William F. Garrity

In The New York Times:

October 13, 2009

Texting, Surfing, Studying?

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

Certain subjects make self-righteous parents of us all: our children thinking they are doing homework when in reality the text messages are flying, the Internet browsers are open, the video is streaming, the loud rock music is blaring on the turntable — oh, wait, sorry, that last one was our parents complaining about us.

Heaven knows, I understand the feeling. And not just as a pediatrician. I have my own children -- a high school student, a college student and a medical student -- and I know the drill.

But if you ask the experts, they are pretty unanimous that we don’t know much. 

"The literature looking at media and its impact on attentional skills is just in its infancy," said Renee Hobbs, a professor of mass media and communications at Temple University and a specialist in media literacy.

Another expert, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington who is a leading researcher on children and the media, agreed. "The pace of science has not kept up with technology," he told me.

And Dr. Victor C. Strasburger, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, said, "Kids are spending an extraordinary amount of time with media," but added: "We don’t really know what they pay attention to, what they don’t. We don’t know how it impacts their school performance, whether it impacts their school performance."

A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking -- or as Dr. Christakis put it, "The truth is you don’t really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can’t process two high-level cognitive things." What you are actually doing, he went on, is "oscillating between the two."

So are teenagers any better at oscillating?

Con't