growing babies learn from high-bandwidth, back-and-forth sensory interaction — not “content.” (View Highlight)
Fast-forward to our screen-saturated present. Parents are often at work, and older kids are at school. Both are typically on screens. The age-old supply of social companions has dried up, leaving babies lonely. For many guardians, the solutions are either to pay for professional childcare by the hour or to subject little ones to vivid screen entertainment, which costs far less. In crass economic terms, parents must choose between connecting with their baby or having money. That is a toxic tradeoff. (View Highlight)
Babies not only make cries and coos which pull the mother’s heartstrings; she makes sounds which touch her baby, too. Her sing-song “Hello, baby!” voice or soothing tones were primed by primate physiology ten million years ago. The baby’s nervous system knows those sounds mean Mom is near, so the child instinctively responds. That natural, native back-and-forth at certain frequencies and cadences is why the mother-baby bond appears in the first place. Those patterns taste sweet to the child’s heart and mind. In that informational sense, baby media is taking candy from a baby, over and over. The jangly, clangy, ultra-high-pitched frequencies on shows like Chip and Potato, Ms. Rachel and CoComelon catch a baby’s attention; their frequency spectra overlap with the ones the baby’s nervous system naturally enjoys. So, those shows capture babies’ attention specifically by triggering vibratory mother-infant bonding instincts. Likewise, the shows’ looming, veering cartoon faces and frequent cutscenes cue nearby motion to the primary visual cortex. It’s ear-candy and eye-candy, in other words, and not by accident. The creators of CoComelon, for instance, algorithmically optimized the show for this. (View Highlight)
Scientifically speaking, optimizing for captivation is like optimizing a digital drug. The fact that optimized shows all reproduce the same high-speed, high-frequency sonic and visual textures proves the science of attention-grabbing works. Unfortunately, the goal is to create addiction, not stop it. (View Highlight)