Judith Christianson
Protecting Our Collective Brainpower
Judith Christianson is a clinician who works with children, teenagers, adults, and families navigating attention, memory, emotional regulation, and the increasing pressures of a digitally saturated world.
Her talk introduces the idea that functional brainpower is a public good. Attention, judgment, memory, and self-correction are not only individual abilities; they are essential to healthy families, effective workplaces, and stable societies. Judith explores how constant digital interruption, cognitive offloading, and AI-mediated environments may be weakening these capacities—and what we can do to design lives and systems that protect them.
Judith describes how digital technology is removing the friction, boredom, effort, and sustained attention that developing brains need—but children are not broken; they are adapting to the environment we created, and by intentionally restoring those experiences, we can help them build resilience, creativity, self-regulation, and stronger thinking.
Judith Christianson is a clinician who works with children, teenagers, adults, and families navigating attention, memory, emotional regulation, and the increasing pressures of a digitally saturated world.
Her talk introduces the idea that functional brainpower is a public good. Attention, judgment, memory, and self-correction are not only individual abilities; they are essential to healthy families, effective workplaces, and stable societies. Judith explores how constant digital interruption, cognitive offloading, and AI-mediated environments may be weakening these capacities—and what we can do to design lives and systems that protect them.
Judith describes how digital technology is removing the friction, boredom, effort, and sustained attention that developing brains need—but children are not broken; they are adapting to the environment we created, and by intentionally restoring those experiences, we can help them build resilience, creativity, self-regulation, and stronger thinking.