Each evening, a familiar scene unfolds in homes around the world. A teenager sits hunched over their smartphone, seamlessly moving between chats, videos, social media, and games. Homework is completed with the help of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform. Engagement with the world increasingly gives way to time spent on screens. While this may appear routine today, it could represent a profound change in how children — and their developing brains — experience the world, learn, and grow.
These changes have particular significance for India, with approximately 65 crore people under the age of 25 and one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing digital ecosystems. Each day, millions of Indian children and adolescents spend significant time on digital devices, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic as education, recreation, and social interaction moved online.
Easy access to the digital world has brought undeniable benefits, from unprecedented access to information and educational resources to new ways of communicating, creating, and learning. The recent remarkable advances in AI, performing tasks that once required sustained mental effort, have expanded these possibilities even further. Nonetheless, these digital environments have also introduced a powerful and largely unregulated force into children’s lives—one we are only beginning to understand.
A brain under construction
To be clear, technology itself is not the problem. The concern is what happens when powerful digital tools and devices become a constant companion in the lives of young people during a period of critical brain development. Cognition, emotion, and behaviour depend on brain systems that undergo profound developmental changes in childhood and adolescence. The prefrontal cortex — central to sustained attention, working memory, planning, decision-making, and impulse control — continues to mature into early adulthood.
Digital environments provide an unusually dense and repetitive stream of experiences that may engage the brain in distinctive ways. Over time, these experiences could influence how the brain’s structures and circuits are organised and connected —strengthening some pathways, while others remain underdeveloped. Because the brain is highly plastic during early life, such patterns of engagement can have lasting effects, potentially shaping how young people think, feel, and act across the lifespan.
Indeed, emerging research has linked high levels of screen time with alterations in the brain’s structural development and connectivity. While suggestive, such findings do not prove that digital technologies cause harmful changes in the developing brain. They do, however, underscore the need to better understand the digital experiences of today’s youth and how, for better or worse, they may affect critical functions such as attention, reflection, self-control, and creativity.
Reinforcement shapes attention
A large proportion of Indian young people use social media, with Instagram among the most popular platforms. Adolescence is a period when belonging, peer evaluation, and social approval are especially important, making the rewards of social media engagement particularly seductive and salient.
Many digital platforms are designed to capture and sustain attention by exploiting basic features of cognition, emotion, and reward. Short videos, autoplay, infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, and social feedback create reinforcement loops in which novelty and rewards — likes, shares, and comments — are delivered rapidly and unpredictably.
These variable patterns of reinforcement can encourage repetitive checking and rapid shifts of attention, keeping users in a continual state of anticipation for the next reward. As a result, many young people may become highly adept at rapidly shifting among multiple sources of information yet may still find it difficult to sustain attention on a single task or topic.
Beyond the amount of time spent online, we must also consider how digital reinforcement can shape young people’s expectations of everyday life. When online reinforcement is imminent and constantly accessible, ordinary experiences — having a face-to-face conversation, practising a skill, or simply sitting with one’s thoughts — may feel less rewarding by comparison.
Offloading mental effort
The speed with which generative AI has emerged and transformed how we engage with the world is astonishing. Unlike many earlier technologies, however, AI does not just assist with mental effort; it can supplant it. To be clear, humans have always used tools to reduce cognitive load. Taking a photograph in a crowded parking lot, for example, means we do not have to later remember where we parked. There is nothing inherently wrong or problematic with this kind of cognitive offloading.
The concern arises when AI begins to replace, rather than support, the mental effort necessary for learning. Students can now use AI platforms to generate ideas, organise arguments, write essays, and summarise material. Used thoughtfully, these tools can enhance the learning process. Used as a substitute for independent thinking, however, and AI can undermine the cognitive effort through which knowledge and skills are developed.
Puzzling over a challenging question, struggling to find the right words, making mistakes, and revising an argument are not obstacles to learning — they are central to it. If AI routinely eliminates these experiences, we should rightly ask what the impact will be on young people’s ability to think critically, use informed judgment, and persevere when answers are not immediately available.
The problem is not just learning. There is another cost that is easy to overlook: boredom. Rarely welcomed, boredom creates space for imagination, reflection, creativity, and the development of a rich inner life. When every idle moment is filled with constant stimulation, young people have fewer opportunities to think, wonder, daydream, or reflect on their experiences.
The adaptive brain
There is another way to understand how young minds may be shaped in today’s digital world. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s lifelong capacity to adapt in response to experience, learning, and the environment. The modern digital environment is almost certain to influence the growth of young people, but not necessarily in a harmful manner. Rather, as some scientists argue, their brains may be adapting to function in a world that is very different from that of previous generations.
To be sure, many young people exhibit impressive abilities to filter information, navigate complex digital environments, and switch among multiple sources of information. Perhaps, then, the changes observed in young people reflect cognitive adaptation — novel ways of thinking and processing information based on the demands of a digitally saturated world.
Yet, adaptation need not be always beneficial; it may also constrain how other capacities are expressed or used. Given the significance of the issue, we must therefore consider what may be gained — and what may be lost — as young minds adapt to increasingly digital environments.
In effect, young people around the world are participating in a vast, largely uncontrolled experiment in how sustained exposure to digital technology may shape developing brains and minds. At the same time, the corporations responsible for designing many of these digital technologies have strong financial incentives to keep young people — their current and future users — engaged.
Safeguarding the future
India’s youth are growing up in an environment that was unimaginable until quite recently. Whatever concerns we may have, we cannot simply ignore or reject digital technology. Children will use it. Our responsibility is to help them use it capably, thoughtfully, and responsibly.
At the family level, parents need practical, evidence-based guidance. Children should have device-free times and places, protected study periods, healthy sleep routines, and opportunities for unstructured time. The objective is not to eliminate screens, but to ensure that they do not occupy every available moment.
Schools have an equally important role. Education must preserve what might be called productive struggle — the effort involved in thinking, writing, reasoning, solving problems, and working through uncertainty. Digital tools, including AI, can support analysis, revision, and feedback without replacing original and critical thinking. Greater emphasis should be placed on independent cognitive engagement, including oral examinations, supervised writing, and applied problem-solving.
At the policy level, digital platforms — especially those targeted at young people — should face far greater scrutiny and accountability. Policymakers must demand technology companies provide stronger evidence about how their products affect the cognitive and emotional development of children and adolescents. Governments must also support independent research capable of informing policies and regulations as these technologies continue to evolve.
We should not wait for definitive evidence of harm before asking whether the digital environments we are creating are conducive to healthy development. A young mind needs stimulation, but also silence; information, but also reflection; assistance, but also struggle. We can embrace technological progress while still protecting the experiences through which children and adolescents learn to think, imagine, reflect, and grow.
Derick H. Lindquist is Dean of the Jindal School of Psychology and Counselling at the O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana