The biological necessity of boredom in the age of screens

Everyone agrees that our attention spans have gone to hell

I call it the tyranny of attention because there's so many demands on our attention coming from so many different directions

that we're simply overwhelmed and we don't have the mental bandwidth to cope with it

I'm Richard Saitoik, professor of neurology at George Washington University and an author of Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Coping with Digital Distractions and Sensory Overload

Your Stone Age Brain in the Age of Screens Washing machines and appliances change every five or ten years

The brain doesn't do that. Evolution doesn't say, oh, it's time for another memory module, a time for another language module

The modern brain is no different than that of our distant Stone Age ancestor

Evolution proceeds by accretion, that is, once the brain arrives on a solution that's good enough

it keeps it and then adds on new features, sort of like a New England add-on house

where you add one room after another and it looks sort of funky, but it works

Working memory is like the mental scratch pad, where we hold whatever we're focused on at the

moment, whether it's remembering a short grocery list or trying to remember an access code

for an app. And it's limited in what it can do, how much it can hold. Everything that we do

costs us in terms of energy expenditure. And ATP is the fuel that fuels every cell in the body

ATP stands for adenine triphosphate. Creatures all over the animal kingdom all rely on ATP. It's like the bedrock of energy transformation. So for example

if you have to go take a test, you're not doing anything, you're just thinking. But at the end of

a three or four hour test section, you're really beat. You're tired because you have expended a lot

of mental energy. So we have to be, you want to be careful not to waste your attention or spend

too much. It's like a bank account that can go into the red very easily. The brain operates within

a fixed energy limit, a bandwidth, and there's no amount of diet, exercise, or Sudoku puzzles

that can increase that. So we have to learn to live with the amount that we have. Listening to

one person speak takes up about half my bandwidth. And trying to listen to two people at once is

impossible because then we've exceeded it. Now, you might think that as you're scrolling or swiping

that you're not really doing much, but because that bandwidth is so small and narrow, there's

not much left over. And most of the energy goes towards maintaining the physical structure by

pumping sodium and potassium irons across membranes. And that leaves very, very little

left over for thought. A great example is the Oscar fiasco in which they named the wrong best

picture. For best picture. You're awesome. Come on. La La Land. Just as Emma Stone was walking off the stage, Cunanan took a picture and tweeted

and that's the exact moment that he should have been discarding the envelope and lining up the

next one. Basically, he flooded his working memory, and that's what led to them announcing

the wrong best picture. The brain and the peripheral nervous system is really one big

changed detector. That is, it responds to any change in the current environment

and so it responds to novelty. Now, back on the savanna, things didn't change very much except

the constellations overhead and the seasons. Now, of course, we've got change everywhere

bidding for our attention. Now, in terms of attention and distraction, I often say that the screens are like secondhand smoke. And so in the fact that

who's ever in the line of sight is affected by it. And we've all experienced this in waiting rooms

and airport lounges, those huge monitors with their moving images, they demand to be looked at

And trying not to look costs energy as much. So either way, we lose

I think the only way around that would be to put in earplugs and put on a blindfold so you not distracted by this stuff this what I call forced viewing Is it ironic that you looking at me on a screen

and the answer is not if you're just focused on my talk right now

but if you're trying to do three things or five things at once, then your focus is really shot

I think the term, you know, dopamine reward is being thrown around too loosely

It's sort of a shorthand for anything that feels good. A good meal will give us a dopamine hit

So, I mean, we're getting these squirts all day long. But there are two pleasure circuits that exist in the brain

one related to wanting and reward, and the other two, pleasure and liking

The two systems differ in how easy they are to trigger. Now, the wanting and reward system is very easy to trigger

Its network is diffused widely throughout the brain and basically in every crevice

But it's impossible to satiate. And this is the basis of the hedonic treadmill

As soon as we get something that we want, we want something else

Pleasure is very short-lived. Even Aristotle pointed this out long ago. On the other hand, the opioid system is smaller in its expanse in the brain. It's harder to trigger. We can satiate it. And this is the basis of addictions, really

Studies show that behavioral addictions such as excessive swiping at your screen or TikTok addiction activates the same brain areas as do physical addictions

So alcohol, cocaine, other kinds of drugs. This has been shown in many experiments where the anxiety level rises minute by minute as you take their phone away

The tech giants know that there's only 1,440 minutes in a day

And so they fight ruthlessly for our eyeballs, and they want to keep us glued to their platform as long as possible, because that's how they make their money

I mean, Reed Hastings of Netflix said it long ago. He said, sleep is their biggest competitor, not Amazon Prime, not Hulu, not the other streaming services

They have become expert in exploiting positive intermittent reinforcement. I mean, I know what they're doing

And yet when I see that next episode in five seconds, it's like, OK, what time is it

Oh, I can I can watch another hour. This is the same mechanism that's used by slot machines and casinos to keep us playing

That is, we scroll and we get a hit or something interesting or a good piece of news

And that's a reward. And so we said, oh, let's get another one

And we keep going. But the rewards come infrequently on an unpredictable schedule, and that's what keeps us glued to the scrolling

So you are physically addicted as well as behaviorally addicted. How can you reclaim your attention? Good question

Well, the most effective thing would be to turn the phone off

But that also turns out to be the hardest thing for people because they have what's called nomophobia, a fear of being without their phone. We are really addicted to the whoosh that happens when a text message comes in. We really have trained ourselves like Pavlov's dogs

when these stimuli come in. The screen lights up, we get the whoosh

or we sit there wondering, gee, has anybody liked me? You know, you get anxious

just not being able to hang on to it. One of the things you can do

if you're not willing to put the phone down or turn it off, adjust the settings on it and your television

so that you're not getting this huge number of photons hitting your retina

In the book, I give examples for this. The first thing you should do is go to your iPhone and turn on the blue, yellow, tritonopic filter. Turn down the brightness as much as you're comfortable with. On your television, which are really, really bright, those OLED screens, you can turn down the picture mode and the contrast mode and the brightness way down by a factor of 40, and you'll still have a great picture to look at

It's just you're not going to be bombarded by all this light coming at you

The other thing would be then what the kind of light that's emanating from these very bright screens

and that is you're getting too much short wavelength light or blue light

Now blue light packs more energy in its photons than any other wavelengths and it penetrates all the way to the back of the eye Blue wavelengths also signal the onset of darkness

and then the arrival of light in the morning. Any photoreceptor could have evolved to handle this

and give us our circadian rhythms of sunlight and sunset. Blue light penetrates the oceans more effectively than anything else

And that's where the photoreceptors in all life first evolved. So that's why we're sensitive to blue light

People have suggested using blue light blocking glasses, which are tinted yellow

Yellow tinted glasses are good for glare if you're sensitive to glare, for example

But those are really worthless. in order to filter out enough of the blue short wavelengths

you need a dark orange lens. And it's so dark that you can barely see what you're doing

So, you know, you can show the effectiveness in a lab, but for everyday living and trying to get around

you'll be stumbling all over the furniture because you won't be able to see anything

Another thing that matters is what you're doing at night Having regular hours of going to bed and waking up

Is one of the best things that you can do To reclaim your attention span and your focus

Why is that? Well, when you're asleep The brain is not just passive

You're not a sack of potatoes lying in bed Our sleeping brain is highly active metabolically

It's consolidating memory. It's clearing out waste products that have accumulated over the day

And it's processing emotions. And so if we don't allow it to do these things by shortchanging ourself on sleep

then it's equivalent of having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.8. You're really going to suffer the next day

and there's no such thing as catching up on sleep. I mean, you can't stay awake all night and then decide

well, I'm going to sleep in on the weekend. It doesn't work that way. And why is that

It has to do with our circadian rhythm and the cycle of sleep

Now, we hit the pillow and we go through four stages of sleep

Stage one, two, three, four, which is the deepest slow wave sleep

and that's where all this repair process happens. And then we go back up to stage three, two, one, and that's about 90 minutes after we've hit the pillow

And then, boom, we enter our first REM stage, and that's where we dream

So I tell my medical students, for example, if you have to give a presentation in the morning, go to bed, set an alarm clock for 5 a.m. if you need to, and cram and review and prepare your thing then

because at that point, you're going to be refreshed from a good night's sleep

Your memory is going to be primed. Your tank's going to be full. And you're going to perform much better than if you had stayed up late cramming

So what are some of the things that you can do in terms of sleep hygiene to establish a healthy pattern of sleep and wakefulness

Well, one would be to try to minimize tech. Don't have a TV in your bedroom, for one thing

Try to have regular hours of going to sleep and waking up in the morning

The more you can keep a regular period like that, the better off you are

Your room should be fairly cool. 68 degrees is ideal. Don't bundle up and get too warm

If you find yourself that you need to throw the covers off in the middle of the night

then you've started out too hot. Another thing that matters is what you're doing at night

Getting into TikTok and politics and religion and all these other things that can rile us up are not a good thing to do after dinner

Certainly not in the hours before bedtime because it's just going to get our adrenaline up

It's going to interfere with our sleep. and once it does that

that interferes with our focus, our attention span, our memory, all those kinds of things

So this deals with self-control and emotional intelligence. Am I able to throw the circuit breaker

and not get into that argument? If you're about to have an argument

the best thing is for both of you to just zip it and have a good night sleep and then talk about it in the morning And you find that in the morning whatever you are all riled up about

really isn't all that important anymore. And again, it's a question of emotional intelligence and self-control

is can you take the bait? Do you realize what's happening and say

I'm not going to go there? That takes a great deal of resilience

because at the end, when you get all riled up and indignant

who are you hurting? You're only hurting yourself. The solution is really very obvious

is that you have to engage with other people in real life

Try to agree to meet somebody for coffee or to take a walk in the park

Now, when you're interacting with another person or a small group of people

your conversation and interaction is very meaningful. You're there for a reason

you're getting something out of it. It feels good. Your oxytocin, which is the binding hormone

they're being released. That doesn't happen when you're looking at a screen

And when you're on a Zoom meeting and looking at 20 people on the screen

that doesn't happen either. That, in fact, is very exhausting. People talk about Zoom fatigue

for several reasons. One, the camera is always in the wrong place, and so you're not quite sure

where to look. You're also worried about how do I look? Am I coming across okay? Do I look all right

And just being able to focus attention like that is draining. The other thing is that the video and

the audio are chopped up into different streams. So what happens is when you and I are having a

conversation, there are normal signals through our body language and through the tone of our speech

of when it's time for me to talk, stop talking, and when it's time for you to respond

But when the audio is chopped up in Zoom meetings, you get this sputtering

And so it's people's attention. They're really focused on like, okay, well, can I get an word in now

And that's tiring. So that's what Zoom fatigue is all about. One of the things you can do is just take a deliberate break

throw that circuit breaker and stop all the busyness, stop all the things that you're trying

to do at this moment. The Dutch have a wonderful concept called Nixon, which means the art of doing

nothing. So you get up from your computer and you stare out the window. You look at the trees

you listen to the birds, you watch the branches swaying in the wind. And you do this for, I don't

know, three minutes is enough to throw that circuit breaker and take you out of the busyness

for a moment. So you have basically, here you are at tilt, and then you do a Nixon moment and you

lower that level of engagement. And so you can start, you can, you know, start over again

And Nixon isn't, it's not meditation. It's not a forced moment of doing nothing. It's just a

voluntary of just, you know, look up, you're outside taking a walk, look up at the buildings

what's out there? You're so used to just looking at ground level or walking along looking at your

phone and running into lampposts. So just put the phone aside, stop, look around, breathe

That's Nixon. That's throwing the circuit breaker. I call silence an essential nutrient

So silence is an essential nutrient because when we evolved three billion years ago, the world was pretty quiet

Mostly you heard the rustle of the wind and that was it

You know, if you heard a snap of a twig, well, that was, you know, you put yourself on alarm

Whoa, what's that? Is that a danger coming? So something out of the ordinary activated our change detector

and it could be, well, what is it? Is it a threat or is it an opportunity

Is it a lion coming after me or is it the possibility of a mate or a meal

So, you know, the brain did not evolve to be on 24-7

It needs periods of downtime to restore itself. Want to support the channel

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