25th Edition of Idealoading: No more screen time for my Kids….Extended reality is altering our brains 🧠 for the worse…?!

December 2, 2023

Your weekly dose of #curiosity in technology, science 🧬, innovation and business🧐

Quick overview of this weeks curiosity Newsletter:

No more screen time for my kids: Extended reality is altering our brains 🧠 for the worse…?! 5 ways VR is changing mediacine. The collision of AI and Metaverse?! Screen time and our health. AI reshaping the metaverse. The brain podcast; our unconscious mind.

Happy Reading and Don’t forget to stay curious and subscribe 🙌❤️

This weeks thoughts

No more screen time for my kids: Extended reality is altering our brains 🧠 for the worse…?!

Rethinking life, the universe and everything as I’m Returning from our beautiful Metaverse-Lab Summit, I had the pleasure to host. It is always invigorating to share a room with brilliant minds and debate topics of technology that are influencing our society. Focusing on the the metaverse seems so 2022. Yet here we are. Some say it is dead. I would like to quote Martha Bennett, Forrester analyst, “it is not not dead, just evolved”. I would agree with that statement. The Virtual worlds are extending into our lives slowly but steadily. Immersion levels are raising as younger generation and Techguys (and Girls) are spending 15hours on average looking at screens. What we didn’t know, or even yet don’t really know, is to what extent is that all that screen time is altering our brains and human physiology!

This was an awaking in the speech Martin Lindstrom gave. To summarise Martin's amazing talk: “We are highly irrational beings and easily influenced. Our brains are sensitive, and it easy to manipulate. We know the subliminal messaging tricks that marketing has been using for year now, to influence our thinking. But what we didn’t know is that screen time is altering our brains 🧠 for good and not always in a good way!"

Martin unraveled the good and the bad in this. The world of immersive medicine and the concept of Metacebo, where the technology of extended reality is doing good. But this is in controlled research environments, like applying medicine doses to patients. The uncontrolled environment is our overuse of screens, from phone to computers, and the endless scrolling. On some level we know it is bad like smoking or drinking, but we can't help ourselves. We know that there is always 2 sides to a coin, with this technology it seems we might be altering our brain Chemistry 🧪 to an extent that we didn't anticipate, and developing brain of kids seem to be most effected!

Based on these insights I went down the rabbit hole of PubMed, Nature, and other research publication sites. I can tell you the findings are not pretty. The research keeps stacking up against screen time, and definitely against endless scrolling, which I also engage in if im honest. There are laws for Smoking, drinking, driving for young adults, but only guidelines for screen time.

With our vigorous engagement towards virtual worlds, yes teams meeting fall under screen time, the conclusion is fairly simple. No more screen time for my kids! Paper, play, puzzles, boardgames, books. 📚. Even though my kids already have a very limited screen time, time is here to do even less! We already don't own a TV at how, but for myself I need to rethink how I spend my time in the evenings. Maybe I should get rid of my subscription on Netflix, Disney, Apple TV to reduce my screen time more.

What will you do? What should we do a society? Stay curious 🧐