3 ways to defend your mind against social media distortions

Technology allows a scale and speed of opinion creation that is extremely seductive to our brain

Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin, socially speaking, existentially speaking

We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody, even if they're on the other side of the planet

even if they have a lot more money than we do, we can still compete with them on engagement

everything is being done by teams of engineers to actually capture your attention and keep it there

your attention is the product we aren't in the present moment every time you go online

you are in a fun house of mirrors have you ever seen a news story about a data breach for a website you use

When that happens, someone anywhere in the world can access that information for a couple of cents on the dark web

If you don't change your passwords or secure your information in time, you might start seeing strange transactions appear on your credit or debit statements

In some cases, you could get locked out of your social media accounts or, worst of all, full on have your identity stolen

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Now, let's get back to the discussion of the impacts of social media

I'm Luke Burgess, founder of Fourth Wall Ventures, professor of business, and author of the book

Wanting, the Power of Memetic Desire in Everyday Life. We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody

or engage with somebody, could even be the president of the United States

and they might react to us back. Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin, socially speaking, existentially speaking

Even if they're on the other side of the planet, even if they have a lot more money than we do

we can still interact with them. We can still compete with them on engagement

They're inside of our world. We have a memetic machine in our pocket where all of these people exist

So what is memetic desire? Mimetic desire means that we're adopting another person's desire as our own

usually without even realizing that we're doing it. So social media has given us millions of mimetic models that we now have to contend with

Some people have went from having 10 mimetic models to now having a million

and we haven't quite come to grips as a culture with what that means for our mental and emotional health

There are two kinds of mimetic models. The first kind is called an external mediator of desire

These are models that are outside of our world whether because they exist in a different social sphere than we do there no possibility of us coming into contact with them and certainly not becoming rivals with them They in some sense outside of our world of desire

outside of our world of competition. Now these external models of desire can be real

or they can be fictional. The other kind of model is inside of our world called internal

mediators of desire. These are people that we do come into contact with, and there is a possibility

of conflict or rivalry with these people. These are people that are in our family. These are people

in our workplace. These are people that could even be our friends. It's easier to compare ourselves

to them. These are the kinds of people that we look to as benchmarks, and we're far more likely

to be envious of somebody that we went to high school with who now has a great job and a beautiful

spouse than we are to be envious of the richest person in the world. The danger with external

mediators of desire, with keeping up with people that are very successful, with people that have

modeled a certain kind of lifestyle, is that there's no end to that process. All desire is

a form of transcendence. We desire to go beyond the boundaries, to go just over the mountain

to be the kind of person that we don't feel that we currently are. Having positive models of desire

to emulate is a very good thing. It's important to have people that model virtues and goodness

that we would like. But we have to understand the limitations of any model and understanding

how the dynamic between us and our models changes in that scenario is really, really important

It's also important to understand when somebody is an internal model of desire to us

because in that case, we have to have boundaries. All desire comes from us feeling like we lack something

And that can bring us into a dangerous, vicious cycle, because there will always be another model to find

We have to choose our models wisely. We also have to know when the model is inflaming us with the desire for something that's going to bring real fulfillment

Or whether it's going to bring a dopamine hit or allow us to fantasize about a life that we'll probably never have

And even if we did have it, it would probably make us miserable. All you need to do is go on Instagram and spend five minutes and you see lifestyles modeled

you see vacation destinations modeled, fashions, manners of speech, ways of engagement

ways of speaking, political preferences. All of these desires are modeled for us 24 hours a day, billions of them

And we need to understand the mimetic landscape of social media or else we'll become totally controlled by it

The greatest strength of social media is its democratizing tendency. We don't have to just look to elites and a few news outlets to tell us about us

We can actually communicate with each other. But when we engage online, we tend to think that we're interacting with a reasonable sample of the actual population

But it's not true. Close to 80% of all content on social media is generated by about 10% of the users

That 10% tends to be extreme on most social issues. They are the vocal fringe

When you have a vocal minority that is perceived as the majority critical mass of us will actually either self or we will actually go along to get along and it becomes a self prophecy

This is how collective illusions form. It's not terribly surprising that some of the first people

to start to use these tools to manipulate were leaders who need consensus to conserve power

An example of this is Nicolas Maduro, the leader of Venezuela. For a long time, it looked like on social media that he had a pretty good beat on the consensus of the people that he led

So almost everything that he would say, stories that were written about him that were positive, would be retweeted and shared

And it looked like this represented some kind of consensus. But it turned out a significant percentage of his so-called followers were actually what we call social bots

These are fake accounts that only exist to retweet anything positive about him or that he said, and importantly, to attack the opposition

When Twitter banned them, the real consensus was with the opposition. and that started to emerge and be retweeted

as more and more people recognized that it was okay to say what they actually thought

Social media is a free-for-all in terms of who can shout the loudest

and who can silence other people in the name of masquerading as a majority

and manufacturing collective illusions. Your willingness to conform and your unwillingness to challenge what you think the group believes

will actually contribute to leading the group astray. The solution to our online life is to get offline once in a while

The most important thing you can do is continue to have conversations with your family, with your neighbors, with your community

Don't carry that distortion over into the way you treat people in real life

My name is Amishi Jha. I'm a neuroscientist and professor at the University of Miami

And the author of the book, Peak Mind. Find your focus, own your attention, invest 12 minutes a day

Where is your attention right now? The human brain's attention system is actually the success story of what makes us unique as human beings

Because attention fuels our ability to think, to feel, and connect. What we pay attention to is our life

For a long time through our evolutionary history, the brain started to suffer from a very big problem

which is that there's far more information out in the environment than could be fully processed

Attention ended up becoming a very useful solution because it allows us to prioritize information

But there are qualities of the human experience that disable attention. Given how powerful attention is, we need to really respect where we place this precious brain resource

The mind is no different than the body. The mind needs to be exercised daily to optimize our psychological well-being

Knowing this, I became very interested in understanding if we might be able to train attention

The brain's attention system is incredibly powerful. There's three big ways we use attention

as a fuel for having success in our daily activities. We use our attention to actually

think. During thinking, there's an idea that comes to mind, and then we hyperlink it to other ideas

That what thought actually is and the glue between those hyperlinks is attention But it not only used for the purposes of what we might call cognitive functioning We also use our attention

to feel. Think about the last time you actually had a joyful moment in your lives. If you weren't

paying attention to it, chances are you missed it. You didn't get the benefit of the positive

emotional response. Finally, the third area is connecting our social interactions with other

people. Without devoting attention, we don't experience care, and we can't extend care. In fact

you might say that paying attention to another person is our highest form of love. But while

attention is so incredibly powerful, it's fragile and vulnerable. The three biggies that we've learned

about in my lab is our stress, threat, or negative mood. Maybe you could even say they're like

kryptonite for attention. But we all know you can't live a life without experiencing stress

threat, or negative mood. A lot of our work with high-performing groups describe this feeling

of not having full access to their attention when they need it most. So what are those circumstances? There's a shorthand that we can use to think about this

The term is VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. The world today feels like it's a constant VUCA environment

But there's another challenge that our attention faces and why many of us feel like we're in an attentional crisis

Frankly, the brain was designed to be lured by, for our evolutionary success and survival

certain kinds of information, threatening information, novel information, self-related information, and even things that are fun and enticing. I'm talking about the attention economy

Everything is being done by teams of engineers to actually capture your attention and keep it there

Your attention is the product. Finally, the mind can be hijacked away by something called mental

time travel. That means that our attention is not in the present moment. So when we're thinking

about the past, our attention is fully in the past. Same thing with the future. About 50% of

our waking moments, we aren't in the present moment. Now, that may seem very disempowering

like how are we ever going to fight that fight? But the good news is that decades of research

in my own lab and many others has now given us a solution, mindfulness training, something that's

been around for millennia. We can train our brain so that we do not need to fight

What we know is that when people practice mindfulness meditation, which is attending

to the present moment, their attention is stronger. 12 minutes or more a day can cultivate

something called meta-awareness. What is meta-awareness? It's the ability to be aware

of the contents and processes of what's going on in our mind moment by moment

We're paying attention to our attention. Now, why would that awareness be beneficial

Because every time we are aware, we have more control. We can own our attention

And we have it available to us to not only enjoy the moments of our lives and feel fulfillment

but to meet the challenges and demands that we certainly will all face. minds wander it's a natural thing that the brain does

when our mind moves away gently return it back simply begin again

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