Young Japanese people are evolving a new lifestyle for the 21st century based on the cellphones that few are now able to live without.

They are using their phones to read books, listen to music, chat with friends and surf the Internet -- an average of 124 minutes a day for high school girls and 92 minutes for boys.

While the wired world they now inhabit holds enormous advantages for learning and communicating, it also brings a downside, say experts who point to a rise in cyberbullying and a growing inability among teenagers to deal with other people face to face.

"Kids say what's most important to them, next to their own lives, is their cellphone," said Masashi Yasukawa, head of the private National Web Counselling Council.

"They are moving their thumbs while eating or watching television," he said.

The passion in 20-year-old Ayumi Chiba's voice backs up this assertion.

"My life is impossible without it," she says of her cellphone. "I used to pretend I was sick and leave school early when I forgot to take it with me."

As the multi-faceted cellphone takes centre stage in teen life, it plays a number of roles -- including a weapon that children can wield against each other with no thought for the consequences.

Yasukawa recalls the case of a 15-year-old girl who regularly received messages telling her: "Die," "You're a nuisance" and "You smell".

They turned out to have been sent by a friend in whom she had confided and who told her not to take the messages too seriously.

"The girl who was doing the bullying confessed it made her feel good to see the unease spreading on her friend's face," Yasukawa said.

Most middle school cellphone users rarely used their phone to talk, the survey found. Saito, of Kawamura Gakuen Women's University near Tokyo, said children seemed to want the security of communicating with someone, without the bother of dealing with a real person.

"Communication ability is bound to decline as cellphones and other devices are now getting between people," he said.

Saito's survey found that students can also use their cellphones as an emotional crutch, and the more problems they have at home, the more dependent they seem to become on their phones.

More than 60 percent of students who said they do not enjoy being with their families send 20 or more emails a day, compared with 35 percent of those happy with their families.

Related:

South Korea Opens Boot Camp to Confront Internet Addiction.

The compound - part boot camp, part rehab center - resembles programs around the world for troubled youths.

Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors lead group sessions, and there are even therapeutic workshops on pottery and drumming.

South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the "PC bang," dim Internet parlors that sit on virtually every street corner.

But such ready access to the Web has come at a price, as legions of obsessed users find that they cannot tear themselves away from their computers.

It has become a national issue here in recent years as users started dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. A growing number of students have skipped school to stay online, shockingly self-destructive behavior in this intensely competitive society.

Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong Hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem.

They spend at least two hours a day online, usually playing games or chatting. Of those, up to a quarter million probably show signs of actual addiction, like an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek ever longer sessions online, and withdrawal symptoms like anger and craving when prevented from logging on.

To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)

The rescue camp, in a forested area about an hour south of Seoul, was created to treat the most severe cases. The camp is entirely paid for by the government, making it tuition-free.

During a session, participants live at the camp, where they are denied computer use and allowed only one hour of cellphone calls a day, to prevent them from playing online games via the phone. They also follow a rigorous regimen of physical exercise and group activities, like horseback riding, aimed at building emotional connections to the real world and weakening those with the virtual one. "It is most important to provide them experience of a lifestyle without the Internet," said Lee Yun Hee, a counselor. "Young Koreans don't know what this is like."

South Korea's gaming addicts. (BBC News)

Experts say the definition of an addict is less to do with the number of hours spent online, but more about the central role computers and the internet can play in someone's life.

Symptoms include:

• Preoccupation with the internet
• The inability to perform normal tasks in everyday life
• Losing control over yourself
• The disruption of daily routines and lifestyles
• Feeling nervous and anxious when not online

Visualising their dreams can help addicts wake up to reality and reduce time spent at the computer, counsellors believe.

King Solomon is said to have told sluggards to look to the hard-working ant and be wise. Aesop, too, extolled the virtues of the humble ant in his fable explaining why the insect's constant toiling through the summer months would make for an easier winter compared with the fortunes of the lazy, singing grasshopper.

Now there is another reason to admire the tiny, colonial denizens of the insect world. Ants not only work hard and are prepared to lay down their lives for their fellow ants, they also take bigger risks for the good of the colony as they get older – and they can even assess how much time they have left in life.

It is well established that worker ants tend to take greater risks as they get older. Scientists have shown that this behavioural trait benefits the colony because certain risky activities, such as foraging far from the nest, are best done by ants coming to the end of their useful lives – it doesn't pay to put young workers in high-risk jobs.

One remaining question, however, was whether ants had some internal mechanism that told them how old they were and how much time they had left before dying.

Dr Moron believed that it might be possible to manipulate an ant's lifespan artificially, and to observe changes to its risk-taking behaviour as a result. His study, published in the latest issue of the journal Animal Behaviour, did just this by increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in a chamber housing an ant's nest. High concentrations of carbon dioxide increase the acidity of the blood and curtail an ant's lifespan.

As the scientists predicted, the worker ants in the colony began to forage further afield earlier than they would have done if they had been brought up in a low carbon dioxide atmosphere. The findings are further evidence of the apparent altruism of the ant. These workers are not only prepared to sacrifice their lives to serve and protect their queen, they also have the ability to make careful calculations of just how much risk they should take based on their current life expectancy.

Many different kinds of animals, other than ants, are known to be altruistic and the issue of how this could evolve in a world of selfish genes remained unresolved until about 40 years ago with the work of the late William Hamilton of Oxford University. It was Hamilton who showed that the altruism seen in ants and other social insects could be explained by something called kin selection.

But would the altruism of the simple ant explain human altruism? Most people show the greatest kindness to their own children, followed by the children of their closest relatives. It cannot explain the more conscious acts of true altruism that people often show to complete strangers. Human altruism may be far more complex, but the humble ant has at least given us a hint of how our own unselfish behaviour first evolved.

Related:

Ants Plug Holes to Smooth Journey.

Dr. Judith Beck is the Director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond.

Her most recent book is The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person.

Cognitive therapy, as developed by my father Aaron Beck, is a comprehensive system of psychotherapy, based on the idea that the way people perceive their experience influences their emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses. Part of what we do is to help people solve the problems they are facing today. We also teach them cognitive and behavioral skills to modify their dysfunctional thinking and actions.

I became particularly interested in the problem of overweight and was able to identify specific mindsets or cognitions about food, eating, hunger, craving, perfectionism, helplessness, self-image, unfairness, deprivation, and others, that needed to be targeted to help them reach their goal.

A unique feature is that the book doesn’t offer a diet but does provide tools to develop the mindset that is required for sustainable success, for modifying sabotaging thoughts and behaviors that typically follow people’s initial good intentions. I help dieters acquire new skills. Problems simply reflect lack of skills--skills that can be acquired and mastered through practice.

Some of the key critical skills are:

• How to motivate oneself. The first task that dieters do is to write a list of the 15 of 20 reasons why they want to lose weight and read that list every single day.
• Plan in advance and self-monitor behavior. A typical reason for diet failure is a strong preference for spontaneity. I ask people to prepare a plan and then I teach them the skills to stick to it.
• Overcome sabotaging thoughts. Dieters have hundreds and hundreds of thoughts that lead them to engage in unhelpful eating behavior.
• Tolerate hunger and craving. Overweight people often confuse the two.

The way you think about food, eating, and dieting affects your behavior and how you feel emotionally. Certain ways of thinking make it difficult to follow a diet and to maintain weight loss. The Beck Diet Solution takes you through a six-week process to change sabotaging thoughts (that cause you to stray from your diet) to helpful thinking (that will lead to success).

Related: Thinking thin can help you be thin. ‘The Beck Diet Solution’ says your mind is the key to weight loss.

In CT, therapeutic change is the result of clients confronting faulty beliefs with contradictory evidence that they have gathered and evaluated.

A slew of factors determine our behavior, social scientists say, including external factors, our mental states and the state of our brain.

There are, however, a few things that keep resurfacing when scientists review violent and aggressive actions by youth, including depression, anger and resentment, low self-esteem, feelings of victimization and sometimes serious psychiatric disorders.

“These are people who often suffer from mental illness, in this case there was evidence this guy was pretty depressed; they sometimes have difficulty telling what’s real and not real,” said Daniel Nelson, a psychiatrist who counsels children affected by trauma at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

But again, most mentally-disturbed individuals don’t pick up a gun and use it. “You can’t say they have isolated themselves and they are depressed, so they are going to turn into a mass murderer,” Nelson told LiveScience. “The problem is now you’ve labeled literally tens of thousands of people incorrectly, because most people who are depressed, isolated and can’t talk, don’t become mass murderers.”

Experts say Schools need systems to spot troubled kids. (article at Reuters)

Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech gunman, left some pretty clear warning signs, mental health experts said, but those details were never pieced together until after he killed 32 people and took his own life.

..

But most students and many faculty members do not know where to turn when they come across disturbing behavior.

"There's no systematic way for pieces of the puzzle to come together. This is a major factor in my view of why school shootings look so foreseeable after the fact," Borum said.

"It's because a lot of people knew pieces of information but nobody communicated with each other. After the fact, you've got it all ... and everybody says, 'How could this have happened?'" he added.

"Everybody just thinks about their own little node." And the problem is not just limited to schools.

This reminds me of the famous bystander effect (I read it in The Tipping Point). I do not have to act because someone else will?

And also The Power of Context (the importance of the situation and context in understanding behavior)

.. But there is a world of difference between being inclined toward violence, and actually committing a violent act. A crime is a relatively rare and aberrant event. For a crime to be committed, something extra, something additional, has to happen to tip a troubled person toward violence, and what the Power of Context is saying is that those Tipping Points may be as simple and trivial as everyday signs of disorder like graffiti and fare-beating.