"We’re Regressing Into The Unknown" - Dr Jared Cooney Horvath

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**Konstantin Kisin** (0:59)
What do we know about the mechanics of how screens and what we see on screens affects our brains?

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (1:06)
It's exactly what you would expect. None of it is great. A parent asked her, when should I give my kid a cellphone? And her response was, when are you ready for them to watch porn?
That will be the first thing they do when they pick up that machine.

**Konstantin Kisin** (1:18)
That's a great answer. One of the things I found absolutely shocking, this generation of children are cognitively inferior to their parents' generation, and you associate that with screen.

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (1:30)
Yeah, and there's no easy way to say it. 50% of kids have a special plan that gives them extra bonus time to help them because they have a learning disorder, typically an attention disorder.

**Konstantin Kisin** (1:40)
50%?

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (1:41)
You can have what's called induced ADHD, where basically you act as though you have it, but you genuinely do not.
Over half of our kids are on a computer, one to four hours every day for learning. Imagine I had a drug, I invented a new drug, and you say, what does that drug do? And I go, mm-hmm, why don't you give it to your kids? We'll find out.

**Konstantin Kisin** (2:02)
Jared, welcome to TRIGGERnometry.

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (2:03)
Thank you so much.

**Konstantin Kisin** (2:04)
We're so looking forward to the conversation because the things you talk about, in our view, are really important. Before we get into them, tell us a little bit about your background, what's your story, how have you come to do what you do and say what you say?

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (2:18)
Yeah, well, similar to Francis, I was a teacher originally, so teaching was my passion, but I got into neuroscience because when I was teaching, that was a decade of the brain, so everything was brain books, brain gym, brain this. So I figured, all right, that must be the next evolution, so I'll go learn that stuff, bring it back to my classroom, thinking that'd be a year or two.
That has ballooned into 18 years now, I've been stuck in academia, I can never quite get out, but my whole focus has been, yeah, on the science of learning. How do human beings learn? Can we bring that back to schools and say, if this is learning, then what does that mean for teaching? What does that mean for studying, for the tools we use?

**Konstantin Kisin** (2:51)
And the way I came across your work is a friend of the show sent me a clip of you on C-SPAN, I think it was. I think you were testifying in Congress?

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (3:00)
Yeah, I think it was Senate, one of those.

**Konstantin Kisin** (3:02)
Senate, right, yeah. Well, yeah, Senator Cruz was there, actually, I remember now. And you were talking about the impact of screen time and screens on children, on learning and on their brains. And one of the things I found absolutely shocking, but also kind of made sense to me is that this generation of children are cognitively inferior to their parents' generations.
And likewise, whereas prior to now, every generation basically got cognitively better, actually, we're now seeing a decline. And you associate that with screens.

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (3:36)
Yeah, and there's no easy way to say it. Like, you've got to find the nicest way to say that sentence, that our kids are cognitively less developed than we are, but it is just where it is. So, since we've been recording cognitive development, turn of the century, late 1800s into the 1900s, every generation now performs their parents, you name it, on basic IQ, memory, attention, literacy, numeracy, and we always attributed that to school, that the more kids spent time in schools, the more their general competencies went up. And it makes sense, that's where we're cutting our teeth.