Cognitive scientist Andrew Smart says that it’s not just technology but also capitalism that is stunting our brains

Is technology is eroding our very ability to be social creatures? Or at least stunting it?

There’s a classic feedback loop at work today: children grow up getting brainwashed that pursuing banal material well-being is the single most important objective in life, their young brains get formatted during school to acquire the kinds of silly skills required to work in boring jobs with even sillier objectives, all so that they can earn enough money to not only eat and have a bed but also to buy the meaningless things most companies produce where the children end up working. This is otherwise known as ambition. Amidst the existential angst and boredom our education system and economy inevitably produce: a shiny new gadget appears – the mobile digital device – that offers endless novelty, escape and opportunities for voyeurism: games, chats, sexting, trolling, pictures of cats in unusual human-esque poses, the humiliation of the global village idiot of the week, naked people, footballers, models, Minecraft, lists, 25 Reasons Your Penis Is Inadequate, 10 Reasons You Are Doing Everything Wrong and You’re Dumb, videos of people injuring themselves in stupid ways on and on ad infinitum.

All of this is just as meaningless as the physical things our economy produces – but in its digital format on your screen in a potentially infinite number of new combinations it is perfectly designed to capture the brain’s endless need for novelty. And the adolescent brain – which has not quite developed the capacity for self-reflection and what is called “cognitive control” is especially vulnerable. The young person intuits that modern life is somehow empty, he is struggling to make sense of other human beings who are preoccupied with absurd things, he or she begins using the mobile device at first for fun and escape, but the device begins to hijack the brain by offering continuous small rewards, novelty, and the promise of something amazing just one click away. Real life and real people become more difficult and hard to navigate, and finally he or she retreats further into the technology. This exacerbates the problems which caused her to seek out the phone in the first place. When all possible information is always available via the small screen in our hands, naturally we start to fear that we are missing something incredible at any time.

Even though he was writing about television, the late, great David Foster Wallace anticipated this feedback loop situation and our digital addiction as well. In one of his essays called “E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction”, he writes:

“If it’s true that many Americans are lonely, and if it’s true that many lonely people are prodigious TV-watchers, and if it’s true that lonely people find in television’s 2D images relief from the pain of their reluctance to be around real humans, then it’s also obvious that the more time spent watching TV, the less time spent in the real human world, and the less time spent in the real human world, the harder it becomes not to feel alienated from real humans, solipsistic, lonely. It’s also true that to the extent one begins to view pseudo-relationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real humans, one has commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3D persons, connections that are pretty important to mental health. For Joe Briefcase, as for many addicts, the ‘special treat’ of TV, begins to substitute for something nourishing and needed, and the original hunger subsides to a strange objectless unease.”

Replace the words “Americans” with “teenagers”, and replace the phrase “TV-watchers” with “iPhone-users”, and “television” with “iPhone” etc., in the above quotation, and this passage describes the current landscape perfectly. The trouble is that the small powerful computers that we now carry around with us are millions if not billions of times more powerful in their ability to hijack brains than television. The phones are now acceptable alternatives to relationships with real humans. These humans, especially young ones, are novelty seekers. The brain responds to novelty by flooding itself with gushes of lovely dopamine and we feel this great sense of “ahhhhhhh that’s nice, something new!” But when the dopamine flood inevitably recedes we feel uneasy – and a sense of dread and boredom starts to creep in. We start looking for the next new thing.

We can no longer talk to real humans because conversations and real social interactions are now awkward, baffling and anxiety ridden. Therefore we turn back to the screen. As adults we are able to somewhat control this because the mature brain keeps its dopamine levels more steady so that we are not in a state of constant distraction whenever we see something shiny. However, in children and teenagers the structures and processes for a more even attentional ability have not developed. This is why this age group is so vulnerable to the power of devices.

This is what technology theorist Sherry Turkle writes about in her new book Reclaiming Conversation – because it turns out that when you do not allow your brain to develop its ability to withstand boredom and solitude – all kinds of other equally important brain things don’t develop either: social aptitude, empathy, emotional reflection, and of course the ability to have meaningful conversations and relationships. But what many famous, Ivy-league-TED-stars often miss is the larger systemic picture. They take for granted the economic system at the root of much of these ills (after all they benefit enormously from this very system).

Thus the problem runs much deeper than technology. In an interview in The Idler No. 46, The “Free Spirits” issue, QI co-founder John Lloyd says:

“The Romans had no word for ‘interesting’… Or ‘boring’ for that matter. The Industrial Revolution is about the time we get the words boring and boredom. It’s work-related. When work is repetitive, meaningless, pointless, badly paid and dangerous, you need a word for this feeling you get.”

The same of course can be said of school. Teenagers are bored for very good reasons – much of modern education is repetitive, meaningless and pointless. It’s little wonder they don’t find conversations with adults – who have to work at repetitive, meaningless and pointless jobs – interesting.

The logic of consumerism – with its bureaucratized objectives, sales and profit above all else – combined with the blind and inexorable march of technology lead directly to this outcome: social alienation, technology that temporarily alleviates social alienation, but actually exacerbates social alienation long term. DFW defined a malignant addiction as something that 1) causes real problems for the addict and 2) offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes. Is there a better description of the iPhone? A device that offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.

Imagine the current situation with mobile technology was an enormous clinical trial. The title of the study would be something like: “Long term socio-cognitive effects of massive daily brain-altering technology use on adolescent development: a longitudinal study”. The methods would sound something like, “hundreds of millions of young people aged 8-18 will be given mobile digital devices with apps, games and websites that directly target brain functions and structures involved in attentional control, empathy, emotional reflection and social aptitude. They will use these devices for more than 7 hours per day for more than 10 years. At various time points throughout development, the children will undergo a series of tests intended to measure these cognitive abilities and assess the impact of device use.” Does this sound like a clinical trial you would give ethical approval to? Yet this kind of massive psychological experiment is exactly what we are unwittingly subjecting ourselves and our children to.

I am a big fanboy of technology. This does not mean however that I don’t appreciate and greatly fear the real dangers that come with technology. But it is not only technology, it is technology in this cultural and economic context – the combination of ruthless capitalism and ubiquitous computers maximizes the dangers. As a cognitive scientist too, I have a deep fear that addiction to technology, especially among young people, poses enormous risks to the very things that make us humans who can manage to live together in peaceful societies.

The solution is not to take the phones away – it is to fix the society that causes people to escape to the phones in the first place.

ENDS

Andrew Smart is the author of Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing and Beyond Zero and One (OR Books). A scientist and engineer interested in consciousness, brains and technology, his work traverses the boundaries of neuroscience, philosophy, culture, radical politics and metaphysics. He was raised in the U.S., educated and married in Sweden, lived in New York and Minneapolis and now lives in Switzerland.