Simmer down now! Be careful about claims that social media "changes our brains."

Neuroscience is a fascinating and extremely promising field. But, and I hate to say this, when people claim things like “neuroscience says X” I tend to respond with the classic Cheri O’Teri line: simmer down now!

There’s lots of great work being done in neuroscience, but there’s not yet many findings that directly translate to, for example, practice implications for education. We need a lot more basic neuroscience scholarship, first. (The effects of toxic stress on learning is a notable counterexample.) And I’d wager there are even fewer clear findings regarding the effects of social media on our brains, as Montag and colleagues (2023) discussed in this wonderful, short piece. Neuroscience holds great promise for understanding how social media use can affect our brains, and in particular how they might differently affect younger v. older people. But we need LOTS more research (and, therefore, more funding and access to social media data) before we can say anything definitive about the effects of social media on the brain. I definitely sympathize with the concerns that drive people to talk about social media being “addictive” due to “constant dopamine hits” that “destroy children’s brains.” But we don’t yet know any of that is actually what is happening (of why), so all of us should probably just simma down for a while now.