Brain Rot

Summary

Podcast Summary: Left To Their Own Devices

Episode Title: Brain Rot
Date: October 10, 2025
Host: Ava Smithing, Toronto Star
Main Theme:
This episode of Left to Their Own Devices investigates the neurological and psychological impacts of screens and social media on children and adolescents. Drawing from personal experiences, groundbreaking research, and interviews with leading experts, host Ava Smithing confronts the controversial idea that today's youth mental health crisis is a direct result of “phone-based childhood.” The episode evaluates popular narratives, new scientific findings, and the complex, sometimes contradictory evidence around the digital lives of young people.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The “Great Rewiring” and Theories of Tech-Driven Mental Illness

• Explaining “The Great Rewiring”
  • Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, claims a sudden increase in youth mental illness (depression, anxiety, self-harm) began in the early 2010s—what he calls “the Great Rewiring.”
  • Quote:
    • "All of a sudden, in the early 2010s, their mental health collapsed." – Jonathan Haidt [00:20]
    • “The first act is the loss of the play-based childhood. Then we get Act 2, which is the arrival of the phone-based childhood.” – Haidt [00:28]
  • Haidt believes that nearly overnight, widespread adoption of smartphones and social media fundamentally altered how children grow up.
• Influence of Haidt’s Book
  • Haidt’s book has spurred global debate and even legislative proposals banning or restricting social media use for minors (e.g., Arkansas and Australia).
  • Quote:
    • “The wife of the Premier of South Australia read the book and...says, 'Peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to fucking do something about it.' So he did.” – Haidt [02:51]

2. Scientific Controversy & Critique

• Skepticism on Causality
  • Despite Haidt’s popularity, many researchers question the evidence linking social media directly to youth mental health crises.
  • Quote:
    • “Everybody's like eating up the anxious generation and freaking out because basically it's bad science.” – Ava Smithing [03:17]
  • Dr. Sarah Coyne (Brigham Young University) questions why many social scientists disagree with Haidt, noting research doesn’t confirm a direct causal link. [03:29]

---

In-the-Lab: What Screens Do to Brains

3. Social Cognition Experiments with Teens

• Emma Dorden’s Brain Lab Studies

  • Emma Dorden (University of Western Ontario), neuroscientist, runs experiments to see how screen time and social media affect teenagers’ social cognition.
  • Pixar Video Test:
    • Teens watched an emotional short film while brain activity was monitored.
    • Result: Higher social media use correlated with lower social cognition (less empathy/understanding).
    • Quote:
      • “We found that the more those teens used social media, the less social cognition they had.” – Ava Smithing [07:32]

• Brain Activity During Scrolling

  • When kids scrolled Instagram Reels, their brains showed active, not passive, engagement—especially for sensational content.
  • Quote:
    • “When we are doing something like passive scrolling, it's not passive, it is impacting the brain.” – Dorden [09:11]

• Screen Time and Anxiety Levels

  • Dorden’s survey: Nearly half of 500 teens had clinically elevated anxiety; the biggest risk factor was passive scrolling.
  • Key Takeaway:
    • Limiting screen time to 2 hours/day and focusing on active, not passive, use may protect mental health. [10:49]
    • “The key message...limiting screen time to about two hours a day and then reducing passive scrolling...could be very key to protecting teen mental health.” – Dorden [10:49]

4. Does Social Media Cause Mental Health Decline? Longitudinal Studies

• Sarah Coyne’s 8-Year Study

  • Coyne’s within-subject, longitudinal study (ages 13–20) found no significant link between time spent on social media and later depression or anxiety.
  • Notable moment:
    • “I was actually really surprised by the results because we found no significant findings.” – Coyne [13:25]
  • Individual experiences on social media vary: What matters is the quality of interaction, not just time spent. [13:46]
  • For some kids, no social media increases risk of depression/anxiety—possible “Goldilocks effect.” [15:14]

• Complex Causes, Not Quick Fixes

  • "I think that narrative is based on fear tactics...This is not how we grew up...so it's scary and we don't know." – Coyne [15:54]

---

Relooking at the Roots: Are Screens a Symptom or a Cause?

5. Underlying Mental Health Issues & Screen Use

• Dr. Michael Rich (Digital Wellness Lab, Boston Children's Hospital):

  • Many “problematic” technology users have underlying conditions: ADHD, social anxiety, autism, depression.
  • For these kids, screens are self-soothing or provide social connection missing offline.
  • Quote:
    • "We actually see problematic interactive media use as a syndrome, as a set of symptoms of these underlying conditions...Our goal with [screens] is not abstinence, but self regulation." – Rich [19:56]

• Screen Time and Addiction: Not The Same

  • Rich criticizes the addiction framework, emphasizing the necessity of self-regulation and digital literacy, not abstinence. [19:56]

6. The Importance of "How" and "With Whom", Not Just "How Much"

• New Tools for Assessment: Dr. John Hutton’s “Screen Q”

  • Evaluates accessibility, content, and parental involvement with screens, not just overall duration.
  • High “Screen Q” scores correlate with worse cognitive and language development in very young children (under five). [23:38]

• Early Childhood Warnings

  • Kids under three should have no screen time; heavy use erodes white matter and social cognition (mirror neuron systems). [24:14]

7. Parental Role & Hypocrisy

• Parental Engagement Outweighs Surveillance

  • Rich’s clinic finds teens crave attention from parents more than phone policing.
  • Quote:
    • “Almost always the first thing out of their mouths is, pay more attention to me...Their parents are staring at that all important email on their phone while yelling at them to turn off Grand Theft Auto. To a kid, that's the height of hypocrisy.” – Rich [27:00]

• Family Connections Trump Controls

  • “A sit down family meal without devices every day—this is where we practice the original social media: conversation.” – Rich [27:37]

---

Memorable Quotes

• “It's a tragedy in two acts. The first act is the loss of the play-based childhood. Then...the arrival of the phone-based childhood.” – Jonathan Haidt [00:28]
• “Correlation isn't causation. Is social media causing mental health issues, or are kids drawn to it because they're already struggling?" – Ava Smithing [10:58]
• “You don't need alcohol to live, you don't need cocaine to live. I would argue that interactive media now is a necessary resource in kids lives.” – Michael Rich [19:56]
• “If you don't use it, you lose it. We gravitate to screens because they are easy...but we’re not exercising those parts of our brain we want to be building.” – Ava Smithing [25:47]
• “We may be better served by examining the more concrete harms of social media. Because as we're about to find out, those harms are very real and sometimes deadly.” – Ava Smithing [29:21]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:02] Introduction to "The Great Rewiring" (Ava Smithing & Jonathan Haidt)
• [03:17] Scientific pushback: Critiquing Haidt's thesis
• [04:22] In the neuroscience lab – Emma Dorden’s research on social cognition
• [09:02] Brain activity when scrolling social media
• [10:14] Large teen survey: Passive scrolling and anxiety
• [13:08] Sarah Coyne’s 8-year longitudinal study: No direct link found
• [15:14] Goldilocks effect—some social media may be protective
• [17:05] Historical parallels: TV panic vs. smartphones
• [19:04] Michael Rich: Underlying psychological drivers of problematic use
• [23:13] John Hutton: Impact of screens on young kids’ brains
• [25:47] Importance of exercising brains offscreen
• [27:00] What kids want from parents: Real attention, not lecturing
• [28:17] Future research and evolving technology: AI and critical thinking

---

Summary & Takeaways

• No One-Size-Fits-All Answer: The impact of screens and social media is nuanced: risks differ vastly based on age, vulnerability, usage quality, and context.
• Evidence is Mixed: While compelling anecdotes and some research suggest harm (especially with heavy, passive use), high-quality longitudinal studies show no uniform effect on mental health.
• Underlying Issues Matter: For many teens, digital compulsions are a symptom, not a cause, of psychological struggles.
• Family Connection is Key: Engaged parenting and shared offline time are more impactful (and desired by teens) than strict surveillance.
• Younger Kids Are Most Vulnerable: Early, unsupervised, and high-quantity screen exposure can measurably harm rapidly developing brains.
• The Research Is Still Evolving: Science lags behind technology—so humility, caution, and active conversation are all essential as the evidence develops.
• Next Episode Preview: The real, concrete, sometimes deadly harms of social media—moving beyond statistics to lives affected by blackmail, exploitation, and more.

---

Overall Tone:
Inquisitive, open-minded, and nuanced, with skepticism toward both panic-driven narratives and techno-optimism. The speakers emphasize ongoing complexity and the need for empathy, evidence, and caring connections.

Transcript

[Ava Smithing]

I see people walking all over Brooklyn holding this book. It's talking about the Great Rewiring. Talk to me, what is the Great Rewiring?

[Jonathan Haidt]

So something happened to young people born after 1995.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the Stern School of business at NYU.

[Jonathan Haidt]

All of a sudden, in the early 2010s, their mental health collapsed.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

In 2024, he wrote a book called the Anxious Generation.

[Jonathan Haidt]

And my argument in the book is a tragedy in two acts. The first act is the loss of the play based childhood. Then we get Act 2, which is the arrival of the phone based childhood.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

This is him on the Daily Show a few months after the book came out.

[Jonathan Haidt]

In 2010, everybody had a flip phone. The iPhone had come out, but most teens had a flip phone. And by 2015, now suddenly everyone has a smartphone, front facing camera, high speed Internet and almost like someone turned a switch. In 2013, girls in America and many other countries suddenly become very anxious, depressed and self harming.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

According to Haidt, this is the Great Rewiring. As smartphones and social media became more ubiquitous, rates of depression and anxiety among young people skyrocketed. Haidt argues this wasn't a coincidence that the thing actually driving the youth mental health crisis was a smartphone. His hypothesis and his book got a lot of attention.

[Emma Dorden]

A new book is sounding the alarm on the current mental health crisis facing youth in our country.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Smartphones and social media addictions are destroying our children's lives.

[Ava Smithing]

Dr. Jonathan Haidt, one of the most influential social psychologists of our time. Thanks for joining me here on the Oprah Podcast. I am actually really excited to talk to Jonathan Haidt about his book the Anxious how the Rewiring of Childhood Is

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

[John Hutton]

I don't think anybody can dispute that.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Since its release In March of 2024, the anxious generation has sold nearly 2 million copies and been translated into 44 different languages. But the book hasn't just been a commercial success, it started to influence policy. As a governor, one of the things we're seeing and spending so much time, money, attention on is the mental health crisis. And your book just kind of a light bulb. Aha moment. Last year, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the Anxious Generation was the inspiration for a proposed law that would require minors to get parental consent before signing up for social media. The book also inspired an Australian law that banned social media for anyone under the age of 16, something Haidt explicitly recommends in his book.

[Jonathan Haidt]

The wife of the Premier of South Australia read the book and she was reading it in bed. And she turns to him and says, peter, you've got to read this book and then you've got to fucking do something about it. So he did.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

It's easy to see why Haidt's ideas have resonated. The youth mental health crisis is real and intuitively it makes sense that social media might be the culprit. But there's one problem so far the research just doesn't back that up.

[Ava Smithing]

Everybody's like eating up the anxious generation and freaking out because basically it's bad science.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

You have people like Jonathan Haidt that

[Emma Dorden]

will flat out l. My question to

[Sarah Coyne]

you, John, is why do you think the majority of social scientists actually working in this field disagree with you on this?

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

I wanted to ask Haidt about this controversy, but he turned down multiple invitations to appear on the podcast. But that didn't stop me from trying to figure out what's the real story here. And if our devices aren't causing an epidemic of mental illness, what are they doing to our brains? I'm Ava Smithing from Paradigms in the Toronto Star. This is left to their own devices. Episode 4 Brain Rot. On a cold day last December, we took a trip to the University of Western Ontario.

[Emma Dorden]

So it's a good time. It's quiet at the university, right?

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Like exams are, everyone's in the library or home. We're here to meet Emma Durden, Canada research chair in Neuroscience and Learning disorders and the head of the developing brain lab here at the university.

[Emma Dorden]

Yeah, so there's tons of cool equipment on this floor. Like science, like sciency equipment.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Jordan's lab studies how kids develop both cognitively and socially.

[Emma Dorden]

We actually use this space to test kids too. We have like two way mirror so you can like look at them and like they don't see you. So we have like a lot of.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

And part of her work involves scanning kids brains. Lately Jordan and her team have been trying to figure out how screen time and social media are impacting teenagers, social cognition, their ability to understand and empathize with other people. So this lovely mess of wires is

[Sarah Coyne]

always fun to put on.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Today, Jordan is running an experiment on a 16 year old named Olivia.

[Emma Dorden]

We have this cap here, so it's like a Medusa cap, swim cap.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

She pulls out a black mesh cap with all these wires sticking out of it. Keep that glued against your forehead.

[Sarah Coyne]

And I'm just going to pull this back.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

And an assistant pulls it over Olivia's bright green hair.

[Sarah Coyne]

It feels weird.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

I feel bald once it's on. The cap uses LED light To show how blood is flowing to different parts of Olivia's brain. All right, I'm going to calibrate it again. In order to see how active the social part of Olivia's brain is, Jordan needs to see how she'll respond to different emotional stimuli. To do this, she has Olivia watch a short Pixar movie called Partly Cloudy.

[Emma Dorden]

There's a number of events that happen during the film where it involves a very high level of social cognition. It's very short, but it has images of people experiencing pain, of sadness, and of interpersonal conflict.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

It's a cute video. In it, a flock of storks meet a group of anthropomorphic clouds. The clouds give the storks baby animals to put in their bundles. A kitten, a little puppy. But one stork is having a rough day. The cloud gives him a baby alligator and then a porcupine.

[Emma Dorden]

So then he gets hurt again. Right. He's a baby ram.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Off to the side, we can see Olivia's brain activity on a monitor jumping up and down in real time.

[Emma Dorden]

The red squiggly line is the increase and decrease in blood flow to a channel in her prefrontal cortex.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

When a character on screen experiences sadness or pain, Olivia's brain appears to respond normally. But Olivia isn't a huge social media user.

[Sarah Coyne]

When I first got social media, I was only allowed to have one hour a day on my phone and then two hours and just kind of work my way up.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Right? But when Emma Dorden did the same experiment with 75 other teenagers, she found that the more those teens used social media, the less social cognition they had, meaning they might have a harder time relating to other people. In other words, social media seems to have made them less social. Jordan says this effect wasn't particularly strong, but still, she's concerned about what it might mean.

[Emma Dorden]

I mean, honestly, if you ask parents what is the most important thing for your child, they're not going to say, oh, I want them to grow up and be a math genius. They're going to say, I want them to have friends. I think these are fundamental skills, and they can also have, like, downstream effects on other types of cognition. So I do think it's important. There's a strong association with mental health potentially. Right. Like that would be the main concern. Right. Like just having impaired social cognition predispose them to adverse health outcomes.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Jordan's Pixar experiment revealed that prolonged social media use may be weakening our social cognition, making us less understanding and less empathetic. But we were curious about something else. Too. What happens to our brains when we're actually on our phones? So with the mesh cap still on Olivia's head, Jordan asked her to open up Instagram.

[Emma Dorden]

Did you want to maybe see when she's, like, using her actual phone?

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Olivia opens up Instagram reels and starts scrolling through a bunch of short videos, sometimes just watching them for a few seconds before swiping to the next one.

[Emma Dorden]

Once she starts a new video, we can see there's an instantaneous change in the brain. Just to say that when we are doing something like passive scrolling, it's not passive, it is impacting the brain.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Right.

[Emma Dorden]

And we can see this in real time.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Every time Olivia swipes to a new video, we can see her brain activity spiking on the monitor.

[Emma Dorden]

Hello. Welcome back.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

LA has better food.

[Sarah Coyne]

2:00 clock in the afternoon.

[Emma Dorden]

Great question.

[John Hutton]

What do they do deserve being occupied.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

And when the videos become more sensational,

[Jonathan Haidt]

a girl shoots her boyfriend.

[Emma Dorden]

Okay.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Her brain really reacts.

[Emma Dorden]

That doesn't sound good.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

So we can see. We can see the big swiping thing. Even though we tend to think of scrolling as something we do when we want to shut our brains off, it's clear from this experiment that that's not what happens. Yeah, even kind of here, where the videos switched, we saw it change a lot. And Dorden has done other studies that have made her increasingly worried about what all this scrolling might be doing to our brains.

[Emma Dorden]

This is 500 teens in Canada and

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

the US in one of these studies, Jordan and her colleagues surveyed a group of 500 teenagers. And right out of the gate, there was a surprising finding. Nearly half of them had clinically elevated levels of anxiety.

[Emma Dorden]

And then the biggest risk factor was passive scrolling.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Jordan's research shows a clear correlation between high social media use and negative mental health outcomes like anxiety, particularly if that social media use consists of a lot of mindless scrolling.

[Emma Dorden]

So the key message there is that limiting screen time to about two hours a day and then reducing passive scrolling behaviors could be very key to protecting teen mental health.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

But of course, correlation isn't causation. So the big question is, is social media actually causing mental health issues, or are kids drawn to social media because they're already struggling?

[Sarah Coyne]

I have been interested in media, I think, since Columbine happened.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Dr. Sarah Coyne started thinking about screens while she was an undergrad in the late 90s, and they were talking about

[Sarah Coyne]

the impact of video games in Columbine.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

At the time, some pundits were claiming that one of America's most infamous school shootings was linked to violent video games.

[Sarah Coyne]

And I've been studying it for more than 20 years now.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Today Coyne is a professor of human development at the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University.

[Sarah Coyne]

So we were interested in examining the longer term impact of social media on mental health.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

In the early 2000 and tens, Coyne was looking at the landscape of social media research and felt like something was missing.

[Sarah Coyne]

At the time, most research had just focused in on social media, kind of in the moment and how that was impacting mental health. But I'm a developmental psychologist and so I wanted to see how is this shaping mental health, say, across adolescence. And so we looked at time spent on social media and depression and anxiety from ages 13 to 20.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Most social media research uses something called a between subject study.

[Sarah Coyne]

So a between subject study compares two or more people.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Right.

[Sarah Coyne]

So it look at my time spent on social media and your time spent on social media and look at my depression and your depression, and let's say that I happen to spend more time on social media and I happen to be more depressed. You spend less time, you're less depressed. So then you might say, okay, well, social media leads to more depression. But there's a lot of differences between you and me that are not accounted for in there. Like there might be a host of reasons why I use social media higher levels and why I'm more depressed.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Right. So Coyne designed an eight year longitudinal study using a within subject design. Rather than compare one subject to another, the study would look at each person individually and see if using more social media made that person more anxious and depressed.

[Sarah Coyne]

And I was actually really surprised by the results because we found no significant findings. In other words, the time spent on social media was not related to either depression or anxiety.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

At first, coin was taken aback by these results, but over time it makes

[Sarah Coyne]

sense to me why it wouldn't have a strong impact. Because let's say you and me both spend an hour on social media and let's say that I have really, really positive experiences. Everyone's liking my stuff and I'm getting all these, you know, positive feelings. And then let's say the same hour you are having terrible experiences and you're getting cyberbullied and people are calling you terrible names. So we both would score the same one hour. Right. But the impact on us could be dramatically different.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Coyne's finding that social media has no impact on anxiety or depression is directly at odds with what we heard from Emma Dorden, the scientist at the University of Western Ontario. When we asked Jordan about This, she pointed out that the teens in Coyne's study were fairly low social media users, just an hour or two a day on average. And in Dordin's research, they found that teens only really started showing signs of anxiety when they were on their phones for more than two hours a day. Two different amounts of screen time, two different conclusions, but they both might be right. Other researchers have hypothesized that when it comes to social media, there could be a Goldilocks effect. More than two hours may be harmful, but less than that could be totally fine. In fact, for some kids, it may even be beneficial.

[Sarah Coyne]

For some groups, having no social media was actually a larger risk of depression and anxiety. And so, again, the story here is to try to understand who is the kid, you know, where are they coming from? What is their physiology? What is their background, what's their personality? What's their social situation? What are they looking at to better understand, like, what is the impact on this person going to be?

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Coyne isn't naive about the risks of social media. She says that somewhere between 5 and 15% of teens have serious problems with their phones. But she doesn't buy this narrative that social media has created an entire generation of anxious kids.

[Sarah Coyne]

I think that narrative is based on fair tactics, and parents want kind of quick, easy answers because most of us in this stage who are raising adolescents, and I have four adolescents right now that I'm raising, this is not how we grew up. This was not our experiences. And so it's scary and we don't know. And so we see our kids struggling and we're like, oh, my gosh, let's just take it away. That seems like a quick and easy answer. And we've got experts right, saying that it is, when really it's so much more complex.

[Ava Smithing]

I think the public discourse around screens is driven by fear and guilt that we've already ruined a generation of young people.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Dr. Michael Rich has been studying screens for a long time.

[Ava Smithing]

Well, I've been studying screens since I was born, but in a professional, scientific way. I've been studying screens for over 30 years.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Before he was a doctor, Rich worked in the film industry for more than a decade. And he's seen us worry about screen time before.

[Ava Smithing]

When I got into medicine, pediatrics in specific, it was a growing concern that the effect of television watching was encouraging kids to be couch potatoes, basically. Are they getting fat, stupid, and violent in front of the television screen? And having come from the media world, I realized that that was an overly simplistic understanding. Of what was going on.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Today. Rich is the director and founder of the digital wellness lab at Boston Children's hospital. And like Dr. Coyne, he's skeptical of some of the conventional wisdom around kids and screenshots. I should probably say here that the Digital wellness lab receives funding from several prominent tech companies, including Snapchat and TikTok. On their website, they say this funding does not compromise their objectivity or autonomy.

[Ava Smithing]

We want to believe that if we give up smartphones or if we don't have social media, everything will be okay. Yet there are many, many people who use screens not just to be okay, but actually to get okay. There are a lot of young people for whom I have cared, who historically had been marginalized, bullied because of their sexuality, because of their race, because of their religion, because of their language, who can now find their tribe online when they could not in their physical community.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

In 2017, Dr. Rich founded the clinic for interactive media and Internet disorders, which is one of the few clinical programs in the world dedicated entirely to kids who have problems with compulsive tech use.

[Ava Smithing]

It's what we call problematic interactive media use, or pai mu.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Over the years, he's seen more than 1,000 patients in his clinic, and he's come to some surprising conclusions about why they're struggling.

[Ava Smithing]

What we have found in the hundreds of kids we've seen who have gotten in trouble with this is first of all, that they all have one or more underlying psychological drivers. And there are four of them. One being attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a second one being social anxiety, the third being autism spectrum disorder, and the fourth being depression. And so they are actually going to interactive media to soothe themselves, to distract themselves, to feel better.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Whereas people like Emma Dorden and Jonathan Haidt think that our devices are making kids anxious and depressed, Dr. Rich says we've got it backwards. A lot of these kids are glued to their phones because they already have mental health issues or other underlying risk factors.

[Ava Smithing]

And so we actually see problematic interactive media use as a syndrome, as a set of symptoms of these underlying conditions. What we are seeing here is not an addiction. One of the real problems we have is this concern in society that this is an addiction disorder. Our goal with treating addiction is abstinence. You don't need alcohol to live, you don't need cocaine to live. I would argue that interactive media now is a necessary resource in kids lives. They need it to learn, they need it to communicate, to connect with each other. And our goal with it is not abstinence, but self regulation.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

I think this is an important point. At the end of the day, our phones are tools, tools to check in on our friends, to look up information, send an email, or watch a show. But often we don't use our devices this intentionally. We're just endlessly mindlessly scrolling through content.

[Ava Smithing]

What we're really trying to figure out here is how best to use these power tools so that they are not distractions or undermining the learning that's going on, but actually can extend that learning. How can we use these technologies in ways that enhance our humanity rather than degrade it or attenuate it?

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

For a long time, most of the research in this field focused on one single screen time. But lately, researchers like Michael Rich have been trying to push our understanding a little further.

[Ava Smithing]

We are really seeking to understand not the impact of screens, but the impact of how we use the screens. And I think that's a distinct difference.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Another person trying to move beyond screen time is Dr. John Hutton.

[John Hutton]

I'm an associate professor of pediatrics at UT Southwestern in Dallas and an attending physician at Children's Health in Dallas as well.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Dr. Hutton has developed a questionnaire called the Screen Queue. It doesn't just look at how long kids are on their devices for, but how they're actually using them. The Screen Queue asks parents how accessible screens are.

[John Hutton]

You know, are they in the bedroom?

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

The type of content their kids are

[John Hutton]

viewing, like fast moving, slow moving, educational, not educational.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

And whether or not parents are with their kids when they're on their devices.

[John Hutton]

To what degree does the parent help the child pick the media and then use it together as a source of, again, conversation?

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

The higher a child scores on the screen Q test, the worse screen habits they have. And a kid who watches a lot of non educational content by themselves on an iPad in their room is going to have a pretty high score. Dr. Hutton studies a different age group than many of the other experts we've spoken to. Most of his work looks at kids younger than five when their brains are developing most rapidly.

[John Hutton]

This is a really hard age to study. This is about as young as you're going to get to do MRI with children voluntarily, where they'll actually go into the scanner. You have to get them to cooperate, to sit really still in the scanner. You can't sedate them. We play the rocket ship game or the statue game or whatever.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Hutton was one of the first people in the world to study the impact of screens on kids this young. And what he's found is genuinely shocking.

[John Hutton]

So what we found was kids with higher Screen Q scores which we asked them parent had less well developed white matter really all over their brain, but particularly in areas that support language, literacy and executive function.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Executive function refers to basic cognitive processes like attention, working memory and impulse control. Those skills, along with language and literacy, aren't just important for school. They're essential for a happy and healthy life. And Hutton's research revealed something else too. The brains of kids with high screen Q scores were actually thinning in certain areas.

[John Hutton]

One was in part of the brain in the parietal lobe. That's related to social cognition. Imagining what's going on in the lives of other people and feeling what they feel. It's called the mirror neuron system, mirroring what someone else is doing.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

What all this means is that Dr. Hutton is looking at kids brains and seeing that they're quite literally being eroded by heavy screen use. Because of this, Hutton says, before the age of three, kids shouldn't have any access to screens at all. For Michael Rich, this makes a lot of sense.

[Ava Smithing]

The human brain ends up being the most sophisticated in the animal kingdom, not because it is hyper developed at birth, but because it's actually embryonic at birth. But what that means is that we get to build our brains in response to the environment around us. And the way brains are built is not by creating new neurons, but creating connections between neurons, synapses. And in the early years, we are actually making more than a million new synapses every second. The other thing that is happening at the same time is we are constantly pruning away synapses that are not as used.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

There's a saying in neuroscience to describe this phenomenon. Neurons that fire together, wire together. But I think this could be summed up with another adage. If you don't use it, you lose it.

[Ava Smithing]

We gravitate to screens because they are easy, because they sort of feed everything to us. They don't demand much of us, but by not demanding much of us, we're not exercising those parts of our brain that, that we want to be building. So I think that having the intent to use the screens for what they're really good at, but then understand that this is a tool that is not good for everything and it needs to be turned off. And sometimes we just need to take a walk in the woods or play catch in the backyard, or best of all, be bored again, we have to bring back boredom.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

So much of the discourse around kids and technology is driven by parents.

[Ava Smithing]

In many ways, the anxious generation is the parents generation.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Right now, parents who see their kids glued to their phones and can't help but worry that it's rotting their brains.

[Ava Smithing]

They look at their kids and they don't understand them.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

But Dr. Rich has worked with hundreds of families like this, and he says that more often than not, the problem may lie less with the kids than with the parents.

[Ava Smithing]

One of the things that I kind of subversively ask my teenage patients when their parents are out of the room is, what could your parents do better? Almost always the first thing out of their mouths is, pay more attention to me. Their parents are staring at that all important email on their phone while yelling at them to turn off grand theft auto right to a kid. That's the height of hypocrisy.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

Dr. Rich says the most impactful thing you can do for your kid's mental health isn't taking away their phone or installing apps that monitor their social media accounts. It's sitting down for dinner with them.

[Ava Smithing]

A sit down family meal without devices every day. This is where we practice the original social media conversation. What did you do today? How did you feel about it? Something really funny happened or I hate my math teacher or whatever. So I think that we have to recognize how valuable we are to our children and to each other and put the devices down and look at each other and talk. And more importantly, listen.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

The research on the impact of technology on young people is evolving rapidly. And every scientist we spoke to emphasized that we need more studies before we can draw definitive conclusions about what these devices are doing to our brains and our mental health. The thing is, that might take years, maybe even decades. And if there's a chance our phones are doing lasting harm, it seems like a pretty big gamble to just keep using them like this while we wait for definitive evidence. Meanwhile, technology itself is continuing to evolve. A recent study from MIT found that people who use AI tools like ChatGPT to write essays demonstrated a loss of critical thinking skills. It's clear from all this research and from personal experience that a lot of kids are struggling. But there also isn't all that much evidence to suggest that smartphones have created an entire generation of anxious and depressed kids. So rather than focusing on those kinds of sweeping claims, we may be better served by examining the more concrete harms of social media. Because as we're about to find out, those harms are very real and sometimes deadly. I didn't do this by choice. I was blackmailed. I was exploited.

[Ava Smithing]

This isn't just one teen suicide. All 20, all 30, all 40 of these are connected. Dirk phoned me and said eventually that Danny was gone.

[Narrator/Host (Ava Smithing)]

That's coming up on Left to Their Own Devices. Left to Their Own Devices is hosted and produced by me, Ava Smithing. It's written and produced by Mitchell Stewart. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldhar. Mixing and sound design by Reza Daya. Additional reporting in this episode by Massey Halatvari of the Investigative Journalism Bureau. The executive producers for Paradigms are James Millward, Helen Hayes, Taylor Owen, and Mitchell Stewart. The executive producer for the Toronto Star is JP Fozo. If you want early access to upcoming episodes of Left to Their Own Devices, subscribe to the Toronto Star at thestar. Com.