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Comment by the-pigeon | Hacker News Reader

The opposite can argued too.

That children who don't use tablets have shorter attention spans and worst social skills. The "natural is better" argument is not research based. Society has long preached that things like reading books is great for kids but it's entirely unnatural just like tablets.

Generally research in this area has been extremely biased against electronics. You also have to control for the type of activities they are doing on the tablet.

For example the mental stimulation when playing an educational Daniel Tiger game is completely different than watching a toy sales driven TV show like Transformers. Both can be done on a tablet though.

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> Society has long preached that things like reading books is great for kids

Wasn't always the case, Plato felt it would dull your memory.

"They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

Plato was probably right. As access to information has become ubiquitous, we increasingly don't need to rely on our memories. Ancient scholars would be able to recite long passages from memory. The printing press made that unnecessary if you could access a book. Now Google has made even books obsolete for some types of information. The internet is the world's memory.

What Plato missed was that our ability to do higher order reasoning and synthesis has grown by leaps with books and now the internet. That's a pretty good trade-off for losing some memory.

'Recite long passages from memory' is still entirely a thing when there's a practical reason (actors in stage plays) or somebody's just really into something (see people who can quote literally everything in several movies from memory). It's just no longer the first step that comes before anything else.

Right, the argument against screens shouldn't be that they aren't natural. It's not "natural" to go to the gym and do repetitive contrived exercises, but this turns out to be a healthy habit.

On the other hand I don't think any great leaps are required to be wary of the effects of screen time. Even as an adult, if I get into the habit of scrolling through newsfeeds, I notice a strong effect of being distracted and seeking stimulus when doing work. My brain has been trained for quick hits of novelty.

In general, there's a night-and-day difference between activities that are easy and tempting vs. challenging but rewarding. I'm sure there are some great educational games on the iPad, but realistically the vast majority of screen time falls into the easy and tempting category.

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