The Swift Bird of Digital Detachment
Neurodevelopmental Impacts of Screens on the Developing Brain
One of the earliest lessons Alice learns in Wonderland is that familiar rules don’t apply and even one’s sense of identity can feel unstable, as when she grows and shrinks unpredictably. Just the same, a child in the digital realm finds the normal cues and feedback from real human presence are distorted or absent. In A General Theory of Love, American scientist Thomas Lewis asserts that human development is inherently relational and emotional in nature, and that our brains are wired through what he calls “limbic resonance,” the attunement of emotions between people who are physically present and emotionally connected. From earliest infancy, a baby’s developing nervous system synchronizes with caregivers via touch, eye contact, voice, and empathy. Our limbic systems, the emotional centers of the brain, literally oscillate in response to those around us. This is how we learn to feel safe and eventually regulate our own emotions. Our nervous systems don’t operate as self-contained units, they’re sustained by the relationships we form, and loving human contact in childhood is a necessity for healthy emotional development.[i]
What exactly happens when a young child’s daily interactions increasingly revolve around screens and web platforms? The child, his neural pathways still soft, not yet fused into a system of belief, enters the stream more as a drowning body than a swimmer: he is taught, from the beginning, that to exist is to be seen, but the seeing is done with metrics. Then, the question becomes: what happens when the earliest bonds between a child and the world are mediated by these metrics? Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist, warns technology has “triangulated” our connections, inserting itself as a persistent third party in family life. She writes that what began as a tool for communication is now “interrupting us and ultimately disconnecting us,” with parents and children alike engrossed in their individual screens, physically together yet emotionally elsewhere.[ii]
Parental distraction has surged to the point that it has a name in research, “technoference,” the interference of devices in parent-child interactions. Its effects echo those of more traditionally neglectful parenting, like insecure attachment and behavior problems. “Tech has gained a de facto co-parenting role,” Steiner-Adair observes, ready to engage, entertain, coach, and educate children when flesh-and-blood caregivers give up, but “it cannot provide the direct, nourishing, and uniquely human dimension of relationship essential for healthy neurological and psychological development in human children.”[iii] No amount of mediated interaction can fully replace live interactions, as we learn empathy and self-regulation from the lived experience of engaging with others. We are, after all, animals with brains wired by millions of years of evolution, attuned to others’ nervous systems through a kind of biological alignment. Oxytocin and endorphins flow through nonverbal interplay, mirror neurons fire when we come into contact with another person through physiological processes that, again, literally shape our neural circuits and teach us to connect.
Sherry Turkle, an MIT researcher who has studied digital culture for decades, captures this well in her book Alone Together. She maintqins that technology offers the “illusion of companionship without the demands of companionship,”[iv] as such a relationship can be simulated but requires none of the patience or empathic effort of real relationships. A teenager in Turkle’s research admitted preferring texting to talking because with text “you can clean up your message” instead of dealing with the raw, unedited flow of real conversation. However, cleaning up messages comes at a cost. We lose the rich, limbic data that underpins empathy. Emotional attunement is a skill, one honed through practice in unstructured, unfiltered encounters, and if the vulnerability of unedited interaction is avoided, our empathic muscles atrophy. No wonder then Turkle found evidence of a “gradual erosion of empathy” among those deeply engaged in constant digital communication.
Digital Identity and the Pursuit of Symbolic Immortality
Existential psychology tells us that we are haunted by the prospect of our own mortality and that, to cope, we build symbolic worlds and grand narratives that promise some kind of immortality. American anthropologist Ernest Becker calls these our “immortality projects.” Pursuing wealth, building legacies, raising families, writing books, conquering empires, are all ways by which we try to prove we are more than our bodies and will leave behind something that outlasts us rather than simply vanish into thin air. Many children and adults now seem to channel this same impulse into the frenetic activity of social media, as well as gaming. Every like, every level, every avatar becomes a trophy in the fight against oblivion. The user seeks to transcend their creatureliness by digitizing the self—not the self as it is, but the self as it might be reflected to others, shined up, photogenically lit, optimized for virality. Unconsciously, they mean to cheat death by becoming pure symbol. In the digital world, they can build a following and score lifelines, even respawn after death, escape mortality by putting character death on pause and granting a “sense of symbolic immortality,” which helps soothe their existential dread.[v] The problem is these are only ersatz achievements that offer an “ersatz immortality,” a temporary feeling of significance.[vi] When a post fails or a game is lost, the distress can be substantial. Becker notes failure to secure one’s immortality project leads to anxiety and despair, and there are parallels in how teens can spiral into anxiety or depression when their social media efforts don’t pan out.
Becker’s remedy was to confront mortality honestly and find meaning beyond egoistic heroics. That’s a tough sell today. Although it does suggest why the pull of these platforms is so incredibly strong: they tap into a primal human motivation to feel important and immortal. Video games literally cast kids as heroes in epic quests, social media promises likeability, online fame, and digital legacy. But those are all simulations of meaning that constitute an achievement system divorced from material reality. At the same time, they are intentionally engineered to engage the brain’s reward circuitry, the very circuits that evolved to reinforce survival behaviors and which are implicated in addiction. Adolescents in particular have a well-known sensitivity to rewards and peer approval, rooted in developmental neurobiology. The nucleus accumbens (NAcc), also dubbed the brain’s “pleasure center,” undergoes changes in adolescence that can make teens more responsive to rewards and social feedback. In the undeniably hypersocial environment of platforms like Instagram or TikTok, neural sensitivity becomes a double-edged sword.
How Screen Time Reshapes the Brain’s Architecture
An fMRI experiment by Sherman et al. (2016)[vii] put teenagers in a simulated social media setting while measuring their brain activity, a scenario where seeing photos with numerous likes triggered greater activation in regions linked to reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention compared to seeing the same images with just a few likes. The brain’s reward center and the NAcc lit up, as did regions that help us understand others’ perspectives and that guide what we pay attention to. The quantified social endorsement, a simple number of likes, acted as a kind of neural high-octane fuel, revealing that the teen brain, by absorbing the simulated social reality of likes and shares, had trouble distinguishing symbol from substance.
Video games operate on a similar neurochemical plane. Fast-paced games provide continuous rewards and unpredictable reinforcement schedules that strongly activate dopaminergic pathways. Research on “internet gaming disorder” and related compulsive tech use[viii] has found brain changes paralleling those seen in substance addictions. For example, structural MRI of heavy gamers showed less gray matter volume in multiple frontal and insular regions compared to non-addicted peers, regions crucial for decision making and emotional regulation.
Moreover, the loss of tangible experience also undermines resilience from a very young age. Through high predictability and immediate rewards, children miss the chance to learn how to deal with uncertainty or frustration. They don’t practice patience or problem-solving. If a game is too hard, they move on to the next. For generations, playgrounds were battlefields where resilience was forged, now the psychological armor remains untested. Meanwhile, our switch to social media “alters society’s communication patterns and disrupts the expression of empathy.”[ix] The child’s psyche is not just influenced but reorganized. He becomes a façade of himself, the canon of the market enters the unconscious, attention becomes currency, currency becomes morality in a new cosmology in which anonymity is the worst thing.
Research shows that screens tend to make worse the very problems we hope they’ll solve. Neuroscientists are increasingly peering into the brains of children and adolescents to map how heavy screen media activity (SMA) correlates with brain structure. The human cortex undergoes dynamic remodeling through childhood and adolescence, pruning away unused connections, fine-tuning networks, myelinating white matter (myelin is an insulating layer that forms around nerves). Cross-sectional MRI studies present initial clues that screen-intensive lifestyles tilt the process. For instance, Hutton et al. (2019)[x] scanned preschoolers and found that those exceeding the recommended screen time limits showed measurably different brain structures. Higher screen use in 3- to 5-year-olds was associated with lower cortical thickness in several brain regions and lower white matter integrity in tracts crucial for language and literacy. White matter acts as the brain’s communication cabling, and poorer integrity there could signal delayed or atypical development. The children who spent more time with tablets or TVs than with picture books performed worse on cognitive tests of processing speed, language, and early literacy.
Reading Plays a Unique Role in Brain Connectivity Networks
Functional connectivity, the synchronous activity between different brain regions, also appears sensitive to media habits. In a study, Horowitz-Kraus and Hutton (2018)[xii] used functional MRI to compare what happens in children’s brains during reading versus during screen time. They focused on the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA, a region in the left occipito-temporal cortex, which is crucial for reading) and its connectivity to other regions. They found that time spent reading was associated with higher connectivity between the VWFA and language regions (and also visual and executive control regions), forming a strong network supportive of reading and comprehension. By contrast, time spent on screens was linked to lower connectivity between the VWFA and those same language and cognitive control regions. Reading pulled together a coalition of brain areas, including visual cortex and speech regions, whereas screen viewing let that coalition loosen or disperse. Over the years, not practicing the brain’s language network integration could mean weaker wiring in circuits that underpin deep reading, understanding, critical analysis, and reflection.
Developmental psychologists have long known that reading to young children, and children’s own reading for pleasure, correlates with stronger language skills and even measurable brain differences. Kids who are read to regularly have more activation in brain areas supporting narrative comprehension and visual imagery when they later listen to stories, and home literacy environment predicts better white matter integrity in language tracts (Hutton et al., 2022). All of it stands in opposition to the typically more image-centric, bite-sized content on screens that may do little to build verbal proficiency. Later, during middle childhood, reading a book demands sustained attention, imagination, memory to follow plot and characters, and contracting a broad network from the occipital lobe (visual decoding of letters) to temporal lobe (language semantics) to frontal lobe (working memory and inference). Skimming endless feeds engages far fewer of these regions in tandem. The child may passively receive stimuli without the iterative, effortful processing that printed words require and, as a consequence, brain regions like Broca’s area (speech production and syntax), Wernicke’s area (language meaning), and their interconnecting fiber tracts might receive less stimulation during critical periods. The reading circuit strengthens with use, as does the crosstalk between visual text and deep language centers.
Are we then changing the “language games” of childhood? When shifting from verbal story-time to swiping, the internal connections that give meaning to words might be pruned or never be formed with the same richness. Screens don’t add something mysterious to the brain—rather, they supply an alternative stream of experience which fails to exercise certain neural muscles while perhaps over-exercising others, like rapid visual attention switching. The neural wiring adapts accordingly, for better or worse.
Attention and Emotions in the Digital Age
Functional connectivity differences are not just localized to language networks. Changes in connectivity between multiple major brain networks involving attention, sustained alertness and self-regulation, memory, and contextual processing suggested screen time might subtly rewire how networks talk to each other at rest, which in turn could manifest in how children think and behave. The idea that TV and video streaming were singled out as particularly impactful reflect the passive, fast-paced, context-switching nature of those media. The developing brain, bombarded with rapid audiovisual rewards, learns a different tuning, one that heightens arousal networks for instant attention capture but does not necessarily strengthen the networks that support reflective self-control or deep memory encoding. If the brain’s networks were an orchestra, balanced evolvement would mean all sections tune and harmonize, but excessive screen stimulation results in a cacophony of neural activity.
Developmentally, the prefrontal cortex, the seat of executive function and impulse control, continues maturing through adolescence, fine-tuning its networks for working memory and sustained attention. Chronic bombardment with digital stimuli interferes with the maturation. Psychological studies have observed correlations between heavy media multitasking and poorer attention in adolescents. A longitudinal study published in JAMA (Ra et al., 2018)[xiii] tracked around 2,600 teens who initially had no significant attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, and found that those who reported frequently using many types of digital media were more likely to develop ADHD-like symptoms within the next two years. For each additional type of high-frequency digital activity, the odds of meeting criteria for inattention and hyperactivity symptoms increased by about 10%. Teens with the heaviest multi-platform use had double the incidence of significant ADHD symptoms compared to those with minimal digital use (around 10% vs 4.5%).
An Australian Catholic University meta-study concluded that “screen use is a vicious cycle: we sometimes give children screens when they’re struggling, but doing so seems to make them struggle more.”[xiv] Both sides feed each other: high anxiety leads to using screens as a distraction, heavy screen use leads to higher anxiety; aggressive behavior might lead a child to violent video games as an outlet, violent video games reinforce aggression. Findings indicate excessive screen use contributes to hostility, anxiety, attention issues, and depression by displacing critical developmental needs.
It’s worth noting this crisis is most evident in Western contexts, where kids have the most access to devices and the least freedom to roam in the real world.[xv] American social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt notes the trend is seen more across the Anglosphere and Europe, and less in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, presumably because in some of these areas, either the digital saturation happened later, or other societal factors differ (in parts of Asia, for example, strong family and academic structures persist, although they have their own screen addiction issues). At any rate, Western societies are dealing with a generation that is, by many accounts, the most fragile on record, despite being materially the most comfortable.
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice eventually wakes up, disoriented but safe in the knowledge that the bizarre dreamworld was just that, a dream. For us, digital life is no dream—it is a persistent part of reality, one that does not disappear when we open our eyes. The challenge ahead is to integrate these technologies in a way that does not subsume our humanity. Growing up immersed in screens is not benign: it reshapes neural pathways, alters attention by shortening it and fragmenting it, subverts emotion regulation by bypassing limbic co-regulation and encouraging quick fixes, impairs aspects of social cognition like empathy by removing crucial face-to-face practice and distorting healthy communication patterns.
We must remind ourselves we are an irreducibly social, relational species, an existential design which modern tech threatens to make ornamental. The human brain is both clay and crystal, soft enough to be molded yet hard enough that once set in a particular shape, it can be difficult to remold. We stand at a crossroads rather like Alice at the fork in the road, with the Cheshire Cat cryptically smiling in the tree, one path continuing further into a slow metaphysical exile, into an unchecked digital Wonderland, with all its perilous wonder, the other path leading to a conscious recalibration, a way out of the rabbit hole, or at least to a safer vantage within it. The neural tales coming out of labs and MRI scanners serve as a mirror and a warning. They reveal screen time is not a trivial pastime, but a force acting on the brains of the young, with outcomes we are only beginning to grasp.
Works cited
[i] Lewis, Thomas, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. A General Theory of Love. Vintage Books, 2000.
[ii] Steiner-Adair, Catherine. The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age. Harper, 2013.
[iii] Via. “The Big Disconnect | Notes & Review.” vialogue, 14 Nov. 2013, vialogue.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/the-big-disconnect-notes-review/.
[iv] Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.
[v] Agnew-Bass, Phoebe. “Minecraft: A Safe Place to Avoid Death?” Ernest Becker Foundation, June 18, 2022. www.ernestbecker.org/the-denial-file/minecraft-a-safe-place-to-avoid-death
[vi] Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1973.
[vii] Sherman, Lauren E et al. “The Power of the Like in Adolescence: Effects of Peer Influence on Neural and Behavioral Responses to Social Media.” Psychological science vol. 27,7 (2016): 1027-35. doi:10.1177/0956797616645673
[viii] Paulus, Martin P et al. “Screen media activity and brain structure in youth: Evidence for diverse structural correlation networks from the ABCD study.” NeuroImage vol. 185 (2019): 140-153. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.10.040
[ix] Terry, Christopher, and Cain, Jeff. “The Emerging Issue of Digital Empathy.” American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education vol. 80,4 (2016): 58. doi.org/10.5688/ajpe80458
[x] Hutton, John S et al. “Associations Between Screen-Based Media Use and Brain White Matter Integrity in Preschool-Aged Children.” JAMA pediatrics vol. 174,1 (2020): e193869. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.3869
[xi] Horowitz-Kraus, Tzipi, and Hutton, John S. “Brain Connectivity in Children Is Increased by the Time They Spend Reading Books and Decreased by the Length of Exposure to Screen-Based Media.” Acta Paediatrica, vol. 107, no. 4, Apr. 2018, pp. 685–93. doi:10.1111/apa.14176. PMID: 29215151.
[xii] Ra, Chaelin K et al. “Association of Digital Media Use With Subsequent Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Among Adolescents.” JAMA vol. 320,3 (2018): 255-263. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.8931
[xiii] Australian Catholic University. “Children’s Screen Use and Emotional Problems Fuel Each Other Over Time.” ACU News, 10 June 2025, www.acu.edu.au/about-acu/news/2025/june/childrens-screen-use-and-emotional-problems-fuel-each-other-over-time
[xiv] Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024.