#226 — The Price of Distraction
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Summary
Dr. Adam Ghazali is a neuroscientist with many diverse interests and several irons in the fire. In this episode, he talks about the role technology plays in our lives, how it affects us, and why it might be the root cause of many of our problems. He also discusses his new book, The Distracted Mind, and how technology might be a solution to some of the problems we re all trying to solve. He s also the co-founder of the Neuroscape Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directs efforts at a research center that he started called Neuroscape, which focuses on the interface between neuroscience and neuroscience and health, and he s the founder of a venture fund that he co-founded with a co-founding partner that focuses on improving the function of our brains through the use of technology. He s the author of The Distraction Mind, a book that covers a lot of ground that I think we re going to want to revisit here because it s so relevant to our time and place right now. I hope you ll join me in this episode of the Making Sense Podcast. If you can t afford a subscription, there s an option at Samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. You ll get 100% access to full episodes of the podcast. Making Sense wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to the podcast! Sam Harris Make Sense - The Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The New York Magazine, NPR, and The Huffington Post, and many other publications. Please don t forget to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, too! Subscribe to Making Sense by searching for "Making Sense" and subscribe on iTunes. It means you re getting access to all sorts of cool stuff. including "MISING Sensey" and "The Making Sense" in the making sense podcast, wherever you listen to it. and "MONEY" and other cool stuff like that goes out there. on the internet. in the future. Thank you for making sense. - Sam Harris, the podcast is making sense! by making sense of the world. Timestamps: 5:00 6:00 - What s going on in the world? 7:30 - How we survive? 8:15 - How do we survive through data? 9:40 - Why do we thrive? 10:20 - How can we survive better? 11:30 12:40 13:00 | What s the key to survival? 15:30 | What does the brain thrive through it? 16:20 17:50 14:40 | What is the role of the brain?
Transcript
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So you are a neuroscientist with many diverse interests and several irons in the fire.
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Maybe you can summarize what you're doing now professionally.
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So I've had a sort of strange career, a fun adventure.
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I'm a neurologist, and I'm a professor at University of California, San Francisco, where
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I direct efforts at a research center that I started called Neuroscape.
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And what we do is look at the sort of interface between technologies and neuroscience and health.
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And then I also have started a couple of companies along the way, including a venture fund, all
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in the same general goal of trying to help improve the function of our brains and frequently through
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And you also wrote the book, The Distracted Mind, which covers a lot of ground that I think
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we're going to want to revisit here, because this is just such a fascinating moment where
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we're seeing the evidence all around us that our technology is, it's always a two-edged
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sword, but it just seems in the information space, especially so at the moment.
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So I mean, obviously, we would not want to give up our connectivity and our access to
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the totality of human knowledge, which has been delivered by the internet and smartphones
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But it's so clearly fragmenting our lives, and it seems rewiring our brains into just different
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expectations of reward, different habit patterns.
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I mean, we're all on a, somewhere on a spectrum of pathology, and we know that there's no bright
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line between having a normal mind and a normal brain and having a condition like obsessive
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I mean, it's just, these are, you're talking about bell curves and gradients, not bright lines
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But it does feel like our use of technology, you know, actively and passively is pushing
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So I think we'll, we'll get into this and then talk about how technology might also be
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I mean, you point out in your book that we are information-seeking creatures.
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How do you think about our relationship to information now?
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You write a book and you try to make it timely, obviously.
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And as, as you know, books take a long time until they eventually come out and you're always
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in danger of it not being relevant anymore by the time it gets into people's hands.
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And if anything, I've seen it become more relevant as you just referred to.
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And I think the COVID pandemic that we're experiencing now is, is showing a lot of the fragmentation
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in our minds and the stressors caused by technology.
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You know, we, we take in information and that's what allows us to interact in this world.
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And we were evolutionarily sort of well-suited to do this.
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We avoid threats and seek out nutrients and mates.
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And this is how the brain evolved to allow us to fluidly, dynamically interact with the
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And the brains that we have now are the product of that.
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And, uh, you know, they're quite, quite adept at dealing with complex information and helping
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us react both reflexively as well as through decision-making.
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But what I think is clear now, probably to many listeners just through their own experience
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and certainly through data, that we don't have unlimited capacity to process information.
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And if the system is overloaded due to all sorts of types of interference that we can talk
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And people see them, feel them in different ways, and they manifest in people's lives in
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But that's sort of the, the crux of that story, that information is key to how we survive and
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thrive, but there's a breaking point and there's all sorts of consequences.
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You use this phrase at various points in the book, information foraging, drawing an analogy
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between, you know, how animals will, will forage for food.
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And there's a, you know, there are a few curves based on data in terms of just kind of the
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opportunity costs and the, the switching costs of exploiting an area for food and then deciding
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to, you know, based on instinct in the case of an animal to move to a new area looking for
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And we exhibit a similar pattern in the way we self-interrupt and attempt to multitask.
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You know, you're, you're, you're on the phone with someone and then you decide to check your
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email or your Slack channel in the middle of that call surreptitiously, not realizing that
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you're essentially losing 30 IQ points for the purposes of that conversation every time
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I mean, there's this, maybe we can just talk about the limits of cognition here and the,
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I mean, obviously multitasking is possible in certain cases because people can listen to
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a podcast or listen to an audio book and also successfully drive a car or, or even do
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work that doesn't require the same kind of linguistic cognition.
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I mean, you can, you can draw, you could practice graphic design or something probably
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without any degradation in your skills, but for so many other tasks, there is a, a zero
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So how do you think about multitasking at this moment?
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So, you know, the term is confusing and complicates what's already a very complex landscape of,
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And the reason why is because if you think about, you know, multitasking, just doing lots
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of tasks at the same time, it's something that we're all familiar with and we feel like
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And it's also, most people feel sort of pleasure in multitasking, that it's something fun and
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And so we're, we're constantly drawn to it and it feels natural and you sort of feel that
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And the, the reason the term is complex because it's a, from a behavioral point of view, sure,
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But what's implicit in it that creates the confusion is that sometimes we use that term
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to mean like parallel processing that you're, you're, you know, from, you know, borrowing
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from the, the computer terminology and signal processing literature, that you're literally
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parallel processing these two tasks and that they're getting equal processing power.
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And when you look at the brain, we've done these studies in our, in our center at UCSF,
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where we'll have someone in a scanner, we've done it with EG, they have more than one demand
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on their attention and we'll see that fragmentation occur, not just in their performance, which
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is quite obvious for pretty much anyone, but we'll see it even neurally that there's really
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a switching between the networks that are involved in accomplishing either of those tasks independently.
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And that you can't really multitask in that true sense of, of parallel processing two things
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that are demanding your attention. Now, if you can offload it and it becomes reflexive and becomes
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a skill that doesn't require attention, then you can do more than one thing. But the minute that changes,
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that's when the conflict and the interference occurs. So just to, you know, say, just to go back to your
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example of listening to a podcast and driving a car, sure, that could work. And it does work most of the
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time because driving is often very reflexive and you're pulling in a lot of bottom-up information
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from the environment, making reflexive decisions without your top-down attention. And so that allows
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you to focus your attention on listening to the podcast and digesting it and understanding it.
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But then something happens on the road and something unexpected and something that demands your
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attention. And that is the point of interference and conflict. Because now your attention has to move
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from the podcast back to the road. It may not get there fast enough. And then this is where you feel
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that, that weight and suffer the, you know, in this example, incredibly detrimental consequences of not
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being able to truly drive and listen to that podcast with all of your resources devoted to both of them
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equally. So I recommend that people pull over to the side of the road if they're in danger of missing
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our subsequent sentences here. You got to have your priorities straight. So you used two phrases there
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that are terms of jargon in not just neuroscience, but cognitive science and engineering generally,
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bottom-up and top-down. How do you think about those? And it strikes me that there's a pretty clear
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asymmetry in terms of, of the bandwidth in those pathways.
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Yeah, let's break that down a bit. It's sort of core to this discussion about information
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processing and the brain. And those terms are used in a lot of different fields. And they're not so
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different in the context here in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science in that the
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way I think about it is from the perspective of attention. I think about most of these things from
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that perspective, I find it's really useful. So attention is an incredibly broad concept and a
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complex one that would take us an hour to tease apart all the subtleties. But one way of thinking
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about it is in two categories. One is bottom-up attention and the other is top-down attention.
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And bottom-up attention is when your limited resources, because we have those limitations and
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both top-down and bottom-up have limitations, that our limited mental resources are being drawn or
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being activated by the environmental stimuli itself. So a loud sound, a flash of light, your name,
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something that's very important or salient to you is going to demand your attention and pull your
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resources towards it very rapidly. And this is obviously a strong survival advantage. If you don't
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have great bottom-up, you're likely to get eaten pretty fast. And so that's bottom-up attention.
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So it's a very ancient part of our attentional system that was really critical for our survival
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on all animal survival. And then there's top-down attention. And by that, I mean the goal-directed
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attention. It's when you make a decision, a conscious decision based on interpreting information
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from either the external environment or your internal environment about where your attention is directed.
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And so you can be attending to something like this podcast right now, and you have every goal to
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absorb all this information, and your attention may get pulled away by a bottom-up force. And so we're
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constantly managing these two draws on our overall sort of capacity of where we put our resources,
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both the bottom-up and the top-down. And if you pay attention to it, you'll see it
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every day, all day, at every moment, is that these two attentional forces are constantly playing a tug-of-war.
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And so how do you think about this experience we all have of self-interrupting? That may be a phrase
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you actually use in the book, I don't recall, but it's this experience that it's all too familiar,
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it's now practically unconscious all the time, of you're paying attention to something, you know,
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you're doing work at your computer, say, and then you decide to check your email.
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Obviously, the technology is playing a massive role here in terms of notifications. I mean,
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if you're receiving texts or you're receiving notifications, well, then it's being driven by the
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machines themselves. But even without that, we just often experience this degradation in our ability
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to sustain attention for the task at hand. And we decide to probably reward is the right framework
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to think about it. And we seek this dopamine hit by switching our attention to something else.
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And we're almost never very aware of the switching costs there, just how much time is lost reorienting
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to the thing you were doing when you do come back. What do we know about this whole process?
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Yeah, I mean, you said it perfectly. We can be our attention, our top-down attention, our goal-directed
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focus can be interfered with. That interference can occur on many levels. It can occur from external
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stimulation, sort of the bottom-up things we're talking about. I would say if your phone vibrates
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in your pocket or you hear a ping on your computer, that's like a perfect example of a bottom-up source
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of attention. And technology companies certainly are aware of that, at least at some level, that you
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can pull attention with that. And so that's one that we're very aware of. But you could create
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interference internally too. And so there may be internal distractions, internal bottom-up information
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like an aching joint or your back just sort of nudges you or your stomach rumbles. And so those
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would be almost like physiological bottom-up stimuli. They're coming from your own body, but they're
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knocking on your brain and saying, hey, I need some attention over here. And then they could be much
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more complicated than that and occur not sort of in a bottom-up way, but just that you have now,
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for some reason decided, and it could be subconscious or it could be conscious, to divert your attention
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from your original goal. And that may be to something external as well. So maybe I think
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that I could listen to this podcast and also bang out a quick email right now, or it may be directed
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internally, right? So I'm going to listen to this, but also think about what I'm going to have for dinner
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tonight. And so we're constantly fragmenting our limited, you know, attentional focus with both
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external and internal distractions and multiple tasks. And there's a cost for this. Like you said,
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whether that cost is something apparent to you or not, it is there. It has been well-documented
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Yeah. So there's obviously a cost in terms of the time lost in having to remind yourself where you
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were in the original task, right? I mean, people don't really keep track of that well, but yeah,
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the research suggests that you do lose a lot of time every time you switch. But there's also,
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it seems to me, there's a kind of emotional cost to all of this. And it's somewhat paradoxical,
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because I think the urge to multitask is often born of this internal sense of time poverty that
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many of us feel. And there's a kind of a feeling of urgency that comes with just the sense that we
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don't have enough time to do everything we need to do or want to do. And so, you know, hence it seems
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like a brilliant idea to be doing two things or more at once. And we really want to feel that we
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can do that. And so I guess, so there's a, there's probably a reward component to it,
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but also just a, an anxiety component. And one way to break this up is that there are these internal
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and external factors here. We have the, our internal states like boredom, anxiety, stress,
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feeling of urgency. And this is, you know, driving us in this direction. And then there are the,
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the, the external factors, which is just the technology itself that's designed to game us
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in a way. I mean, so, so many of these platforms that we engage, their entire business model is
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based on maximizing the capture of our attention. And, you know, that's not new, but it's really been
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weaponized to an unusual degree by our technology now. So maybe let's take the internal side of this
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first. What is this doing to our emotional lives? And how do you, how do you see it as derivative of
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very common states of mind, like anxiety and, and boredom?
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Yeah. I mean, you, you summarized it absolutely perfectly. That that's how I think about it
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exactly, that there are two forces, an internal and an external force that drives us to shift our
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attention all the time, whether it's multitasking or just being distracted by, by external or internal
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stimuli. And, you know, just to tie this in with something we talked about a little bit of, of
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foraging, you know, in the, in the book, I really spent a lot of time developing this, which really is
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a hypothesis that we're foraging for information in the way that other animals forage for food.
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And there's a theory that's used, um, actually it's a mathematical approach to help understand
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and actually predict quantitatively of how long an animal will forage in a particular
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patch, like a squirrel in a tree before moving to another one. And it could be actually predicted
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to really a high degree of accuracy. And they also have two forces that are driving them to make
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that decision. So there's a cost benefit ratio going on of how long you stay in your patch versus
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how hard it is to get to another patch, right? So if you've depleted 50% of the nuts in the tree,
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but the next tree is really far away, you're just going to keep eating those nuts. But if the next tree
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is full and it's right there, 50% may be enough for you to jump over. And so that has been well
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described in how animals that forage and patching environments make sort of these internal
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decisions about remaining or leaving a patch. And you could think of information as a patch as well
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that we're foraging in, whether it's a website or an article that you're reading or any task that
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you're engaged in. And there are these internal and external forces that decide sort of the cost
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benefit ratio of you staying there or just keep switching. And on the internal side, I think what's
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clear is that there is often a diminished return of remaining in a patch, sort of eating the nuts,
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right? Like you've read three quarters of the article, like you sort of have the idea ready.
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So that's true. And that's just part of why people switch ever, right? And that's sort of
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unavoidable. But then this seems to be these other aspects that you talked about that are becoming quite
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clear now in that there's these forces that drive us out of a patch that are not related to the
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diminishing returns related to the information itself. They're related to these sort of internal
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drives that we're just intolerant to being bored. Boredom feels just something that we cannot just
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sit with and allow to wash over us, even though it doesn't actually hurt us. And then there's also
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that anxiety that you're missing out on something else, that FOMO, that there's something going on
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that's deserving of your time that you're missing. And then there's also the anxiety that you're not
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being maximally productive, that you have the capacity to get another thing done simultaneously.
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And so as those elements accumulate over time, along with your diminished return that you're
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getting from the patch you're in, there's a driving force to push you out. And if that next tree is
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really close, if it's really just a tab in your browser or your phone sitting in your pocket,
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then there is no resistance to switching and you just keep moving.
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Yeah. Well, the next tree, informationally speaking, is always just right there. You know,
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I mean, it's a tab away and there are an infinite number of trees now. I mean, so in one sense,
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boredom has almost been driven into extinction by technology because, you know, there's just,
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again, we have perpetual access to the totality of the world's information. And I still remember
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what it was like to walk into a blockbuster video looking for a movie to watch and spending some
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intolerable amount of time roaming the aisles there looking for a film I hadn't seen or wanted
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to see again. And I remember how inefficient that was and how prone to failure it was. I mean,
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it got to a point where there was no guarantee I was going to come out of a video store with
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Yeah. I mean, this never happened in a bookstore. I mean, there was still a functionally infinite
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number of books I wanted to read. But with film, I really felt like we were kind of coming up against
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the limitations of supply there. And yet now we have access to so much information and entertainment,
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and it's becoming so frictionless. I mean, most of us are still juggling too many apps and too many
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sources. But insofar as this gets consolidated in places like Netflix, you know, it's just like
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boredom has almost been banished on one level, except on another level, it appears to be growing in the
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sense that it feels like our reward cycles in our engagement with media are getting shorter.
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And there's zero downtime between them. I mean, literally, the next episode begins to autoplay
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on most of these platforms, right? And you have to opt out of watching it rather than decide what you
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want to watch next. So it's just we're now part of this binge watching machine. And it's not just
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watching. I mean, binge reading, binge scrolling of social media. And the frictions out of the system,
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our expectation of reward is coming in, it feels to me, much shorter increments of time.
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And I would expect that our attention span, which is to say our tolerance for boredom, or just the
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uncertainty of what our attention is going to land on in a satisfying way, is growing shorter. So on one
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level, I feel like boredom is almost gone. But on another level, I feel like we are being tuned to
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be less and less resilient to boredom than we've ever been.
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Yeah, I think that's that's exactly right. And it's sort of a fun area of some harmless self
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experimentation. You know, you have these moments that throughout the day where you're forced to
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stop doing things like one that I love is just, you know, although things are shifting now, but
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because people are in but like when you're waiting online at a grocery store, and you're, you sort of
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have only two people in front of you, it's not really going to take that long. You could just pause
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there and think about things or just relax your mind. But I mean, I feel it just like think like most
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people do this, this drive to just reach into your pocket and with no actual intention of necessarily
00:25:08.280
or need to look something up, but just to let that information flow start again, even at a light,
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you know, at a traffic light, you know, you know, it's only going to be 30 seconds. And this is part
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of the danger that you know, that you can feel if you just allow a little bit of introspection and time
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to occur on those natural pauses in our life, you can feel that onset of boredom. And, you know,
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it's something that there is, like you said, just a very, very low tolerance for. And I would, I would
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challenge people to get familiar with that feeling of boredom, not to be afraid of it, to realize that
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it's not going to hurt you. And, you know, it's sort of like a little hunger is not necessarily the
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worst thing at times as well. You don't need to eat every second when you get these stimuli. So
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being in control and being aware of your, of these internal states is really critical.
00:26:01.720
And so I think with the intolerance of boredom, there's a lack of appreciation or recognition of
00:26:07.680
it as well. So what do you recommend people do? What sort of bright lines do you, you think they
00:26:15.700
should, should look for in their, their lives? And whether we think about this in terms of habit
00:26:21.980
patterns or discipline or engaging with technology differently or different technologies? I mean,
00:26:29.400
I think we want to talk about some of the work you're doing in digital medicine at the end, but
00:26:35.620
what do you recommend people do on a day-to-day basis?
00:26:39.080
Yeah, this is such a great question. It was sort of an interesting point in my life as, as a scientist.
00:26:45.740
Um, and I, I know you have neuroscience roots as well. When I started getting asked that question,
00:26:51.620
because I don't like fancy myself as like a self-help type of person, but I, but I understood
00:26:57.960
the need for it. You know, I've been studying distraction and multitasking from a neuroscientist
00:27:02.800
perspective. And when it came to writing a book on the topic that I wanted to be more than a neuroscience
00:27:09.540
primer on, on this, it was a very real question that I had to ask myself, you know, how do I answer
00:27:17.160
that? And so how I really went about it was just describe to people what I do. So I, you know, this
00:27:23.420
is, you know, my own desire to live a focused life of meaning. And how do I get there knowing all of
00:27:31.800
this information that I've found in my own research? What are the things that I do? And so that's sort of
00:27:37.360
the route that I went about this. And also the grounding in the marginal value theorem, the forage
00:27:43.300
optimal foraging models that we talk about gave a lot of those clues because once you see the
00:27:49.180
pressures that make us switch all the time. So that's sort of what I used as a foundation to give
00:27:54.980
advice to both myself and anyone else. Once you understand the pressures that drive this behavior,
00:28:01.460
then you sort of have the framework for reversing that and creating new habits.
00:28:06.460
So as we already described, there's both external and internal pressures on the external side,
00:28:12.760
because that one's a little easier, is just the accessibility. There's no doubt that the
00:28:16.900
accessibility is driving a lot of this behavior because that tree is so close. So some of the
00:28:22.280
things, and some people do this and go to extreme measures to do this, is start limiting some
00:28:27.980
accessibility just to make it a little easier. So, you know, if you can't not look at your phone
00:28:33.900
when you're at a traffic light, maybe you should put the phone in the trunk of your car. Maybe you
00:28:39.360
should not work with all your browsers open, or if you're really writing an article that has a time
00:28:44.840
pressure on it, maybe not keep, you know, Twitter or Slack open at the same time. And so limiting
00:28:50.480
accessibility is just a really simple way to start decreasing that switching tendency.
00:28:57.740
A little more complicated is on the internal side. How do you monitor and manage the anxiety and the
00:29:05.060
boredom and the desire for higher degrees of productivity that are driving you from that side
00:29:11.900
of the equation? And for there, what I experimented with myself was just practicing, like many things in
00:29:20.100
life, they don't come necessarily without effort, practicing the art of sustained attention and
00:29:26.920
single tasking. And I started doing this, you know, a couple of years ago as a, you know, sort of
00:29:32.900
now speaking about the book and that content publicly and just saying, okay, I'm going to
00:29:38.420
challenge myself. I have an hour that I'm going to quit everything except this one source of my
00:29:44.860
attention, this one focus. And when I started doing that at the beginning, it was really hard. It was
00:29:49.900
shockingly hard because I felt this desire to like, just go and check Facebook or just go and talk to
00:29:56.140
someone, even if it wasn't technology. And so what I started doing and what I advise people based on my
00:30:02.040
own experience is start with small periods of time that you're doing singular focus and feel what
00:30:09.360
happens, understand the boredom and the anxiety, work through it and stick with it. And then take that
00:30:16.100
break, make that break, not about necessarily going on social media, getting into these iteratives,
00:30:21.620
like sinkholes and just take you away from your goals, but rather stretch, do some light exercise,
00:30:27.800
close your eyes, meditate, look at nature, either through photography or real nature. These things,
00:30:34.220
I think have a lot of support for being really healthy little breaks and then get back into that
00:30:39.800
focus and see if you can extend that over time. I think it's sort of similar to someone learning how to
00:30:46.440
become like a long distance runner. Like you can't really just start by running four miles and what's
00:30:51.900
intolerable to you on day one, because it's painful or maybe even boring after a while you start enjoying
00:30:59.040
that feeling. And, and I think I've discovered it's like that with this as well. You could single task
00:31:05.040
sort of like an endurance runner where after a while it's just effortless and even fun to do that.
00:31:11.920
And so I think it's a process of baby stepping into longer periods of time of building the skill
00:31:19.020
sets that allow you to sustain your attention without derailing yourself.
00:31:24.380
I think this notion of single tasking is really important. And the fact that we even have a name
00:31:31.060
for it is a sign of how far we've wandered from, from, from what used to be normal. And when I think
00:31:36.720
about how much harder it's getting to read a book, and if that's happening to me, I'm kind of a
00:31:45.500
canary in the coal mine for this because, you know, I really, I read a lot. I, you know, books have
00:31:50.860
always been a major part of my life. I read both professionally and for, for pleasure, but even I am
00:31:58.060
finding it harder to, to finish books. I mean, it's just one, you know, the competition for my attention
00:32:05.160
is, is just, it's always at a, a fever pitch. So I, you know, it gets diverted into, to other streams of
00:32:11.820
information, but I'm also finding it harder to just, just to commit to, you know, sitting down for an hour and
00:32:19.980
doing nothing but reading the book, right? And that makes me realize that I'm almost unrecognizable
00:32:27.880
to myself. The Sam Harris of, of 20 years ago would not have been able to imagine finding, reading a book
00:32:36.520
for an hour at all difficult. I mean, that, there was kind of a, a basin of attraction there for me, which was,
00:32:42.380
I mean, once I, once I was in it, you know, I was in it. It's like forecasting that at some point you're going to
00:32:48.220
find it difficult to eat ice cream, right? Like that, that makes no sense at all. It's, it's something
00:32:53.360
I consciously correct for. And as you know, I spent a lot of time focusing on explicitly the topic of,
00:32:59.660
of meditation and the importance of training attention in that way. Being able to pay attention
00:33:06.020
is one thing, but having an internal sense that there are many things that merit your attention
00:33:12.720
right now. And the best way to, to play this game is to essentially have many browser
00:33:18.180
windows always open. It's a kind of decision that once you make it, you're, you're then forced
00:33:24.300
to function in that fairly doomed paradigm of just splitting attention. So I do think there's a lot to
00:33:31.520
be said for just making a decision around certain things like this. And so having a, the concept of,
00:33:38.340
of single tasking, it's a kind of hack for what you're going to tend to do by default,
00:33:44.420
just because of what's happening at your desk and coming from the smartphone in your pocket.
00:33:50.540
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I liked the way you said that it's, it's, it's really more than one factor
00:33:56.000
here that, that leads to success in the way out of this. One of them is the actual cognitive skillset
00:34:03.200
of being able to sustain attention. And I think that that, even if you want to, and, and meditation is a
00:34:09.160
great way to build that, that ability. I mean, you know, meditation, many forms of concentrated
00:34:16.540
meditation are essentially that there are attention training practices in many ways. And so that's part
00:34:22.580
of it. And then you have to make the decision to actually apply it in a consistent fashion. And that
00:34:31.360
comes along with controlling your environment to put you in the best possible setting to accomplish
00:34:39.420
it. And then there is, you know, with the, all of that comes the forming of new habits so that it's
00:34:45.420
not a constant control effort to do that, that it, that it is your reflex. Your reflex is to engage in
00:34:55.020
the world in this way. And I think that with all those factors, it's possible to see your way through. But it
00:35:02.220
comes with recognition of what the cost of this type of style of interaction with technology, and your
00:35:08.480
environment in general is, that allows, gives you the motivation to take all these steps to just live
00:35:15.680
So how can technology help? I mean, you have this phrase, I've heard you use digital medicine, which is part of what
00:35:23.440
you're exploring as a tech entrepreneur and a scientist. You know, what is digital medicine? And what else
00:35:30.820
do you see on the horizon in terms of new technology that can help us?
00:35:35.920
Yeah, well, thanks for, thanks for the opportunity to talk about both sides of this coin, because
00:35:40.940
normally, like in very short formats, I'll do like an NPR interview, and I'll have five minutes. And it's a
00:35:47.240
nuanced discussion, because here I am, the author of a book called The Distracted Mind, we just have
00:35:53.100
been talking for, you know, 40 minutes about all of the challenges of our ability to maintain
00:36:00.620
attention and how technology has aggravated that. And what I spend most of my time working on,
00:36:06.960
on the academic and on the industry side is using technology as a way of improving attention.
00:36:13.720
And so it is complex, you know, on the surface. So I appreciate the opportunity to dive in a little
00:36:20.060
bit. I think it's not dissimilar from, you know, most other things in nature is that there's a
00:36:25.340
yin yang, right? There's always this push and pull, and any sword can cut both ways, a term that you used
00:36:31.300
already. And that's true of technology. And I sort of dove in deep into that pool of, okay, technology
00:36:40.260
has aggravated our already fragmented attention in a lot of the ways that we've been talking about.
00:36:46.620
Starting with that as a foundation, can we reimagine it as a tool to actually do the reverse to help our
00:36:55.780
attention? And that is a goal that was born out of just practicality that I don't believe we're
00:37:02.480
putting this genie back in the bottle. I mean, it is here, it is powerful, and it has a lot of really
00:37:08.060
amazing assets. It's all over the world, right? So it has this incredible ability, not just to connect,
00:37:14.060
but to reach people that don't have access to many things, like doctors and teachers.
00:37:21.480
So it has all of these incredible strengths that really appealed to me. And so I dove into,
00:37:28.580
you know, now it's been 12 years since I challenged myself at thinking about technology as a source of
00:37:34.420
good, not just in general, in some wishy-washy way, but actually as a tool to help fine-tune
00:37:41.900
attention abilities. That was my original goal. And starting 12 years ago, I came up with, you know,
00:37:48.480
sort of this idea. I use the term digital medicine a lot. I think more frequently, I use the term
00:37:53.460
experiential medicine to encapsulate something a little larger, digital medicine being an example of
00:37:59.480
that, or one of, you know, many types of experiential medicines. But the general idea behind
00:38:07.020
digital medicine and the bigger category of experiential medicine is that our brains have
00:38:12.600
this phenomena of plasticity, its ability to modify itself at every level in response to challenge and
00:38:19.560
experience. And this is the basis of learning. It exists throughout our lives. It doesn't just end
00:38:26.000
after you become an adult and certainly not through older ages as we now appreciate. And so the general
00:38:32.580
concept is if we can challenge the brain in a targeted way and align the mechanics of whatever
00:38:39.840
that interaction is and the reward systems appropriately, we should be able to optimize
00:38:47.240
these neural systems, whatever they may be. And it's a very ancient practice. Meditation, mindfulness,
00:38:54.120
which, you know, I know is a big part of your world, is I would say a perfect example of an experiential
00:38:59.900
medicine. And it could be delivered through a human expert, or it could be delivered digitally,
00:39:04.620
in which case I would say that's a digital medicine. So that's sort of, you know, the high
00:39:09.600
level path that I've been on now for over a decade, both in research and in sort of product creation and
00:39:16.580
entrepreneurship, is to think about how we build technologies that create interactions that help
00:39:24.700
us improve the function of our brains. Yeah, I want to reiterate that,
00:39:29.900
point you just made, which is often made, but I feel like it doesn't really land for people,
00:39:35.160
or at least it can be, one, it's counterintuitive, and two, it's often hyped in a way that is misleading.
00:39:43.500
So that this notion that what you do with your brain winds up physically changing your brain based
00:39:50.140
on neuroplasticity, you know, this is a fascinating fact about us, that the machinery that is producing
00:39:57.160
our experience and cognition changes itself based on how it's used. And as you point out, that's the key
00:40:06.180
to all learning and everything else about us that leaves a trace, right? So if someone's going to
00:40:12.040
remember anything about this conversation, they'll remember it based on actual physical changes in their
00:40:18.480
brains. That's what the encoding of memory requires. And yet it's often said that people
00:40:25.560
kind of marvel at the claim that there's evidence, scientific evidence, that something like meditation
00:40:31.120
practice can physically change the brain, right? Or the functional behavior of the brain under
00:40:36.500
neuroimaging. But of course it does, right? Literally everything you do changes your brain.
00:40:42.180
So on some level it is a kind of a hype claim that one hears in the meditation literature to emphasize
00:40:50.700
this point because everything changes your brain. But because we have this general property of
00:40:57.280
plasticity, we really should view the consequences of paying attention to specific things in specific
00:41:05.060
ways as being fairly indelible until we do something else that changes us in some other way, right? So
00:41:13.520
on some level you get more of what you pay attention to. It's almost like the algorithms that are
00:41:20.060
successfully gaming our attention. We know that if you're on YouTube and you keep clicking on videos of
00:41:26.220
cats or Olympic sprinter finals or whatever it is, whatever you get into, you get more of the same
00:41:34.380
and on some level that same kind of algorithmic property is true of us. I mean, you're making
00:41:42.400
yourself based on what you're doing with your attention and the kinds of habits you're ramifying and
00:41:48.260
you are quite literally sculpting your neural circuitry in the meantime. And everyone experiences
00:41:56.680
this in miniature psychologically, but it's another thing to remind yourself that there's a physical
00:42:03.600
basis for this, a kind of living sculpture that is producing this. This is something that we've
00:42:10.500
been doing inadvertently more or less every moment of our lives. And now we have the most well-resourced
00:42:17.520
and technologically competent companies that have ever existed turning their tractor beams on us
00:42:26.100
and demanding our attention from every screen in sight. And what you don't take responsibility for
00:42:34.060
here is going to happen to you based on other people's business models. And it's just worth
00:42:41.060
realizing that the causality here is not really in dispute. Basically, all of these moments matter
00:42:47.080
and they deliver to you your future self who will have whatever competencies or weaknesses or
00:42:55.660
mounting dissatisfaction with life to deal with. And if your life doesn't feel the way you want it to
00:43:02.740
feel, there's a lot you have done on purpose and by accident to bring yourself to this point. And
00:43:09.680
there's a lot you may yet do to feel differently.
00:43:14.820
Yeah. I mean, that was beautifully said. I think that that is really true. It's sort of
00:43:18.820
something that's overhyped and used sometimes even as a marketing tool and yet underappreciated for its
00:43:24.920
true profound power of change that experiences can induce. One way that, you know, the reason I use,
00:43:35.240
I put the word medicine in there, although it doesn't have to necessarily be for people that
00:43:44.380
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