Change Your Brain Every Day - Violent Video Games On The Brain: What It Looks Like, with Dr. Lisa Strohman

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

It’s clear that technology and gadgets have changed radically over the last 30 years. In fact, the evolution happens so quickly that it’s difficult to determine the safety of new tech before it goes to market. In the second episode of a series with psychologist and author Dr. Lisa Strohman, Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen discuss what the scientific research says about how certain gadgets and video games affect our children.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are still here with our amazing guest, Dr. Lisa Stroman, and she's got a great book, Unplug. We've been talking about devices and

the effect on the brain, especially with children. So this has been really fascinating to me. And we want to talk about how gadgets have changed. How have you seen them change over the last 30 years? Wow, that's a big, tall order. A lot has happened in the last 30 years. First of all, we have created such small microcomputers today that we can basically walk around with a processing unit in our hip pocket that's more powerful than the computers that we had in governmental agencies 30 years ago. So we think that that magnitude and the shift between how much data we can process, how quickly we can process it, and how accessible it is, is probably the most important part in that change that's happened because it's given access to everyone. So you basically have everything at your fingertips all the time. important part in that change that's happened because it's given access to everyone.

So you basically have everything at your fingertips all the time. And this is also with kids. Most parents don't put controls on their phones. So let me tell a story. When I was growing up, which was a lot longer ago than you guys, I mean, we really had typewriters and you'd write things by hand. And I just published a book this year called Change Your Brain, Change Your Grades. Well, the first version of that I wrote in 1982 longhand. I actually wrote it longhand and it was such a wonderful process, but I hated editing it. And that's when the personal computer just came out. And I asked my dad for $1,700 so I could get a Sanyo personal computer. They had the little floppy disks.

And it changed my life in a good way. I could edit it. My productivity went way up. Yeah, sure. There's good and bad. I mean, obviously, we have a lot of great things with technology. We just have to be careful. But in 1987, when my oldest son, Anthony, was 10,

Atari came into the house. I was stationed in Barstow in the middle of the Mojave Desert. And he had been a really good student. And now when Atari came, he was not a good student anymore. And he and I started fighting about it because he couldn't stop. Because initially, I'm like, this game is so cool. I didn't have games like that when I was a child. And I thought it was so cool.

But I could see its addictive quality. And also being a child psychiatrist, I just finished my child psychiatry training. I went, these things are bad for children because they can addict them. And that's with the old video games that would do ping pong, ping pong, right? I mean, they were completely boring. And since then, it has just gone exponentially crazy where you can play these 3D games on your phone that totally wear out the pleasure centers in your brain. So they actually purposefully addict them, wear out the pleasure centers, and they're stealing. It's amazing. The attention of our children.

Dr. Stroman, are you familiar with the work of colonel david grossman i have on combat so i read that book i mean it's weird that i read it but i read it more from a martial artist standpoint but um the part in there that stuck out to me that i actually brought into one of our books and i talked to daniel about that i thought was fascinating was when he actually talked about video games and the violence in video games and how it's affecting the youth and how it was so effective with like school shooters and kids who had never picked up a weapon. They pick up a weapon, they walk in, they can hit a moving target perfectly. And it didn't make any sense to,

because law enforcement trains and they can't do that, right. It's like, it's very difficult to do. Um, and how, because of that, the military had adopted the Atari, um, because you brought up Atari, they adopted that technology to train military, to train police officers. I thought that was fascinating. Do you know anything about that? I do. I think that a lot of parents don't recognize a, that there's differences in video gaming, right? So there there's nonviolent, there's violent video gaming. When you put in an escalation where you're putting in a first person shooter, or you're teaching kids, it is that fight or flight mechanism in the brain. And Dr. Amon would talk to that more to that. But what you see is that that brain basically gets in this hyper vigilant state. And the fear that I have, and what I see with kids is there's such a desensitization that

happens over time. So I was on a national board for the American Psychological Association. I was on this commission that looked at violent video games. And I want to say that probably everyone that was actually on the committee was over the age of 65. And none of them had ever played these video games. And i i remember sitting in the room and i said have any of you actually played grand theft auto or have you played halo have you no so they're looking at this in these in these like micro moments instead of like really understanding what it is like for these kids to jump in to a video game get get shot you know fortnight is a perfect example of a more recent one where you can shoot someone you can hide from someone and then

if you if you get killed you know you there's no blood so what message is that sending to the kids from a psychological perspective right and then can you ghost them right so somebody kills you now you can actually follow and float through the game with the person that you just killed. Right. And, and you can, and I am, and you can, depending on like what messaging that you're using, you can talk to them and harass them the entire time. So, so the psychological and emotional warfare on top of just the play is so massive. And I think that parents don't understand, you know, for instance, Discord

is the app is 98 million kids strong. Like that's a lot of people on a, on a gaming platform app that's outside of Xbox, PlayStation, Atari, right? It is outside of even the platform so that these kids can have private conversations and communicate with one another. Right. They're conversing. And the thing is, is what you said is so interesting because these are kids with developing brains, which is what you've been trying to say. These are not adults who already have their, that are already developed and have their moral compass set, who are already pretty set in their ways. These are kids who are very impressionable. and nine out of ten um teenagers in the uk have no purpose so if you put these devices that change your brain into the heads of kids who have no purpose their purpose is to just play the game

and can can you help us though with what does the research really say about devices and video games for children? Because I have this mindset, this is a bad idea. But you'll hear periodically research come out that says, oh, no, it's really good for them. They're learning new skills. They're becoming more dexterous. Although I read one study where the thumb representation in the brain has become larger since these video games. And that's good if you're a monkey. It may not be good if you're not a monkey. But could you just help us? Where is the research today on the impact of technology and violent video games on developing brains?

The research is extremely clear that violent video games creates damage in a negative way to kids. It creates a higher anxiety. It creates higher depression. And it also, to your point, morphs the brain and aggrandizes those areas of the brain that give you the potential to be more aggressive, less empathetic, all of the things that you do not want your child to be in these developing periods of time. The challenge with the research, you know, and I use air quotes around the research in that sense, is that some of the research that comes out that gets presented to me.

So I'm in the middle of a talk and I'm talking about technology and the impact on the brain and here's the realities. And somebody said, well, there was just a study at UCI that stated that it's not really that bad. So I said, well, I'd like to see who sponsored that research. I'd like to see who they asked. And of course it was, they asked 10 to 15 year olds, hey, do you feel bad after you use your device and not to did

they not only start with 2 000 kids they published the results of only 366 of them and it's self report that is not science that is not something that should go out and hit mainstream media and say oh by the way it's really not as bad for their brains totally different and so you can speak to that but that that's very frustrating to me on what hits mainstream media and what doesn't. And I feel that the, the industry itself has such a strong lobbying arm. It's very complicated and how, when it gets a violent video games to your point, how that is linked into the CDC. I work with Dr. James Mercy there in terms of like their, their ability to do research on guns and violence,

and that's attached to this gaming industry. So there's a lot of political issues on the back end that people don't recognize. So that's to me why we're not seeing more of it. But when you do get in and you look hindsight to kids that are on violent video games, it is bad. All bad. Do you remember, I think it was 1997, there was a cartoon in Japan, a Nintendo Pokemon cartoon, and they had an explosion, a specific sequence of red, white, and yellow lights that flashed at four and a half flashes per second. And all of a sudden, 729 Japanese kids ended up in emergency rooms with new onset seizures. And it was that study that for me went, okay, these things are not good. Because there's no neuroscience on, is this good for a developing brain or is it bad? There's no study on it that's published ahead of time. So we've

unleashed these devices onto a developing population. And what we now know is the incidence of depression in teenagers is skyrocketing. The incidence of ADD has more than tripled since 1992. And I think it's just incumbent upon us to look at, well, what's changing in our society besides taking fat out of our diet, which is a bad thing, putting these addictive devices in the hands of developing brains. I agree. And in addition to the idea of them being addictive to kids, you and I were having a conversation prior to us starting about the regulation and what people are allowed to put on there.

What was the image that would pop up and give the message for kids to kill themselves? Oh, Momo. Momo. There's controversy about whether that actually happened. But my point is, and then there was the other one when my daughter was in grade school, she was in elementary school.

There was Talking Tom, but then Talking Angela came out and they got busted for actually viewing children, for peeping in on children. That one got shut down. So all of these things that some of them might be real, some of them not, but we know there's enough of it that is real, right? That what do you do?

So I think we should, we have to stop, but let's talk about the dangers. Right. And what do you do? To children and what do you do? The dangers of digital technology. And how do you protect them? So Unplugged is Dr. Stroman's book that you can get on Amazon. D-C-AKids. So D as in dog, C as in Charlie, A as in apple, DCAKids.org. You can actually, I was looking this up. It was really cool. Sign up for a program to actually learn how to,

and Dr. Stroman's program will help you really do digital supervision on your kids. This is so important. If you have a child and you like the child, see, if you don't like the child, that's different. But if you like the child and you want to protect that child, this is just, it's just absolutely essential for you to look into this DCAKids.org. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe. So you'll always know when there's a new episode and while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD,

you can use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.