Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber

by Joe Clement

The brain is a very efficient machine and it hates to waste energy. So from the age of two to five, a toddler’s brain starts realizing what pathways it is actually going to need, and what pathways it does not. If the brain rarely uses a particular pathway, it simply closes and discards it. This is an important developmental process known as pruning. Just as a gardener would cut back the dying branches of a bush to let the living ones become stronger, the brain removes underused synapses to strengthen the synapses it does use. If the brain did not do this, the excessive number of synapses would be too much for the brain to handle. Pruning allows the brain to focus on the pathways it actually needs. This creates the use-it-or-lose-it principle of cognitive ability. As the brain prunes away rarely used synaptic connections, it loses the potential to realize that particular cognitive ability later in life. A child who rarely uses imagination in childhood will be unimaginative later in life.