You walk into a room and get introduced to a lady wearing a hideous dress, but instead of telling her what you think about her dress, you instead say "it's a pleasure to meet you." Why is it that we can stop ourselves from saying our first reaction or what our brain is thinking?
We can suppress our unacceptable social responses because we have properly developed our frontal lobe. The frontal lobe plays an important role in cognitive maturity, motivation, learning and social responses. Injury or decreased formation of the frontal lobe may lead to depression, loss of emotions, volition, personality, inability to suppress unacceptable social responses, inability to choose between good and bad actions, inability to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, and difficulty with working memory tasks.
"Dr. Elizabeth Sowell, a member of the UCLA brain research team, led studies of brain development from adolescence to adulthood. She and her colleagues found that the frontal lobe undergoes far more change during adolescence than at any other stage of life. It is also the last part of the brain to develop, which means that even as they become fully capable in other areas, adolescents cannot reason as well as adults." -Juvenile Justice Center
More and more kids are under developing their frontal lobe. Kids are becoming more volatile, violent, and have no filter regarding social responses. Why is this?
I believe that a major reason for this behavior is due to the prevalence of video games. I'm not blaming the violence of the video games on their behavior, but more on their under developed brains. A child's brain in constantly being shaped and developed. So when a child spends most of their days sitting in front of a computer or TV playing video games instead of being outside playing sports, or inside reading and problem solving they are creating a brain imbalance.
"Using the most sophisticated technology available, the level of brain activity was measured in hundreds of teenagers playing a Nintendo game and compared to the brain scans of other students doing a simple, repetitive arithmetical exercise. To the surprise of brain-mapping expert Professor Ryuta Kawashima and his team at Tohoku University in Japan, it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement. In contrast, arithmetic stimulated brain activity in both the left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe - the area of the brain most associated with learning, memory and emotion.
Most worrying of all was that the frontal lobe, which continues to develop in humans until the age of about 20, also has an important role to play in keeping an individual's behaviour in check.
Whenever you use self-control to refrain from lashing out or doing something you should not, the frontal lobe is hard at work.
Children often do things they shouldn't because their frontal lobes are underdeveloped. The more work done to thicken the fibres connecting the neurons in this part of the brain, the better the child's ability will be to control their behaviour. The more this area is stimulated, the more these fibres will thicken.
The students who played computer games were halting the process of brain development and affecting their ability to control potentially anti-social elements of their behaviour."
Bottom line: get your children involved in other activities! Enroll children in sports at a early age, get them interested in reading, and problem solving especially throughout childhood and adolescents.
Pura Vida!
Alica Ryan, NTP
You walk into a room and get introduced to a lady wearing a hideous dress, but instead of telling her what you think about her dress, you instead say "it's a pleasure to meet you." Why is it that we can stop ourselves from saying our first reaction or what our brain is thinking?
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