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SF
Madrid
11/11/2022
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It is not easy to hear in a conversation with parents how fed up they are with their children spending the day with their eyes glued to a screen connected to social networks. Experts warn of the need to delay age when children are given their first mobile phone - which is usually a very popular gift for their First Communion - and above all, setting limits on their consumption.
The head of the Detoxification and Dual Pathology Unit of the Hospital also joined this call. Vithas Aguas Vivas Hospital, the doctor Augusto Zafra, who warns about addictions resulting from "progressive digitalisation." An issue that is increasingly accepted by the scientific community and will become "a major public health problem."
The psychiatrist has highlighted that "almost no one questions the cerebral impact of sensory nutrition in the digital age, capable of generating a neuronal neuroadaptation in the first two decades of life and which will determine the subject's existence for the rest of his or her life."
In this way, Dr. Zafra has stressed that, in the same way that certain drugs They cause a medium-term attention deficit, "the high-impact stimuli generated by short and viral videos in a developing brain of children and adolescents can generate neuronal tissue in the adult tending to hyperstimulation, immediacy and the loss of attentional focus similar to what happens to people who suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)". In fact, Zafra has been warning since 2014 about the problems arising from inappropriate use of social networks and the ones that they could generate in the future.
Thus, it has been made clear that, "without knowing it, and allowing unsupervised accessibility of this type of stimuli in minors, We can be facilitating a brain design similar to that of people who suffer from the neurological disease called ADHD."
To explain the addictive effects of certain social platforms, Dr. Zafra refers to the “sensory rush” of which Bernstein Research speaks. The human brain is designed “to anticipate potential pleasure through the craving sustained by the famous substance called dopamine that generates an uncontrollable need to be impacted by easily accessible stimuli and immediate pleasure that generates pulses of endogenous opioids and endorphin cascades 'at the touch of a button'. And this is a reality because our brain organ is really designed to work like this.
This "sensory pill" becomes "compulsive and a slave focused on a behavioral repetition that escapes the subject's self-control, rationality and temporal perception. And platforms like Tik Tok take advantage of this, providing us with the best sensory pill immediately and with a quick pulse. capable of shaking all our sensory brain areas and emotional."
The head of this Detoxification and Dual Pathology Unit has highlighted that Tik Tok is today "the most popular social platform and it seems that the rhythms that prevail in other social networks such as Facebook have become slow and weak." And, explained Dr. Zafra, the fast video "has a high impact on the human sensory system, it causes us to disconnect from reality, it gives us an instant pleasure that is difficult to describe and it shakes our dormant emotions."
The platform's high media impact, rapid rise in popularity and progressive increase in market share compared to other social networks "does not go unnoticed by the competition. Instagram quickly made its reels viral as a star product, just as YouTube generated its shorts. And all this, Dr. Zafra points out, "is not a coincidence, since the objective is to capture the full attention and maximum time of the audience».
According to Dr. Zafra, "it is not surprising that the algorithm that prevails in Tik Tok is designed so that visual content is consumed as it becomes more viral." In this way, he has indicated that "it has an infallible nose for show you what only interests you, beyond the conscious plans and the preference initially shown to the platform by the subject. And the scariest thing about all this is that it really hits the mark.
For this reason, Dr. Zafra has predicted that "the future design of social networks is focused on perfecting increasingly refined and potentially more addictive algorithms that artificialize emotions, silently anesthetize our conscious will and reduce the feeling of human suffering».
For this reason, he has advanced that platforms "that invite us to have a virtual parallel life, such as Metaverse"They will be a revolution for our socialization and for the current way that human beings relate to themselves, to other people and to the world. What's more, the Metaverse will turn existential and philosophical conceptualizations of the human being upside down like never before in our history," he concluded.
Despite all this, the professional has highlighted that social networks are "neither angels nor demons but digital tools at the service of human beings that are being perfected every day" but he sees it necessary for each person to learn to "tame and dose From an early age, both the quantity and quality of information received digitally, which is disguised under the adjectives of 'entertainment', 'socialization', 'convenience' and 'globalization', among others, are affected.
In this sense, Dr. Zafra has pointed out that "healthy self-management of the time we invest in these 'social' digital platforms will be necessary for our mental balance and any tool designed to help prevent overuse will be insufficient if there is no full social awareness of this need."
"It won't be luck or chance," he says. "Our future emotions, thoughts and mental processes depend on each person's self-care and the way we relate to each other. It will simply depend on how we decide to feed our brain system and how we take care of the rest of the organic shell that surrounds our nervous system.
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