Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
24 June 2026
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Science, Innovation and Technology Committee House of Commons
00:03 - 01:56
Speaker 10
Order, order, and welcome to today's meeting of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee. Now I want to thank all of our witnesses and indeed our committee members and clerks and staff who are here in Westminster in our soaring temperatures, our heatwave today. And I want to underline and emphasize firstly that gentlemen and others can take off jackets, and secondly that there is if there is a need or for a break or any concerns, please raise them and we can always suspend the session if we cannot deal with the temperatures. So, this is the second session in our inquiry into neuroscience and digital childhoods. We have heard worrying evidence from neuroscientists about the lack of robust causal evidence for the impact of digital devices on children and young people.
And today we're hearing from those who work closely with children about their perspectives on the impact of digital devices, their views on the evidence gap and how policymakers should move ahead even in the absence of clear evidence. Now, in our first panel, we are very pleased to welcome Ravi Iyer, a researcher who is part of the Anxious Generation movement. Ravi comes to us from Boston where it is 4:30 in the morning or something, so you may not be dealing with the heat, but you're certainly going to be dealing with the time difference. So we're really appreciate you joining us and I am going to hand over to Alison for our first question.
01:56 - 02:08
Speaker 2
Thank you Ravi, I want to pull on your expertise as an educational psychologist if I may, and I want to understand ask you to set out your understanding of the relationship between digital devices and young people's mental health and particularly their brain development.
02:08 - 02:40
Speaker 7
Yeah, so let me introduce myself and just so I'm the managing director of the USC Marshall School Neely Center. I also have worked with Jonathan Haidt, I'm a fellow social psychologist actually, worked with them for almost 20 years. And I actually used to work at Meta and so I have, you know, some knowledge of many of the design decisions that were that affect kids. A lot of what I worked on at Meta were design decisions that affect variables that are known to affect mental health of kids.
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