Synaptic Pruning

Reese is a normal teenager who enjoys sports and, of course, her phone. She loves to text, play video games, and get online. She used to be very active and played basketball every day. Reese is on her phone during school and does not have very good grades anymore due to being on her phone. Her mom took her phone away thinking maybe she will try to bring her grades up. This only made her try harder to get online. This is because of synaptic pruning in the brain, the highly active risk and reward system, and the still developing prefrontal cortex. Teens do not need more than two hours a day of screentime. Raising the recommended daily time of two hours to four hours would only make the effects worse on teens. The American Academy of Pediatrics …show more content…
The American Academy of Pediatrics should not recommend changing the time from two hours to four hours due to synaptic pruning. Being online while synaptic pruning is happening can cause the teen brain to lose important skills teens need as a human. The space between a neuron’s axon and another neuron’s dendrites is called a synapse (Scholastic). If a synapse is not being used it is pruned or gets removed through synaptic pruning (Scholastic). That energy being used on that synapse is re-directed into a more active synapse (Scholastic). Synaptic pruning occurs based on choices of activities and teen’s behaviors (Scholastic). If teens are online all the time, then synapses that the teen’s need is being pruned away due to being online all the time. That energy used for like social skills or focus during school is being pruned and that energy goes to the synapse for being online. Teen’s need calm minds to think, teen’s overuse technology like Google for instance. This might cause people to synaptically prune their brains to be