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Join Marc Arginteanu, a neurosurgeon, as we delve into a 2023 study revealing the alarming effects of social media and electronic addiction on the developing brains of middle school-aged children. Discover the intricacies of the study’s findings, the connection between TikTok and pseudo-Tourette’s syndrome, the impact of Instagram, and how excessive screen time affects brain structure and function. Marc will provide expert insights and discuss the potential for mitigating these effects by reducing screen time.

Marc Arginteanu is a neurosurgeon and author of Azazel’s Public House.

He discusses the KevinMD article, “I’m a neurosurgeon. Social media may change your kid’s brain.”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast, and get CME for this episode by clicking on the CME link in the show notes. Today we welcome back Marc Arginteanu. He’s a neurosurgeon, and today’s KevinMD article is “I’m a neurosurgeon. Social media may change your kid’s brain.” Marc, welcome back to the show.

Marc Arginteanu: Great to see you, Kevin, and it’s a pleasure to be here and have a chance to speak with your audience for a little while.

Kevin Pho: So Marc has been on in the past. Go to KevinMD.com/podcast to search for Marc’s name to hear his story and prior episodes. Today let’s talk about his KevinMD article, “Social media may change your kid’s brain.” For those who didn’t get a chance to read it, tell us what this article is about.

Marc Arginteanu: Sure. It’s about how social media does change the kid’s brain. And I started with a 2023 article of middle school aged children, and that article laid out some scary findings.

So in that article, scientists recruited more than 150 kids. The kids were middle school aged, around 12, and they were all public school kids, and they were from rural North Carolina.

And the scientists started by surveying the kids about their social media usage, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. And the kids were rated, like, some of the kids were rarely checking their social media, maybe once a day or even less, and the other kids were absolutely glued to the screens. Some of them checked social media more than 20 times a day.

And then what the researchers did was performed functional MRIs. And in case, I know a lot of your audience is doctors but some aren’t, so in case they don’t understand what a functional MRI is, a regular MRI everybody knows about, you lie in a tube and it takes a picture. A functional MRI is a little bit different. It starts out the same, but then the imaging machine shows which nerve cells, which neurons are active. So it not only shows you the anatomy of the brain, it shows you which parts of the brain are active.

So to go back for a second, the researchers performed these functional MRIs of the children in the study every year for three years, and then they asked the kids a bunch of psychological questions.

The conclusions of this study, as I said, were pretty scary. The kids who checked their social media too often became absolutely hypersensitive to any kind of feedback from their peers. They entered this pathological psychological state where they swung from joy to dread. They’d be craving that positive electronic reinforcement one moment, and then fearing any disapproval that was mirrored in their screens and functional MRIs.

So it wasn’t just the behavioral aspect. The functional MRIs actually demonstrated that the habitual social media checkers had different brain activities than the ones who didn’t give a fig about their Snapchat or other social media.

There were widespread differences, and it included areas of the amygdala. And again, for those of your audience that might not know, the amygdala is part of the limbic system, the limbic system is the emotional part of your brain.

It also showed differences in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And everybody knows the frontal lobes are the part that’s most different from us and other mammals, and it really is associated with executive functions such as decision making, focusing attention.

And then there were some other parts of the brain too that were different. One was the insula, which is a part of the brain that’s responsible for emotionally guiding social behavior. And then the ventral striatum, which is sort of a mix between the limbic system and the reptilian part of the brain, the most base part of the brain, and that’s a big part of the reward system of your brain.

Kevin Pho: So you’re a neurosurgeon, obviously. So when you read these findings, through your lens as a neurosurgeon, what was your reaction?

Marc Arginteanu: Well, part of it was through my lens as a neurosurgeon and part is through my lens as a parent. But through my lens as a neurosurgeon, you can see that this is akin to some other addictions that we’ve seen. It’s similar and different, and we can get into that too, to other kinds of addictions that we’ve seen.

And then as a parent, it made me realize that this stuff is out there. And again, I’ll go back to being similar to other types of addictions. My kids are all grown now, but even if your kids are teenagers or even younger, at some point or another you can’t really control what they’re going to be exposed to, be it sugary food, fried food, alcohol, drugs, or social media. And I put social media in the same category. You can’t really stop them from being exposed to it, but what you can do, in my experience as a parent, is educate them, talk to them like they’re a little bit older than they are, and listen to what they have to say about things and get their take on a lot of things.

Kevin Pho: In your article you talk about TikTok specifically and how it has some unique risks. So talk about TikTok specifically.

Marc Arginteanu: Yeah, TikTok, I think it comes up in the news as probably one of the most addictive of all of them, maybe the most dangerous offender to the teenage brain.

One of the really interesting things about TikTok, when it comes to someone who is in the field of taking care of people’s brains, is there was something called a psychogenic pseudo-Tourette syndrome in susceptible teenagers. And for your audience members that might not know what Tourette’s is, it’s a kind of tic. So there’s a motor tic, which is where you move abnormally or your face twitches abnormally, so it may be that kind of tic. But it’s also the kind where people spew out verbal sewage, often they’ll curse or scream or something like that.

In 2021 there were doctors who were at several pediatric ERs up in Canada and down here in the United States, and they saw this basic epidemic of Tourette’s cases in teenage girls initially. And they were perplexed, they had no idea, how can this be? Is there some toxin going around that’s causing this, is it a drug that the kids are using?

But then they found that the kids were actually all viewing these same TikTok videos. And it was a TikTok video with a hashtag Tourette’s, and these videos were viewed billions of times. So that I thought was super scary too.

Kevin Pho: You also talk about the findings of a German study in 2020. And I guess the question there is, is it just with social media apps, or is it just with mobile devices in general, that you’re seeing some of these effects?

Marc Arginteanu: Yeah, you’re exactly right, Kevin. That study that you’re talking about, the 2020 German study, was more on just smartphone addiction in general, so electronic addiction in general. So I don’t think it’s just limited to social media, it’s our whole world.

And in that study, for your listeners, the scientists performed a psychological test on 50 individuals. And as I recall the individuals were young but not teenagers, maybe in their 20s or something like that. And half of the individuals were addicted to their smartphones and half weren’t.

And in this one the doctors also did a special kind of MRI, so they did a volumetric MRI. Volumetric means it would show the size of specific structures. And they showed that that group that was addicted to their smartphones, they had atrophy in the insular cortex. And we mentioned insular cortex before, that’s the part that’s active in psychological conflicts. And you can see that insula is a part of the brain that almost takes into account what the emotional part of the brain is doing and what the thinking part of the brain is doing, and tries to get those things on the same page, if you will, singing from the same hymn book, if you will.

The German scientists also noticed that there was atrophy, atrophy means wasting away for those who don’t know, of a part of the brain called the inferior temporal cortex. The temporal cortex is above your ear, around your ear, and different parts of the temporal cortex do different things. The inferior part of the temporal cortex, it’s not called that because it’s inferior, like meaning morally inferior, it’s just lower down than the middle or superior. It’s involved in the recognition of patterns, faces, and objects.

And they also saw not only atrophy but decreased brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex, or the cingulate cortex in general, is another one of these bridging parts of the brain. It’s sort of in the middle of the brain right above what’s called the corpus callosum, which is the main highway that connects the two sides of the brain. And the cingulate cortex, the front part of it is more associated with the limbic system, the back part of it is more associated with the thinking part of the brain. So this part especially is associated with empathy, impulse control, emotion, and decision making.

Kevin Pho: So what are some of the steps here? Because I think the proverbial genie is out of the bottle. We can’t ban social media, despite some efforts from our government. We can’t ban devices. I know some of them give some lip service to limits on screen time. You mentioned things like having a discussion with our kids. So what’s the path forward here?

Marc Arginteanu: Yeah, so I do think you have to give the kids, or give the young adults, some level of agency, some level of responsibility and so forth. And I do think it ought to be treated in the same way as any other substance that could be addictive, or powerfully addictive.

These products are designed to be addictive, they’re designed to keep your eyes on them for as long as possible. But in a similar way, desserts are designed to be addictive, potato chips are designed to be addictive. I mean, no one needs potato chips, but whatever the latest thing is.

So if you’re a parent you can try to set some boundaries, you could explain to them why it’s bad for them. And if you yourself are struggling with it, it’s very similar.

First of all, there probably are already, if there aren’t already, I do think it may be worthwhile, not to legislate these things out of existence, but perhaps to legislate that they offer some support groups for people who have been spending too much time on them, and have strategies of how to decrease it, because it’s going to be different for every person.

The other thing that people have found is, it’s a lot about a dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. Every time you get a like, every time you connect with a friend, every time you do blank on your little screen.

One of the things that we know, and you and I as physicians know, is that the hardest part is the beginning. The hardest part is stopping. Once you sort of stop getting those dopamine hits and start to limit them, it becomes a lot easier to keep it under control. So something like a vacation, you say, all right, I vow to be off social media for 48 hours or some such thing.

Other things that people have done is, they have these little locks. I know my college age daughter talks about stuff like that, some of her friends have it, where you take the phone and you put it in this little safe that is designed to not open for X number of hours. So I think that something like that can be helpful, saving you from yourself. So those are some ideas I think that could be helpful.

Kevin Pho: Now, is there ever a point where one may need to seek help because this social media or mobile device addiction is so strong that it can’t be controlled with these measures? Are there any resources where this addiction becomes pathological, so to speak?

Marc Arginteanu: Absolutely, for sure. One of the articles that I’d read recently, and I talk about in the article on KevinMD, was at the University of Pennsylvania, maybe in the last couple of years. They saw significant psychological changes caused by electronic addiction among college students, including loneliness and depression. And part of treating that was to talk with a mental health professional.

The good news, though, is after only three weeks of limiting their screen time to less than a half hour a day, a lot of those psychological changes improved. They actually became less lonely and less depressed. So it’s not a hopeless thing.

And as I said, everything in moderation. You shouldn’t live a joyless life, but you ought to have some guardrails around yourself, the same way as any other thing that might not be the best for you in excess, certainly may not be bad for you if kept under control.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Marc Arginteanu. He’s a neurosurgeon, and today’s KevinMD article is “Social media may change your kid’s brain.” Marc, as always, we’ll end with some of your take-home messages to the KevinMD audience.

Marc Arginteanu: Yeah. Well, first of all, it really is a pleasure to be able to talk to the KevinMD audience, and you’ve been more than gracious over the years to publish so many of my articles on your wonderful platform, and I appreciate that.

What I would definitely want the audience to hear is not so much the message that social media is addictive, social media can be bad for you, electronics are addictive, electronics can be bad for you. That’s true, I believe, but I believe it has to be put in the place of, it’s just the newest thing and the newest challenge, either for parenting, or the newest challenge if you will for things that can addict us and really diminish the quality of our own lives.

So I think to put it into perspective, and think about it as part of your bigger life, both for yourself and as your responsibility as a parent, that I think is one important thing.

I also hope you’ll allow me to plug my book, if anyone’s interested in learning more about the way that I would recommend they unlock the potential of their own brain. My book about unlocking the potential of your brain is called “The Mind Unlocked.” I have it, I’ll hold it up for a second, even though it’s backwards. It did debut as a number one on Kindle in neuropsychology, so I would hope that people might consider checking it out.

Kevin Pho: Marc, once again, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks for coming back on the show.

Marc Arginteanu: Yeah, thanks for having me.