Waldorf schools:  This is where the chief technology officer of eBay sent his children, as well as employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. Three-quarters of the students there have parents with solid high-tech connections. Why?

Did you know that Steve Jobs never allowed his children to use the devices he invented?

The Waldorf school’s chief teaching tools are pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. No computers or cell phones are allowed in school. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home. While schools worldwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers and hi-tech equipment, a contrarian point of view can be found at the tech economy’s epicentre, where some parents and educators have a clear message: computers and schools don’t mix.

Waldorf schools subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

Paul Thomas, a former teacher and an associate professor of education at Furman University, who has written 12 books about public educational methods, disagreed, saying that “a spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning.” “Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.” And Waldorf’s parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with attractive lesson plans.

Many people feel their children will be left behind if they don’t learn to use technology early in life. Waldorf’s parents disagree and counter that argument with how easy it is to pick technology skills. Technology developers make their products “brain-dead” and easy to use. It is in their financial interest that every person on earth should be able to use it.

Problematic internet use covers a range of severity, namely:

Mild problems we perceive among typical well-functioning individuals who text multiple times per hour or ignore family and friends to get together in favour of texting.

Moderate problems we perceive among individuals whose screen time activities result in moderate family discord and inefficient work but who are still able to, for example, get good grades and participate in sports (if it’s a kid).

Severe problems are detected among individuals who cannot control their online behaviour despite significant resultant problems such as isolation, falling grades, family turmoil and withdrawal from friends, family and activities. These can be caused by addiction to social media, pornography, gambling, or online gaming.

How do we differentiate between a bad habit and addiction?

One noticeable difference between habit and addiction is the effort and time required to change it. Conversely, altering habits requires minimal effort, time, and attention. On the other hand, addiction often demands an integrative, long-term plan to treat negative physical symptoms like withdrawal and the emotional disconnect between body and behaviour.

The addictive behaviour gave rise to new terms like:

Nomophobia: is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact.

“Phantom vibration syndrome“: the syndrome known as “phantom vibration” is characterized by an individual falsely perceiving that their cell phone is either vibrating or ringing at a time when it isn’t. Those who experience phantom vibration syndrome may be engaging in an activity away from their cell phones yet believe it’s ringing.

Ringanxiety is another term for phantom vibration syndrome. Watch people when someone’s phone rings—they’ll check theirs, too, just in case.

Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure.

FOMO: fear of missing out.

Catfish: People who deliberately create fake personal profiles online to trick an unsuspecting person into falling in love with them.

 iPredator: A person, group or nation who, directly or indirectly, engages in exploitation, victimization, coercion, stalking, theft or disparagement of others using Information and Communications Technology [ICT].

The pleasure principle

Addictive drugs trigger feel-good brain chemicals such as dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a cluster of nerve cells underneath the cerebral cortex, also known as the brain’s pleasure centre.

Internet Addiction changes the brain, similar to cocaine. For example, a Facebook addict and a cocaine addict have the same brain changes that indicate addiction to SPECT brain scans.

What is dopamine?

Certain chemicals are released in your brain to allow it to function normally. They are called neurotransmitters. NEUROTRANSMITTERS are the brain chemicals that communicate information throughout our brain and body. They relay signals between nerve cells, called “neurons.” For example, the brain uses neurotransmitters to tell your heart to beat, your lungs to breathe, and your stomach to digest. Dopamine is the brain’s pleasure chemical.

Pleasure is just the tip of the dopamine iceberg. Dopamine impacts the body in many areas, including motivation, memory, behaviour and cognition, attention, sleep, mood, learning, and pleasurable reward.

The mesolimbic pathway, which originates in the middle of the brain and branches to various places like the cerebral cortex, is the brain’s most crucial reward pathway. One of the mesolimbic stops is the nucleus accumbens. Increased dopamine in the nucleus accumbens signals feedback for predicting rewards. Your brain recognizes that something important — good or bad — is about to happen, thus triggering motivation to do something. In this instance, it motivates you to text on your cell phone, surf the internet, watch a porn movie on your PC or play a PlayStation game.

The learning process and development of tolerance

Dopamine interacts with another neurotransmitter, glutamate, to control the brain’s reward-related learning system. This system is vital in sustaining life because it links activities needed for human survival, such as eating and sex, with pleasure and reward. So, dopamine is good for you until it gets too much. For example, repeated exposure to an addictive substance causes nerve cells to communicate so that couples’ liking’ something without ‘wanting’ it. It, in turn, drives us to go after it.

Over time, the brain’s reward centre is less impacted by dopamine and needs more to obtain the same dopamine “high“.

Compulsion takes over

Your brain is clever. It quickly stores information about environmental cues associated with the desired substance. These memories help create a conditioned response – intense urge- whenever the person encounters signals from surroundings. Cravings contribute not only to addiction but also to relapse during periods of abstinence.

Example: The possibility of receiving a message on your cell phone when the screen lights up triggers a dopamine release, the same as your ringtone. Red numbers indicate new notifications, such as a cell phone’s vibration.

At first, a person will experience no symptoms of increased dopamine secretion. As it progresses, however, the reward centre starts blocking dopamine access. Eventually, it blocks it off completely. By this time, the person will be unable to experience feelings of pleasure. The term used to describe this state is “Anhedonia”—the inability to feel joy.

How do addicts cope with anhedonia?

There has been a sharp increase in people who self-harm in the past few years. It seems to have become a trend, a coping mechanism for youth today. During a recent survey, secondary school pupils were asked if they know of someone who self-harms, and 70 -80% indicated that they know of someone who does. It also seems to be a predominantly teen thing. Most of the time, reasons for self-harm are a chaotic home environment, sexual abuse, and overuse of internet technology.

You may ask why internet technology?

When kids have cut off all dopamine from the “pleasure centre” in their brains, they don’t feel anymore. To start feeling again, they turn to cut. When they cut, another neurotransmitter is released – endorphin. The pain from cutting makes the brain sense injury and floods the system with endorphins, which act as a natural pain reliever. However, it is not as powerful as dopamine and the high they get quickly dissipates. Then they have to cut again, and again, and again. Cutting becomes more extreme and profound as time passes, and they draw blood. Some cut to the bone after a while to get the endorphin release. The top three reasons for digital anhedonia are watching pornography, playing social video games and internet surfing—Self-Harm Quiz.

Multitasking is killing your brain. 

Do you study while listening to music and texting your friends? Do you watch TV and Facebook or WhatsApp simultaneously? Do you watch a series on your PC while studying?

“People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, “The brain is very good at deluding itself.” Miller, a Pi-cower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that, for the most part, we can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. What we can do, he said, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed. “Switching from task to task, you think you’re simultaneously paying attention to everything around you. But you’re not,” Miller said. “You’re not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously but switching between them rapidly.”

 Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again, October 2, 2008. I heard on Morning Edition. Jon Hamilton, 2010.

 Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time, and bombarding them with information only slows them down. When people think they’re multitasking, they quickly switch from one task to another. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.”

This constant task-switching encourages bad brain habits. When we complete a tiny task (sending an email, answering a text message, posting a tweet), we are hit with a dollop of dopamine, our reward hormone. Our brains love dopamine, so we’re encouraged to switch between small mini-tasks that give us instant gratification. Unfortunately, this creates a dangerous feedback loop that makes us feel like we’re accomplishing a ton when we’re not doing much (or at least nothing requiring much critical thinking).

Effects of multitasking:

• Multitasking lowers your work quality and efficiency.
• Multitasking makes it more difficult to organize thoughts and filter out irrelevant information.
• You make more mistakes.
• You remember less and have more incredible difficulty in understanding.
• You have problems with concentration, anger and frustration.
• It is linked to depression.

Multitasking can lower your IQ by between 10-15%. For men, multitasking can drop IQ by as much as 15 points, essentially turning you into the cognitive equivalent of an 8-year-old.