Play and the Toddler’s Brain On Television

By: Maria Lourdes Sionzon-Bott

Dimitri Christakis is a pediatrician and the Director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development in Seattle Children’s Research Institute.  He specializes in early childhood development, and whose influential findings are helping identify optimal media exposure for children.

Dimitri Christakis details his private research in the TED talk

The typical newborn brain actually weighs 333 grams and in the first two years of life it triples its original weight and grows to be 999 grams.  Brain growth over the lifespan shows that the brain grows very steeply over the first two years and continuous to progress until the age 20 and then slowly regresses by age 56.

Every human being is born with a lifetime supply of brain cells and neurons and it’s the connection between the brains cells called synapses are the ones that actually accounts for the brain growth development.  These synapses form based on early experiences which fine tuned the mind to the world that surrounds the individual himself.

Below is an illustration on how the brain cells and neurons are connected by synapses.  As you can see at birth the human brain is born with 2,500 synapses; by age 3 the brain has developed with 15,000 synapses and overtime those connections are actually pruned in response to the external stimulation – the external world that the individual lives in.

Another example of how our brain works early in life is the breathing of a one day old infant listening to classical music; this shows that as early as the first day of life, there is a discernable psychological reaction to what actually babies hears.

Based on research from decades ago, we all know and are made aware that too little stimulation is bad for brain development.  Below are two PET scans; PET scans are measures of the brain function; the brighter color shows more brain activity.  On the left is a PET scan of a normal kindergarten and on the right is a PET scan of a child raised in a horribly neglected environment. As shown on the right diagram, there are areas of the child’s brain that shows no activity, and that his brain did not develop because there is almost no stimulation at all.

But, is there also a possibility of over-stimulating the brain?  In which the brain is inappropriately stimulated which results to instead of being beneficial, can actually be harmful.

This is a very important issue because we are in this stage of technologizing childhood these days, in a way which it is already un-presidented.  The average child who is exposed to television in the 1970’s is four years old as opposed to the children of these times who are exposed to television as early as four months old.

Research shows that prolonged exposure to television results to rapid image change in the brain during the critical period of development.  This develops a precondition mind which in turns expects high levels of stimulation resulting to inattention later in life.

Studies  shows that if by the age of 3 and a child is exposed to more television time which takes up to 40% of the child’s waking hours than cognitive stimulation ; it is more likely that by age of 7 years old the child will more likely to have attention problems.  For every hour that the child watches television by age 3 there is a 10% chance that the child will have attention problem by school age.

Whereas, a child exposed to more cognitive stimulation by age 3 than television exposure; will have lesser the chance of likely to have attention problems later in life.  In fact for every hour that the child is exposed to cognitive stimulation, reduce the chance of having attention problems later in life by 30%.

Therefore, studies and research shows that there are certain things that the child is exposed early on his life that increase the chance to enhance their ability to pay attention; and there are certain things that they are exposed early on that actually impedes them.

In another experiment where children is exposed to slow paced educational films such as Mr. Rogers, studies show that children who watch educational films shows no risk of attention problems compared to children exposed to faced paced entertainment films such as cartoons like The Power Puff Girls, shows that the risk of having attention problems by their school age is increased by 60% and increase more as much as 110% if exposed to more violent films.

Dr. Dimitri Christakis has been experimenting with building a mouse model of television viewing wherein starting at 10 days of life mice were being exposed to lights and sound stimulations 6 hours daily for 42 days.

After 10 days these mice were tested for a series of tests; the first one measures the mice activity for Risk Taking using the Open Field test.  There are two competing instinct that mice have, one is to avoid being in the middle of the open field because it is too risky; and they have the other competing instinct to forge for food, so at some point it has to go in the middle and take the risk to explore their environment.

The diagram below shows the mouse movements, notice the diagram on the left shows that the normal mouse spends most of its time around the perimeter.  On the other hand, the one on the right shows how much time the mouse stays in the middle and at the same time shows how much general activity it does within the perimeter; this just shows a very hyperactive and a risk taking mouse.

The diagram below shows a graph of the Open Field Overstimulation result of how much time the over stimulated mouse spends his time in the center and how often it enters the center; compared to the mouse which wasn’t exposed to lights and sound stimulations 6 hours daily for 42 days.

Another test done is the Novel Object Recognition which tests short-term memory and learning.

In this test a mouse is placed in a box with two objects and the mouse will explore both and “get-to-know” the objects.  Then the mouse will be taken out of the box and an hour later, a novel object will placed in the box with another object.  The diagram below shows how much time the mouse spends in each object.  The mouse which is learning will spend more time with the novel object as opposed to the diagram on the right where the mouse spends the same amount of time with both objects.

The result shows that the control mouse or the normal mouse spends 75% of the time with the novel object; whereas the over stimulated mouse spends the same amount of time with both objects as if the mouse can’t distinguish which object is the novel object which shows that the mouse is not learning and they are not acting like normal mouse.

The Building Block Study was done in a randomized trial at the low income Seattle clinic with 200 kids ages 18 to 24 months and where half of the kids were given blocks at the beginning of the study and the other half were given blocks at the end.  Their parents were given “Bloctivities” these are ways to play with their children using blocks.

The diagram below shows that children who received the blocks initially played with the blocks 59% of the time on a typical day.  Whereas, the children who received the blocks later and played only 13% of the time on a typical day.

The diagram below shows that the children who played 59% of the time on a typical day spends 20 minutes per day with 1.4 episodes per day and with that 65% of the time was spent playing blocks with their parents.

Six months later, these children’s language were assessed and shows that of these children who received the blocks late scored 42% below average.  Children who received the blocks early scored 56% percentile significantly better and slightly above average.  Thus, promoting interactive play early in life does promote language development on children.

In conclusion, early childhood is very important to children (and for mice) and is very critical to their development.  The need for more real time play is vitally important for the children in our time today and they should be exposed to less fast-paced media.

When we change the beginning of the story, then we change the whole story!