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How does technology affects the development of children’s minds?
Technology
The sad reality is that, nowadays, babies learn to unlock their phones before adding, building sentences, or dressing autonomously. They learn to be distracted with amazing ease.
As parents, we use this resource multiple times. If we go out to dinner, we will enjoy a concert or take our children to the hairdresser; mobile is the way to entertain and not disturb. They play a game or a YouTube video and the child disappears.
This has innumerable consequences for children’s development, but we want to emphasize two.
Distraction instead of tolerance for frustration or effort
The human mind is very comfortable. It is always governed by the law of minimum effort. If you find shortcuts, data you can forget, or efforts to save, it will always take them.
The child’s brain does not like to get frustrated and will never exert itself if it is not through an adult.
There are countless situations in which parents require the attention and effort of the child so that the child achieves the necessary autonomy.
Let’s take a simple example: learn to eat on a plate and with cutlery. This simple task that we all have so automated was a great effort when we were little. Our parents had to sit with us day after day, creating a habit that brought frustrations, stains, and difficulties.
All parents know the sensation of seeing your child stain from head to toe while dining when you already had him bathed and clean. How slow and tedious it is that he picks up the spoon by himself and manages to bring it to his mouth.
Many times we want to save time and effort and give them food. However, that frustration is part of the trial-and-error learning process that will create the habit and make you independent.
However, if when the child has to make an effort to hit and put the food in his mouth, we distract him with a video of the mobile, his brain disperses. Without realizing it we are creating the mental association that every time a situation comes in which to make an effort it will not be necessary to do so, there will be a distraction.
It is impossible for our children to maintain sustained attention if we use these mechanisms frequently.
When children are young they need to fantasize about building the world and creating stories in their heads. In this way, they can imagine themselves as teachers, firefighters, singers, or doctors.
It is important that they take a piece of cardboard and pretend that it is a magic wand, that they paint a dragon on a sheet and pretend to defeat it.
If we listen to 3-year-olds playing by themselves (or with their non-interactive toys) you will see exactly what “symbolic play” means. It means being able to use imagination and symbolism in what surrounds us; it is always a unique and wonderful creation of children’s minds.
Obviously we are not talking about a game whose direct purpose is educational, it is not that they learn and internalize rules, but something very important and that will determine their cognitive development: the ability to think, to symbolize the world, to understand ourselves with a common language.
Whether the child can understand and internalize the reality around him depends, in part, on whether he can enjoy this type of creative play.
Movies, video games, or apps do not allow children to create (from the verb create) anything of their own. They can interact, they can be entertaining or even educational, but they shouldn’t take up most of your leisure time.
As we have said before, the brain, in general, is lazy and if it can save the effort it will. Therefore, you will always choose a screen where you “get it all done” over the effort of a game where you have to make up your own stories. However, now we know the great importance of those inventions and fantasies that he develops when he plays.
Consequences of early abuse of technologies
In the long term, when children enter preadolescence, the abuse of screens during cognitive development usually means that they do not have hobbies, they are not particularly interested in anything and they are not able to get bored.
They need their dose of images, mobile, YouTube, or Instagram. They are less creative, they have fewer concerns and sometimes, the most serious, they have failed to symbolize the world in their minds.
It is essential that children learn to be bored, to entertain themselves (without anything, being with themselves), to wait, to maintain attention, to be frustrated, and to choose. Aspects that a mobile or tablet does not provide you.
But of course, we are in society, our babies grow up, they go to school and before arriving at the institute their friends already have mobiles. They soon start asking for a smartphone of their own.
At what age is it recommended that a child have a mobile?
The age at which minors have their first smartphone has plummeted in the last decade.
Personally I have seen 2-year-olds quietly unlock their parents’ mobile. 3-year-old children unlock it and open a video or game player application completely autonomously. And to some 10-year-olds who are already asking for the latest iPhone on the market. The situation is discouraging.
Hamza Fazal is a reporter for The Hear UP. After graduating from the University of Abbottabad, Hamza got an internship at the NPR and worked as a reporter and producer. Hamza has also worked as a reporter for the Medium. Hamza covers health and science for The Hear UP.
Vice reports that a physicist working at the University of Bristol in the UK has potentially discovered quantum wormholes. Researcher Hatim Salih has proposed an experiment that makes a type of teleportation called “counter-transportation” realistically feasible. However, this isn’t exactly the Star Trek transporter many sci-fi fans have dreamed of over the years. Here’s everything you need to know about Salih’s quantum wormhole experiment.
Salih’s quantum wormhole is a huge scientific breakthrough.
The general theory of relativity of the famous scientist Albert Einstein affirms that hypothetical “bridges” are possible between two points in space-time. However, since 1935, when Einstein presented his theory, the existence of wormholes has been purely hypothetical. However, Salih’s experiment paves the potential way to achieve the longstanding goal of traversing a rift in space-time.
Counterportation comes from “counterfactual” and “transportation” and while similar to teleportation, the two terms are not synonymous. “Counterportation gives you the end goal of recreating an object in space,” Salih said. “[B] but we can make sure nothing happened.”
Although unfortunately, for Salih to achieve true counterportation, they’ll have to wait a few years. The quantum computers necessary to perform the task don’t exist yet in 2023. “If counterportation is to be realized, an entirely new type of quantum computer has to be built,” Salih said. However, development is underway, and Salih hopes to complete it in three to four years.
Wormholes are a classic trope of science fiction in popular media, if only because they provide such a handy futuristic plot device to avoid the issue of violating relativity with faster-than-light travel. In reality, they are purely theoretical. Unlike black holes—also once thought to be purely theoretical—no evidence for an actual wormhole has ever been found, although they are fascinating from an abstract theoretical physics perceptive. You might be forgiven for thinking that undiscovered status had changed if you only read the headlines this week announcing that physicists had used a quantum computer to make a wormhole, reporting on a new paper published in Nature.
Let’s set the record straight right away: This isn’t a bona fide traversable wormhole—i.e., a bridge between two regions of spacetime connecting the mouth of one black hole to another, through which a physical object can pass—in any real, physical sense. “There’s a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality,” co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab said during a media briefing this week. “So don’t hold your breath about sending your dog through a wormhole.” But it’s still a pretty clever, nifty experiment in its own right that provides a tantalizing proof of principle to the kinds of quantum-scale physics experiments that might be possible as quantum computers continue to improve.
“It’s not the real thing; it’s not even close to the real thing; it’s barely even a simulation of something-not-close-to-the-real-thing,” physicist Matt Strassler wrote on his blog. “Could this method lead to a simulation of a real wormhole someday? Maybe in the distant future. Could it lead to making a real wormhole? Never. Don’t get me wrong. What they did is pretty cool! But the hype in the press?
The success of this experiment could change the field of physics forever.
Additionally, Salih posits that this work is tantamount to the particle acceleration work at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). “This work will be in the spirit of the multi-billion ventures that exist to witness new physical phenomena,” Salih said. “[…] But at a fraction of the resources.”
The ultimate goal of the quantum wormhole experiment is to “explore fundamental questions about the universe,” Salih says. And if successful, the experiment could allow scientists to research “higher dimensions.”
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