By India McCarty
It’s no secret: screens are bad for your brain. Many people try out digital detoxes, but what’s really going on neurologically when you take a break from your phone?
“Our study is so exciting, because it’s the first study to actually compare how children’s brains are functioning during screen time compared to shared book reading,” Meredith Pecukonis, the lead author of a 2025 study, told Developmental Science.
In the study, children wore caps that monitored brain function while listening to someone read them a story as they followed along in a book and then when they were played an audio recording of a story while following along on a screen.
While listening to someone read from a book, the children’s right temporal parietal junction was activated. When following along from the screen, this same part of the brain did not activate.
The temporal parietal junction of the brain facilitates several different mental processes, including social cognition, language processing and self-evaluation.
“Given that we saw that this region of the brain was active during shared book reading, but not during screen time, suggests that children were more engaged in these social cognitive processes during shared book reading,” Pecukonis explained. “This region of the brain is also involved in attention more generally, and so it could be that children were just more attentive during shared book reading.”
Pecukonis and her team’s research matches up with other studies looking into the effects of ditching your phone for a few days.
In a study published by Computers in Human Behavior, researchers had young adults limit their smartphone use, only pulling it out when it was essential. After the three days were up, the researchers scanned participants’ brains and found “significant activity shifts in reward and craving regions of the brain, resembling patterns seen in substance or alcohol addiction,” per Medical Xpress.
Another research team had test subjects block mobile internet access from their phones for two weeks. The participants saw increased sustained attention spans, and Science Blog explained the “enhancement in sustained attention ability matched what would be expected from erasing ten years of age-related cognitive decline.”
“These results provide causal evidence that blocking mobile internet can improve important psychological outcomes and suggest that maintaining the status quo of constant connection to the internet may be detrimental to time use, cognitive functioning, and well-being,” the researchers concluded.
Screens can feel inescapable these days, but for the benefit of your cognitive abilities, it’s important to put them down and give your brain a break.
Read Next: Excessive Screen Time Linked to Lower Cognitive Function, Study Finds
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