Oh sure, we all have ADD, or Attention Deficit (Hyperactive) Disorder, they’re just day dreaming, we all day dream. The amount of times I have heard that being someone who has ADD myself, boy I couldn’t tell you. Many people claim that ADD is not an actual disease because everyone has trouble concentrating and paying attention at times. Well with that argument than the field of psychology is not an actual field of science, that’s a stretch. Psychology is real, ADD is real and it’s becoming a serious issue with the rise of technology use possibly being to blame.
How serious is this ADD issue really if everyone has it? Well according to The Centers for Disease Control 11% of children have been diagnosed with ADD since 2011 and there has been a 3% increase in ADD diagnoses since 1997 to 2006, making it the most prominent mental health disorder in children today. Serious enough for you?
The evidence that children’s increased use of technology may be leading to the rise in ADD comes from an article by Lesley Alderman, She cites a study published in Pediatrics and conducted by Dimitri Christakis, MD, in that stated of the 1,323 children ranging from fourth to sixth grade, those who spent more than two hours of screen time a day were 1.6 to 2.1 times more likely to have attention issues. In addition, another one of his studies found that children under the age of 5 who are exposed to more than two hours of screen time are 20% more likely to have attention problems at school. These statistics are daunting enough to see that technology is causing attention issues in children, but what about adults?
Well, in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” David Carr claims that the over abundance of media stimuli on the internet has resulted in a new reading style called skimming, that has diminished one’s attention span. Carr claims that skimming has diminished one’s attention because he used to be able to read lengthy novels without getting distracted but now he is limited to two to three pages. Skimming is basically defined that the internet has so much different stimuli that one mostly reads for key words, bouncing from source to source, rarely revisiting any one source twice. Carr believes that this skimming allows humans to retain only enough information to recall the source later in a Google search. Being able to Google the rest of the information by typing in only a few relevant words is what Carr claims to be causing his attention problems. I see this attention phenomenon resulting from the internet and technology using what psychologists like to call classical and operant conditioning, to cause humans to develop attention problems.
Now watch these two videos of popular TV shows The Office and The Big Bang Theory as to how the characters are able to condition their peers into behaving in a certain way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt4N9GSBoMI
So, in essence, classical conditioning shape’s one to involuntarily respond to a stimuli and become accustomed to doing it while operant conditioning shapes one’s behaviors through rewards and punishments. The video of The Big Bang Theory demonstrates operant conditioning through Sheldon rewarding Penny’s good behavior and punishing her bad behavior to make her behave in the manner Sheldon pleases. Technology and the internet operantly conditions humans to skim, in that the reward of being able to Google search only the necessary information to access the entirety, results in the behavior of skimming. Next, classical conditioning is demonstrated through Dwight in The Office as he involuntarily stuck out his hand when the computer made the reboot sound even though Jim did not offer an Altoid. Therefore, this repeated skimming behavior is classically conditioning humans involuntary response of a weaker attention span as Carr highlighted earlier. This logic of how technology is classically and operantly conditioning humans to exhibit this weaker attention span may be detrimental to adults as well. Furthermore, this logical argument of technology and the internet conditioning humans to have weaker attention spans may be conclusive as potentially one reason why there has also been a rise in ADD.
So is ADD serious enough for you yet? It better be. The statistical evidence that ADD is the most prominent mental health disorder in children while simultaneously seeing that technology may be conditioning humans to shape diminishing attentive behaviors is quite concerning. Although the correlation between the rise in ADD and the rise in technology in everyday life may not be the single cause of this increase in ADD diagnoses, it still raises significant implications of the potential detriments of technology. Also, although there are drugs to combat the symptoms of ADD, the side effects of ADD medication can be extremely harmful demonstrated through this Family Guy clip.
The potential harmful side effects of ADD medication plus the ever increasing rate of children with ADD may see more kids drugged out like in the Family Guy Episode or more kids with serious attention problems either because they refuse to take the medication or their ignorant like most of you. The evidence that technology may have a correlation to this increase in ADD and attention problems is even enough for The American Academy of Pediatrics to state that children should be exposed to no more than one or two hours of screen time a day, while children under two should not be exposed at all. So reconsider how much technology you and your kids are using, you don’t want to end up like Stewie.