Status Updates From Il cervello degli adolescen...

“This is worrisome,” Dr. Wang of Ohio State told the media, “because students begin to feel like they need to have the TV on or they need to continually check their text messages or computer while they do their homework. It’s not helping them, but they get an emotional reward that keeps them doing it.

“They felt satisfied not because they were effective at studying, but because the addition of TV made the studying entertaining. The combination of the activities accounts for the good feelings obtained.”

First, the gamers group scored much higher on tests for risk-taking. Next, functional MRI showed less connectivity to the gamers’ frontal lobes, but more connectivity in areas that have been observed in nicotine addiction,

A study published in China in 2012 looked at seventeen adolescents who met the definition of gaming addiction and compared their brain scans with those of twenty-four nongamers of similar gender, age, and educational level.

The compulsive need 2be digitally connected happens on 2 levels,behaviorally&biochemically. Every ring,ping,beep& burst of song fr a smartphone results in an “Oh, wow” moment in the brain. When the new text message/post is opened,the discovery is like a digital gift; it releases a pleasurable rush of dopamine in the brain. There is mounting evidence that Internet addiction has much in common with substance addiction.

The cascade of neuroprocesses that kicks off the brain’s reward circuitry and the rush of the pleasure chemical dopamine can be triggered just as easily by the release of the latest iPhone as by alcohol, pot, sex, or a fast car. In some ways, technology is a drug.

being addicted to the Internet involves the same reward center as drugs

The difference between those with ordinary teenage angst and those with bona fide anxiety disorders is one not of content but of degree.

Researchers have found that clinical depression seems to emerge from a gradual dysregulation of the HPA axis from childhood into adolescence caused by a greater-than-normal release of cortisol in the brain

While stress is one of the main risk factors for schizophrenia, as it is for mood and anxiety disorders, there are at least two others: advanced paternal age at time of conception and frequent marijuana use in adolescence.