TikTok acts on children’s brains like a ‘candy store’ shortening their attention span: report
The way children are consuming social media, especially on TikTok, is likely negatively affecting their attention spans, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
“It is hard to look at increasing trends in media consumption of all types, media multitasking and rates of ADHD [attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder] in young people and not conclude that there is a decrease in their attention span,” said Dr. Carl Marci, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Although the link between ADHD and screen time is debatable, new research suggests the type of short and fast-paced videos that children consume today are partly to blame for why they struggle to participate in longer-term activities.
TikTok, known as Douyin in its home market, debuted in China in September 2016 as a shortform video sharing platform, primarily for lip-syncing and dancing videos, but became the most downloaded app in 2019, according to paper published in NeuroImage last year.
The paper is one of several studies to examine the effect of TikTok on the brain, which examined how personalized videos, compared to general-interest videos, influenced the reward centers of the brain.
The MRI scans of participants were highly activated in the addiction part of the brain who watched personalized videos, finding some users struggled to control when to stop watching. – READ MORE
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