From sleep and body mass index to mental health, over the past few years, one scientific study after another has attempted to determine the effects of screen time – on children and teenagers in particular.
While most of these studies highlight harmful effects, others are more nuanced, making it difficult to implement specific actions to regulate screen time for these young users.
More recently, new research by scientists at University College London has focused not on screens but on internet use and, more specifically, on internet addiction, to determine its effects on teenagers’ brains.
For the purposes of this research, principal authors Max Chang and Irene Lee analysed 12 neuroimaging studies of teens with internet addiction. Their aim was to observe the brain and any changes induced by this addiction and, more specifically, changes in connectivity between brain networks that play an important role in behaviour.
Published in the journal PLOS Mental Health, the analysis of these studies suggests a disturbance in signalling in brain regions involved in neural networks in internet-addicted adolescents.
In particular, this disruption was observed when performing activities controlled by the brain’s “executive control network” – which affects behaviours involving attention, planning, decision-making and impulsivity – in internet-addicted adolescents, compared with teens who did not have this addiction.
“Understanding how and where internet addiction affects the functional connectivity in the brains of adolescents, as well as replicating functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with multiple populations could guide future global therapeutic and public health interventions,” the researchers pointed out.
The academics, however, qualify their findings, stating that “present answers merely paint an unfinished picture that does not necessarily depict internet usage as overwhelmingly positive or negative”.
They believe further studies on a larger sample of participants are now needed “to confirm how internet addiction changes the way in which the brain controls behaviours and, therefore, general wellbeing”.