Emotion and Attention. Our brain's integrated emotion/attention system initiates everything we think and do. It's impossible to resolve and respond to a problem if we're not attending to it, and why would we attend to something that's unimportant? Emotion (our arousal system) thus drives attention (our focusing system), which drives our recognition of and response to novel and familiar challenges. Many mental disorders (from autism in children to Alzheimer's disease in the aged) result from malfunctions in our emotion and/or attention systems.

Our brain must continually explore variations from normality, and ignore or merely monitor steady states. Any major variation implies a potential danger or opportunity that might require a quick response. A brain that doesn't attend to a rapidly approaching car won't live long.

A child in a living room in which nothing has changed in days will thus focus on TV or video games and their emotionally arousing and continually changing environments. The more the environment deviates from normality, the more attractive it is to a developing brain that must explore and master many recognition and response strategies.

The normal lives of most young people aren't violent or sexually charged, but these are innate survival concerns. The relevant cognitive recognition and response systems must thus be developed and maintained. Childhood fairy tales often focus on events related to abandonment, violence, and sexuality, so it's not surprising that the same themes occur in their current electronic correlates, and in the games young people play. Fear is a key emotional state that drives much of what we do.

A four-year-old grandchild once told me that he wanted to sit on my lap while I told him scary stories. He had an innate sense that he needed to develop his fear system, but preferably in a pretend setting, safe on his grandfather's lap, than in a real life scary situation.

The emerging generation's world encompasses both natural and electronic environments. They must master both, and so they become screenagers as well as teenagers. Next month's column will discuss what researchers are discovering about the positive and negative effects of electronic media on the development of this dual identity.