benjamin franklin's, the creators who take these wild bets and sometimes the bets pay off. i completely agree with laura. we should be funding a whole series of things that are carefully researched science but are mavericks some of the stuff that the pew foundation does, and they have some of the highest paid out. >> let's get some quick comments from our viewers. i agree with the things you said about organic and the same people that want to promote organic also want to preserve the amazon. but if you have a 6000 cal dairy, 2,000 gallons of pure

protein. that is a benefit, and if it is usable, the bottom line is, the mothers of america by the milk, the consumers drive profits. how we educate them? had we combat emotion in perception with science and education? >> what is happening in iowa, which is really interesting, it used to be your choice as to what you create per acre. it was pretty limited. a corn farmer or a sore a farmer. farmer. there is so much more opportunity to create the, .iber, medicine we are able to transform life. some of the richest areas of the country are going to be those that can produce the

highest value added per acre. but the options are tenfold or hundredfold. that is why education is so important. the choices for every kid in iowa or in north dakota, for every kid in south dakota, are so much more varied, so much more interesting and productive per acre that we are going to see some very large transformations to come. i suspect these will be some of the richer areas in the country, if they apply the science and technology. >> let's go to one more call from kentucky on the republican line. and all spending by the government must be appropriated within the house of representatives. within that body of 435 men and women, there is only one real

scientists, one from mit. most of them are lawyers. this seems to be part of the problem. if only we could get more scientists like yourself and others in positions of power within the house to appropriate or not appropriate and reduce that deficit, i believe that we would find a broader pass in the future. your comments, please. >> i think you are absolutely right. i think science literacy is becoming more and more important, in the same way as somebody needs to know basic orgraphy or basic history basic music. the ability to understand why .obotics is important it is the difference between a region having a rich, robust market and not having it.

absolutely congress should have more people who are science literate. congress work hard and work long hours. they are faced with very hard decisions. but i get really upset when 90% of the debate that comes about, either cut it all or raise the taxes on everything. all the oxygen goes out of the room and you stop debating all the stuff that is really important. let's just get on with it. we have had two major wars and have been promising people a lot of stuff. we do have to cut some programs, but whose programs? we promise people too much. but we have to get on with this and start growing in taking the opportunity of all these incredible young brains in the united states or that want to come to the united states to continue to build the world's greatest economy. z, joining usue

this evening from newton, massachusetts. thanks for spending time with us. >> thank you so much. >> the conversation continues on line with our facebook question about the deficit and the growth of scientific research. you can go to facebook.com/cspan to post your comments and questions. next, a discussion on the effect of the internet on the brain and child development. this is from the colorado world affairs, -- counsel in denver. >> hello, everyone. welcome. this is your brain on the internet. 8, and itonday, april is just after 3:00 p.m.

my name is alan carmichael. . work with the boulder weekly i would ask you to please check your cellphone and make sure it is turned off. we want to be sure that all cell phones are turned off at this time. thanks for coming. i will briefly introduce our panelists and we will get underway. to my left is michael, he is a writer and philosopher. he has written many books and published in lots of amazing magazines. down is thomas hardaway, a u.s. army veteran of 31 years. he now works as a child and adolescent psychiatrist and has a long tenure of working with children. is right down there. he is a field professional in

both geology and anthropology. he spent over 36 years practicing archaeology on easter island. our fourth panelist is not going to be able to make it today. for that information, check the web site. we have a great panel and to start things off, i will handed over to michael. to michael.ver >> the good afternoon. i am going to stand up because i am too short for people in the back to sea. let me ask, can the people in the back hear me ok? the people in the back, can you raise your hand if you are hearing me clearly? thank you, much better. all right, so i am going to isress that question, this

your brain on the internet, by first asking what that word "on" means. what does it mean to say your brain is on the internet? there are a two usage is. you are basically looking at your gadget, transfixed to your iphone or your computer or whatever other gadget you are using. enormous literature on the impact of that. there are dozens of books are doing whether our use of smart phones and the internet are making us dumber, more isolated, smarter. for most people, i think that is

what it means to say that your brain is on the internet. that the internet is doing something to you as you are using it. but there is a second usage that is less common, which i have spent the most time writing and thinking about. that is the physical integration of humans and machines. let me explain where i come from. i made dueled cochlear implant user. dual cochlear implant user. sinceeen truly death 2001. at that time i got a cochlear implant in my left ear -- i have 2001.ruly deaf since there is a string of 16 electrodes that are surgically threaded into my inner ear, lying flat against the auditory nerve of my inner ear.

there are extra revises and processes with this device whose job is to pick up sound waves, digitize them, and send them to a radio transmitter that is in that little round thing. here is the battery that controls the system. so what i have inside my head and outside my head connect and work together a bit like this. .hat just sticks there stupid implant tricks. [laughter] sending a doing is radio signal through my skin to the in plant -- to the implant and it is embedded in my skull just underneath the skin. you cannot really see it from the distance you are sitting at, but the 16 electrodes are inside

my year. -- inside my ear. i wrote a book about this that came out in 2005. the basic outcome of that book for me was that it is possible to put electronics into a human body and make that body believe that it is having a sensory experience. that is what happened to me. that is what a cochlear implant does. it makes my brain believed that it is hearing the sound. when i think of putting your is iton the internet, possible to put devices inside the human body that allow us to physically, in terms of the brain, connect to the internet? can we connect our actual brains physically to the global internet? is it possible? is it feasible?

is it desirable? what would it do to us? and it quickly outline some of the things that it might do to us. i spent a lot of time investigating the physical possibility of doing this. weh today's technology, cannot do what we would call mind reading in any real sense. it is difficult to look at the nerve by mary's, the firing of neurons in the brain. it means the brain is thinking about an apple. that kind of thing is possible to a limited extent with things like magnetic resonance imager is. it is impossible to think of a person -- to tell of a person is thinking yes or no, if they are making a decision to add or to subtract something. it is possible to reconstruct what they are actually seeing eye looking at the neural

activity in the back of the brain. but there are not many -- that is not really mind reading in a real sense. that is an attempt to correlate your activity was something that user is doing. but the second book that i wrote, i try to push that further, and to outline a scenario of how could actually put our brain on the internet. i said at the outset, it doesn't mean that you can read minds. know the inner experience of the brain is to be the owner of that rain. in my book, i argued that it is possible, in theory, to extract information about neural firing, infer from that what experience the brain is having, send that signal to another brain, and repeat the , so thatin reverse

person has a simulacrum of what the center experienced or felt or salt. it is conceptually just beginning to become possible to talk about doing such a thing. if i have electronic implants in , i can send the word apple over the internet to your device, which would make your brain believe that you are seeing an apple. thequestion is, what is point? it is a bit like talking about e-mail in 1993. when i first thought about e- mail, i thought it is just a faster way to send letters. which is true, but it also profoundly transformed the way we communicate. in this book, i try to be a leading edge of discussion, saying have some way to imagine

technology like this. it is hard to do because we are trying to imagine uses of the technology for which no social context exists at the present. workinge is like kings together extremely closely, where someone had a sensation or saw something important, everyone else would immediately know that. when i hear the phrase, this is your brain on the internet, that is what i think about. i try to imagine these kinds of leading-edge technology and where they could go and what that might allow us to do. thank you. [applause]

>> am i on the air yet? that forn opportunity me has been a little bit unexpected because i come from more of a medical and developmental perspective here. certainly not an electronic one, as my wife will attest to. there is now a rule in the house that i am not allowed to be too close to anything that has buttons on it. [laughter] from that perspective, i probably would not have very much to contribute. however, as i began to -- the theof this kind of meeting, people of brings various backgrounds, and you would not believe the things you get dropped in as a participant. i began to realize just how

for children and adolescents, this has a profound effect. that came home to me a couple of years ago when i was on tour with the children's choir that i work with, and we stated a of oddry which had a lot eccentricities in the cafeteria that were on the wall. rules,things like slide and all my kids all the way up to a senior in high school did not recognize a slide rule. that seems kind of odd to really perceive that. in addition, they had a big cabinet on the wall, and it was a card catalog from a library. my seniors and juniors recognized that, but i did not ask them. i said anyone under the age of 12, tell me what that is. all sorts of interesting

answers. nobody even began to get a clue to what that was. they would say it obviously has course in it, it could hold letters. is it a letter sorter? to listen to this conversation going on was very interesting. when we finally tell them what it was for, that you had little cards in their that was each eight link to a book or a journal of some sort, there were absolutely amazed. really? you mean you made a card up for each book in the library? there was this kind of thinking that you could tell from people who had already been exposed to something were linked to something that is almost real time. it is reflected in the way they perceive other things that i had not really thought about before. pilot, and i asked everybody under the age of 10, what was the big books, and they stared at it and

it was a telephone book. the older ones, some of them had seen one because they still get distributed from time to time, but practically speaking, at least where i am in texas, they serve no practical purpose the way they used to. anachronism,uch an something that was just a question marks for these kids. when i read the topic, the brain on the internet, i was thinking about those old commercials where they had scrambled eggs and it is your brain on cocaine or whatever it was. i thought maybe this was something about the evils and the toxicity of the internet and the like. it brought home to me that as children and adolescents begin to think in terms of how they organize information, how they access information, this really

is a different way of accessing and organizing information in many ways. when we think of the developing brain, the critical element of development of course is accessing information, adapting to get, using it to adapt to something out, and going back and kind of a circle, getting more informations organizing it in your brain and and synthesizing it to go forward. when you think the terms of now how one would access that information, i was thinking more in terms of middle schoolers beginning to learn how to do research in a different way from the way i learned. the biggest trick there would be helping them to discriminate between always -- and who defines noise? we would define noises being information you don't need. some people would say that is noise. others would say that is very

important. the idea always has been when we have a research project, we go out and had a list of references, which over teacher had made for us, or we try to get those references out of other articles. we would go and look for information and we would spend afternoons and morning discriminating and making little note cards of what is and always, what is not relevant to what i am studying, and what is extremely relevant. school, iam a middle don't know what is relevant or not. at any level we begin to think in those terms. i am not trying to present a discussion as a lecture as much as i am just throwing things out that might stimulate a question or two that would make some interesting discussion. as i see children who are disorder, who have various psychiatric disorder, from

personality to biochemical disorder is, is the way they perceive people are interacting with them, how they perceive information that they read and alike, and how they learn in general. i think the idea of being able to discriminate what is important and relevant is important socially. what we arenk of really doing, we are editing. those of us who had cameras, we always wished we had enough money to buy tons of film so that we could take all the pictures we wanted to of the interesting things we saw all. but in fact we had to do our editing up front, because we knew we only had three rolls of our kodak film and we have to be careful what we take a picture of. now, of course, with infinite digital photography, you go out and take five pictures of literally everything that comes your way.

now toy it is easier there are thousands of photographs being shared and no one has edited them. you have to take an extra step to edit retrospectively if you want anyone to look at them. so the idea of editing are discriminating are thinking ahead of the information not only going to procure, but then how are you going to archive that information? when you need to access it from where you archive it, you will run into the problems that i have, and that is that i am of two minds when it comes to whether i have my old notebook. so i write it in here because it is easy to get at. takes so long to push the little buttons there that are not always spelled right.

as you are talking about where we are in 19 -- we have so much available to us that it is overwhelming for us in terms of accessing in using the internet. think of what it is for our children and adolescents. i have a hard time teaching them. they are teaching me. i had a 4-year-old who came in with adhd, but he was very focused on his new little thing. he was playing all sorts of things and going back and forth from one to the next. i was amazed at the 4-year-old, and i would not have known where to start on his little game. i thought that perhaps of any of you have a question, it might make for good discussion. [applause]

>> welcome this afternoon. i want to start this out in any number of different ways. my father always required us for children to be observant, be observant, be observant. and after that, think, for god's sake. the problem is, you never knew what you are supposed to be observant about. let me give you an illustration of that. here was a man whose mother was a classics graduate from wellesley college, wrote both latin and greek, and she married a sheep herder in central wyoming. only in america. and raised a son who would go on to get his ph.d. from yale. pieces professor named richard foster flint. his little nine graduate

student slaves and said all right, i want you to be observant. do a exactly as i do. and on the table in front of him was a beaker full of a yellow, foamy fluid. he said this is a glass of human urine. i want you to do exactly as i do. so he reached forward and he stood up -- stuck his finger in the year and and then he lifted off. -- stuck his finger in the uring. the nine graduate students line up and get as he was told. at the end, he said you have all flunked. you are not observant. middle finger in the myne and laid off forefinger. so not being observed at has

its payments. that is what i was taught to do. my father said the reason he chose being a geologist in central wyoming was because he did not see much future in the back end of a cow. the only other profession he had ever seen out there were geologist looking for oil, of course, so he did not have much of a choice, he had to become a geologist. they were really talents in their field. i want to mention this because of although i do have a variable background, i have taught for 40 years at the college level in rock springs, wyoming. one of the chances that i got was to realize, by being

observant, that a handful of hasing in the end chippings a certain limitation, at least it does for me. there were 286 registered archaeologists back in about 1975. to do archaeology of wyoming. that was the year that a first went out into the cell pacifica. i got out there and lo and behold, there were not 10 archaeologist for a third of the plant. if you have a choice, what would you do? do archeology in wyoming which is cold and windy and yellow and frosty and kind of harsh, or would you rather be in the south pacific, which is warm and breezy and green and colorful and sensuous. i did not see much future in a handful of flights. at any rate, that is how i got involved with the easter island

archaeology, and it is on the internet, a lot of it. if you are desperate for entertainment, you can always google easter island charlie love, and you will have more than enough entertainment. excavationved in an on the island that found the first trees. these are giant palm trees, and only a geologist would find them. nobody had bothered to look before. they were not being observant. i am not extolling the virtues here. when you get a trench be enough, the entire island is covered molds.e palm root they are all contrived. i have not found one that was not contrived. you have to have mystery in the title or it will not sell. so i am sorry but i am really

ofguine about documentary'ies any source. what i want to get across is that there is a propensity in american culture to seek after mysteries. it is a bottom line. if you want a mystery, it is not how the statues were moved. we have already done that. we did that 26 years ago. replica,p a nine-ton and we moved it standing upright like this, not lying down. that was the first time one had ever been moved in the entire united states. we moved it with 28 -- 25 people. we put it on a bobsled-like thing and we rolled it forward. in twod it 150 feet minutes rolling time. now they are starting to walz- statues. walk

they have not done the archaeology of the roadways. 27 of my students and i went down there and excavated 1,000 feet of roadway, looking for clues as to how they move the statues along these roadways. these young upstarts have not done the background archaeology on that. the point i am trying to say is, when you see the new documentary on easter island, they will cover the island with trees. didmystery is how and when it get to easter island in the first place. it produces a coconut a little smaller than a golf ball. and they take two or three years to germinate, and another 800- 1200 years to grow into a mature palm. you cannot recycle them.

when you cut one down, it is down for ever. easter island is as barren as the desert of wyoming. that is why was a mystery as to how they moved these colossal statues across the island, some of them 14 miles. some of them weigh 86 tons. whenever i give a little talk to engineers, i challenge them. times ifake it five you want, and i want you to move in it vertically. the bases of them are always perfect. in order to be an archeologist, you have to be observant. you have to think. don't we all have to do that? everywhere in academics you should be being observant and think. that is the sole contribution i think i've made for four years worth of students, let alone

being of field man. get them out there. when you see it in the field, then you have a much better perspective overall of what you are dealing with when it comes to research. i yield the rest of my time. [applause] >> thank you to our panelists for all that. we will open that up to questions and answers in a moment. if anyone wants to ask a question, you can line up by the microphone in the middle of the room right there. a the meantime, all last question of the panelists to kind of kick off this portion of our presentation. phrase from the late, great roger ebert, we tend to kind of get into our own

world as we move along in our careers. for me personally, that in the media business. the rise in popularity of the internet has been a huge factor, and one of the more interesting debates that we have includes long form journalistic stories in the boulder weekly. our people with their of minute thought patterns that are in attention to general,ore a.d.d. in with the internet form. is there room for long stories about important topic anymore? how do we get them to pay attention to, if the keynote speech this morning was written down in a 45-minute speech, excellence. are going to get people to pay attention to this? i just wanted to get some

the idea ofake on long form journalism and how you see it being affected by the internet. >> this has been a subject of great debate, how the internet is transforming not only journalism, but the world of books as well. it is relevant to both of us professionally. you work in the media and i write books. the question is, what is the internet doing to us? i don't know if i am the best example because i constantly read long form journalism. i read more than i ever did because i have access to things ipad.kindle and i read more than i did when there were only paper books around. i don't know if i am typical or

not. we have a proliferating media landscape with so many different things competing for attention. it's hard for one thing to national participation. when i was growing up, there were 13 channels on tv. the weekly news arrived on the doorstep in the morning. i personally am not really one of those people who are scared that the internet is damaging along for. i think it is alive and well. it is so easy and fast and i actually read them. that is my take on this.

long not see it as hurting form journalism. the question is that the media is changing. i see a bright future here, because it is so easy to distribute books. that can only be positive in the long run for the book industry. but because the meaning has changed, the form has changed. the thing about writing my third book. i know that the first chapter really has to grab an audience. thatis the sample chapter we download on the candle. i have changed the way i think about the book. >> i think the idea of children and adolescents, and when you think about it, we really are

the children and adolescents ourselves, have always had a a long,with looking at full story in terms of media. but i recall as i was getting older taking a newspaper and wishing there is more information about something i was interested enough to read. you remember you would start the first six paragraphs and then it orld say continued on 4a whatever it was. you read some more and then unfortunately it would fizzled or stop. you always want to continue it some more. when it was presented in that kind of format, perhaps that was more enticing than going on to .n internet format

we kind of dart around to something we think is interesting, and we try to absorber it completely in quickly and then move on to the next thing. many times i see this happening ,ith children and adolescents with their perception of a given topic tends to be a little more superficial. i am not sure i can explain that. i think you bring up a really good point, that to encourage and really push our children and adolescents to look at things critically and to look at it at another level. i believe the internet provides that opportunity, but we as adults, and helping them to develop, have to develop the critical thinking in them and not have them go from topic to topic as you see when you do a google search. you will have 13 of these on a page. the internet affords us the

requirements to push our developing young adults to do more critical thinking and look more in-depth and to value someone else who has done that for them and written a long article. with theainly agree comments you folks have raised. after teaching for 40 years, i have developed some thoughts of my own about that. over the last two decades, i have watched the ability of my students kind of lower down a little bit. things are not as intense. shoveled too much stuff and they don't know what to believe and what not to believe, in part because their parents are not there to question them on it. you have gone from 40 years ago when you had one parent who was employed and the other really taking care of the youngsters and doing other things around

house. to job now gone to workers, and the kids are left by themselves. the end result is they find other ways to entertain themselves. certainly by television, which is abysmal as far as i am in terms of content. you do have some programs that they are but scientifically abysmal, too. they don't give enough detail on these things in it cannot find them. you have to have patience. your critical thinking skills have to be alive, and that is something we are not teaching children. look at congress. that is a grown-up version, and the end result is a rhetorical question, how many of you think the country is certainly on a downward spiral because we don't

have a congress that does anything? they do have patience, right up until they get their pay check. so i am kind of discouraged. i think it comes from child raising. i think have the responsibility is on the parents to make sure their children do it. not only that, do what? one of the things i've found number one,r again, i find the form kids to be the most responsible. that is because if you are on a farm or a ranch in your mom or dad says you have to go feed the cattle, you better go do that. if you don't, it is not going to get done, and you jeopardize the welfare of the family when you do that. most kids are the responsible. you give them an assignment and

it comes back the next day. kinds ofkids find all ways of putting it off. that is because you have so many friends and peers. the ranch kids do not have as many. there are fewer distractions. another difference is in the actual ability. those parents who have taught the kids to read out loud in the a story, read back to them. not only are they more articulate, they are less has a and over many of the words, i eat out. doesn't get done? that is the problem. . think we have a lot of ills it is a matter of being responsible and teaching responsibility. how do you do that? [applause]

>> we will now open it up to questions from the audience. keep in mind this is just for questions, not statements, so go ahead. >> thank you, gentlemen. thank you for speaking to us. my question s, now that devices like smart phones have put the infinite storehouse of human knowledge in each of our pockets, the ability to immediately reference any skeptics that we don't know with,or are unfamiliar has not undermined the necessity for learning in remembering information and underlining the value of critical thinking. >> is the undermining our ability to come up with things on our own?

>> that is that a fascinating question that you ask. this kind of question has been asked for 2500 years. it is not a new question. 2400 years ago, plato wrote a dialogue where he complained -- theseexistence of new youngsters are going to someone and gaining knowledge, they would rather read a scroll by themselves and learn that way and not talk to people. is as old as technology itself in many ways.

is it changing our ability to remember things? i would say yes. but again, it has always been constant, media driven change. in pre literature society said did not have a riding, -- that did not have writing, it was a tremendously valued skill. you have to minimize risk of all your ancestors going back that far. it is a sign of spiritual dedication. we live in a time with instant access to facts. show "jeopardy" is a really good example of

that. it is the ability to memorize useless facts and spit them out of command. ibm has developed a program ix.ch is as good as in what it does is free us to develop new kinds of skills. this is what technology has always done. it has always change the kind of landscape in which we live. ,ou always have old-timers while the youngsters develop new skills that are as powerful and more profound than anything that has gone before. it has changed the way we think about information, retrieve and redistribute information. i think that is good in many ways.

grow up notids remembering what the capital of florida is. i think more valuable skill is to teach kids how to look that up. we can now spend less time teaching kids how to minimize and more time to think about the available information, including its reliability. just the fact that is on the wikipedia does not mean it is right. to> i would really like weigh in for just a moment on this really profound question. if i know where the information is, why do i need to remember it or memorize it? i remember coming through medical school and we had these big books. i remember looking kind of bewildered and people said you don't really have to remember

all that stuff and memorize it, you just need to know where it is so you can look it up. thought, number one, i have a 15-minute appointment with a patient, so that is not going to work. something you really have in your brain for several reasons. one is that you are constantly synthesizing other information with what you have already got. if all the information is not here, so that when you add additional information -- my dad used to say i will give you the skeleton upon which to add all the information you are going to get from now on. and that skeleton needs to be added to. one thing i've noticed in children of adolescence and other adults is that a lot of times we have a lot of disdain for things we don't need immediately.

why should i have to read heart of darkness or play-doh? i am going to go out and be an information management technician. ,hen i talk to kids about that what we really need this music? bodyworks of art to select text that we are seeing? select textneed to that we are seeing? and the children come and say i am going to be this or that, i don't need all this other information, it means that they lose out on all that thinking that will have to be done for the world around them. if they don't know who plato was or all these other things, or have not memorize the basic that is how silly this

sounds. you cannot really get into algebra and do that until all this operational information is at your fingertips. that is why it is so important that the pre operational information, which is facts, figures, are at your fingertips, so that when you do the more formal thinking, you now have that information right in the unit in this casserole that keeps getting more complex and more contexture early integrated with what you are going to be doing all your life, which will be continuous learning and sharing the benefits of that with those around you that we serve. [applause] >> i find my students like these martin bonds for really one reason of good use. that is, -- by students like these smart bonds.

smartphones. where and when was magellan killed? they find out it was 1520. wasyou tell me why he hacked to pieces? nocannot find it, there is analysis. you can find a point of information, but you cannot find an analysis. isn't there. [applause] we have anymore questions? go ahead. speak a little closer to the mike. your cochlear implant, that is a most recent step in advancement of more closely integrating technology with our other capabilities. that is only going to become

more extensive in the future, which will have implications for learning or how we access information for adolescent development. when new york neural system was more plastic, what kind of indications might that have for how you think and process information. >> the question was, in relation to michael's implant and his one example of how new, modern technology is evolving us and the world, so just your thoughts on those implications. >> i have a lot of thoughts on that. i am just trying to figure out which stocks to pick up on first because it is a very general question.

is one of the key points that i try to make when i talk with people about new neural technologies and what they make possible. i think that when a lot of people imagined a bionic future, that basically imagine what we do today, only bigger, better, and faster. dark, hearee in the the old resound, run in the dark. this is superhero fantasy thinking. the thing that new technologies do is they don't just let us do what we do now, only better. there are entirely new things that could not have been imagined before. this is the kind of thinking that i try to write about in my books and articles. i try to rig -- imagine different kinds of futures.

in a very specific way, gathering information from one person is happy, anxious, fearful, sad. that is the kind of information this.e get for encrypting over the internet, that kind of information is fairly sparse. e-mail is prone to contusion. they have access to each other's emotional status. be verythat could powerful collectively or in groups.

we never know how group of people stealing at a given moment. a patient during the arab spring on twitter. tweets.s a flood of fear, shock, anger, hope. that was the kind of collective communication that i had never seen before. ae collected feelings of large group of ordinary people. brain surgery is no trivial thing. it would allow a form of collective communication.

>> we can take the next question. go ahead. >> my roommate works at a montessori preschool. they don't do any sort of video recordings or even listen to recorded music because they think children need space to come up with things on their own. my little cousins are light 4, and they have their little ipad. i don't really have a good way of raising that question, but what do you think? >> it is about cognitive development of young people with access to the toys that we have now.

question,ciate that because i think that the question was asked in such a way that a decision would be implied that either this is a good or bad thing. i suppose everybody has had problems with new things that have come along and said now what is going to happen to our children. that with just the art of writing. many times people have that discussion on that level. that is we should not have any of these things, or we should. and what will that do? whats so much to do with we do with that and what the parents and the teachers do with that. it is possible, like with anything else, if you don't have

limits in your home. the toxicity that is potentially ising from the internet mindboggling. 83-0 orficial nature of 4-year-old learning, it depends on what they give that kid. what kind of material, just like it was with paper and pencil and everything else. for us to have that reading aloud and being read to and all those things. can decided, if we at the adult level, how can i use this technology to push us forward. that would be great. like anything else, once we put our eggs into one basket and say it is electronics that will

make it happen or the lack of electronics that will keep us in good shape, then we are getting away from the real question. we need to pay attention to these children and constantly synthesizing and how best to do that. that speaks to a lot of parents who are now very unwilling or even fearful of putting limits on any of these things. and i say, well, what does your child do if he's not doing his homework? he spends about phi hours on the internet or with his friends, he's got 200 friends. i don't think he's ever met any of them or talked to them really but he's got 200 of them, whatever they are. you would think this that would be a no brainer in terms of your response to that parent. and yet, many of us, the children have decided the limits. i'm not finished yet. i've only been on for an