Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

longevity.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 201 posts

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#161

Post by thierrydamiba »

andai wrote: post #62
frereubu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like hocus pocus to me, along the lines of the claim that phone alert tones activate the "love centre" of the brain. Just so happens that the "love centre" is also the "vomiting centre" along with a load of other stuff. I'd treat this hand-wavy claim with the same kind of skepticism - your counter-example is an excellent one. I agree that looking at a phone first thing in the morning is a bad idea, but fo…

I got into "deep work" a while ago, keeping my internet off until noon every day. It blew my mind how calm and focused I was when I didn't fill my head with nonsense first thing in the morning.

I think it also depends on what you’re doing on your phone. Big difference between waking up and checking Twitter and waking up and messaging a loved one across the world.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#162

Post by MaxMatti »

andai wrote: post #62
frereubu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like hocus pocus to me, along the lines of the claim that phone alert tones activate the "love centre" of the brain. Just so happens that the "love centre" is also the "vomiting centre" along with a load of other stuff. I'd treat this hand-wavy claim with the same kind of skepticism - your counter-example is an excellent one. I agree that looking at a phone first thing in the morning is a bad idea, but fo…

I got into "deep work" a while ago, keeping my internet off until noon every day. It blew my mind how calm and focused I was when I didn't fill my head with nonsense first thing in the morning.

I'm unsure how much of a difference that really makes as there's lots of distractions in my (and probably most peoples) morning routine that are not related to my phone. Boring things like the hygiene routine but also things that come up and require thought such as (almost) empty grocery items or things related to the commute such as radio in the car or ads in public transit. While most of these are not specifically engineered to be attention seeking, I still see most of them as distracting and my focus only starts when I sit down to do some work.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#163

Post by ninalanyon »

andai wrote: post #62
frereubu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like hocus pocus to me, along the lines of the claim that phone alert tones activate the "love centre" of the brain. Just so happens that the "love centre" is also the "vomiting centre" along with a load of other stuff. I'd treat this hand-wavy claim with the same kind of skepticism - your counter-example is an excellent one. I agree that looking at a phone first thing in the morning is a bad idea, but fo…

I got into "deep work" a while ago, keeping my internet off until noon every day. It blew my mind how calm and focused I was when I didn't fill my head with nonsense first thing in the morning.

I generally avoided opening my email until lunchtime for the same reason. That meant I could work all morning while I was fresh and alert on the things that I had planned the day before. Then I'd spend the afternoon on the more administrative side of software development including planning what to do the next day.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#164

Post by ninalanyon »

defyonce wrote: post #101
frereubu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like hocus pocus to me, along the lines of the claim that phone alert tones activate the "love centre" of the brain. Just so happens that the "love centre" is also the "vomiting centre" along with a load of other stuff. I'd treat this hand-wavy claim with the same kind of skepticism - your counter-example is an excellent one. I agree that looking at a phone first thing in the morning is a bad idea, but fo…

There is only one reason why my phone alerts: something gone wrong, and they need my attention. I hate phone alerts with all my soul. I wish they never existed as a concept.

You do know that you can turn alerts off?

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#165

Post by portaouflop »

OJFord wrote: post #117
portaouflop wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it you you’re sarcastic but natural is dying at age twenty from a broken leg, miss me with natural living

I know it's just an example, but it didn't take modern medicine for us not to die of broken legs at twenty. There's some risks sure, but the norm was presumably lying down and resting because it (especially doing anything else) bloody hurts, it gradually healing, and then varying degrees of hobbling for the rest of life because it healed without a splint. (And then it wouldn't be that surprising I don't think if we f…

We didn’t need modern medicine to heal broken bones but for sure more than what was „naturally“ available.

You can switch out broken bones for „being dragged from the campfire into the dark and devoured“ - another natural occurrence that I gladly live without

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#166

Post by [deleted] »

MrJagil wrote: post #11

“One of the biggest issues with picking up the phone right away in the morning is that when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler. “You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning. On a physiological level, it’s the same thing.” This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at m…

[deleted]

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#168

Post by moron4hire »

frereubu wrote: post #21
MrJagil wrote: post #11

“One of the biggest issues with picking up the phone right away in the morning is that when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler. “You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning. On a physiological level, it’s the same thing.” This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at m…

This sounds like hocus pocus to me, along the lines of the claim that phone alert tones activate the "love centre" of the brain. Just so happens that the "love centre" is also the "vomiting centre" along with a load of other stuff. I'd treat this hand-wavy claim with the same kind of skepticism - your counter-example is an excellent one. I agree that looking at a phone first thing in the morning is a bad idea, but fo…

Other things that are regularly close to my face: my glasses, several pillows in my bed, my fork as I eat, my children as I hug them.

Of course, my children can also jam their face into mine when they're being all manic and running around and that's not fun

But clearly, there is a big difference between "things I choose to put in front of my face" and "things that appear in front of my face outside of my own agency".

Similar to how you can't tickle yourself.

That wasn't even hard to figure out. First 15 minutes of the day, haven't gotten out of bed yet, with my phone in my face.

I also find it interesting how these sorts of articles never talk about reading books. I find that reading novels too much can also give me feelings of being stuck, not wanting to do anything else, just trundling along doing the same activity over and over again. It's how I got through all 9 books in The Expanse series in only a couple of months.

The problem isn't screens or light or not seeing the sky. It's over indulgence in consumption. It's just plain ol' addiction.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#169

Post by portaouflop »

danielbln wrote: post #132
portaouflop wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit tangential but how does a digital book mess up your eyes? Or a physical one. I don’t think reading has any effect on your eyesight. People are quick nowadays (or always have been) to bring out the good old „todays kids are rotten to the core“ trope - just because it’s now you who is old and doesn’t get how the world moved on, doesn’t mean it’s any different to the centuries of complaining about the youth before…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9139974/ Reading can absolutely have an impact on the eyes. Close distance reading as well as lack of natural light seem to be conditions that can favor e.g. myopia.

Yes in some cases close distance maybe causes myopia in very young children - this is not the same as „reading is dangerous for your eyes“.

In general it’s good to take care of your eyes, like you do for the rest of the body and doing anything 8h+ without pause is bad.

But concluding that there is some kind of danger associated with reading is nonsense. Almost anything else you do is more dangerous.

Not convinced that the study you posted is evidence of reading being dangerous: >This is a cross-sectional study and therefore causal relationship could not be determined. The data analyzed in the study were drawn from a questionnaire study conducted about 40 years ago

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#170

Post by joenot443 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #58

While trying to go a bit deeper into the sources, they honestly feel extremely weak... An example of how negative impact on the brain is backed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11469-019-00182-2 From the abstract: > we systematically identified articles meeting the following inclusion criteria: published in English between January 1999–July 2019; human or animal subjects; primary and secondary sources incl…

The author's fairly active elsewhere online, looks like she's a "Health Coach" at UC San Diego with a MS in Kinesiology.

This isn't science journalism, it's closer to influencer health blogging. My impression is that the author doesn't have a background in technical writing and probably wrote this for an audience different from the typical HN crowd.

Post reply on HN