus, which is at the heart of the declarative memory circuit that comes into play, say, in math class when you need to apply abstract rules to novel problems. The upshot of the study was that the focurs could apply the new skill more broadly but the multitaskers could not. Multitaskers' reliance on rote habit would be all well and good if we want our offspring to work on asmbly lines, but to do the kind of high-level thinking that experts agree will be key to getting well-paying jobs, we'd better exerci our collective hippocampus.
Some technology obrvers, like Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, claim that social media are getting a bum rap and that the real problem lies in the hyperprotective way we parent today. "Over and over, kids tell me that they'd rather get together in person, but then they list off all of the things that make doing
21条so impossible" — like their overscheduled after-school lives or parents' fears of kids navigating the streets alone, she says.
Stone has obrved something similar in technology u among adolescents: "When they're with friends, they won't answer their cell phone. And if they get an SMS, they will just answer, 'BZ, L8R.' " Perhaps this is a sign that our kids will be better than we are at learning how to prioritize tasks — something that will come in handy when they become workers and spous and parents.
>中国漫画史
