How computers can harm your children's future… by damaging their brains
By Sam PascuaChildren who spend hour after hour on the computer may be damaging a vital part of their brains. Here, in a stark warning, Baroness Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution and Oxford Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology, explains how this could be creating a generation blighted by obesity and gambling.
One can look at the world through experience or poetry, or one can view it in terms of science. Science does not invalidate other ways of perceiving things, but it can help explain what we see. And it can do so with regard to young people who spend several hours of the day playing computer games, or in online chatrooms.
The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to every event. We cannot complacently take it that our ways of learning and thinking will remain constant. Humans are highly responsive to change and so quick to adapt – in part because of the prefrontal cortex.
This area of the brain is more evolved in humans than in any other creature. It also forms late in our development, not becoming fully active until our teenage years.
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