bewilderbrain

A slow moving tide of scrutiny laps at the shores of Smartphone Island…reluctant, confused, but unable to entirely avoid the facts…

In evolutionary terms, smartphones don’t even register as a blip on a timeline, let alone a new era.

But it’s easy to feel that few advances in technology could change the course and experience of humanity as much as the internet…and mobile phones.

People did of course say the same thing about the industrial revolution, and quite possibly, the invention of the wheel though. Its important to remember that.

Nevertheless, we are certainly in uncharted territory as a species. With the first generations of parents who have never done life without a phone now passing the baton to their children.

A little article of technology, attached to our hands, our friends, our world in general, in mutual waves of supposed connection.

We have been sent into the arena of constant information and communication, like generations before us were with other technologies, with no real idea of the immediate influence, or the way it will shape our futures.

But scientific reports are starting to appear. And there is no denying that some of the evidence is damning.

I have to put my hand up here – to being Generation X .

That’s right – I clearly remember the time before…

I am like a relic of an earlier era of the United Federation of Planets – before transporters were invented.

But I am, for the most part, as caught in the thrall of my phone as the next person.

The stuff we now know about smartphone use, and excessive screentime…

At this point, most people are aware on some level that excessive use of smartphones and screens is not good for us.

It’s a reality we don’t even really want to acknowledge, let alone face.

I’m not here to go into the scientific reports and technical details, most of which have by now been broadcast and publicised. But in brief overview…

Excessive use of smartphones has been shown to have far-reaching physical, physiological, mental and emotional impacts on us, from the now more common postural abnormalities and neck humps appearing in younger people, to the links with depression, anxiety and dependance.

In mental health terms, the contribution to anxiety and depression can be a self-perpetuating cycle.

Anxious brains may seek distraction from racing thoughts in a smartphone, depressive brains may seek solace, distraction, even answers to the mental states they are caught in, from their phones.

(See also – Duelling the Dead-eyed Dullard of Depression)

And for those who are lonely, another paradox – their phones provide an avenue of communication – but with excessive use, have the potential to further remove them from society, and the actual physical people around them.

Those with existing mental health issues may therefore be simultaneously most vulnerable to the thrall of their phones, and most susceptible to further adverse effects.

Smartphones and the neurodiverse brain…

Claims that smartphones, social media and screentime are a “cause” of ADHD, are unfounded, and extraordinarily unhelpful.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental difference, present, and sometimes also presenting, from early in life.

These claims return ADHD to the ludicrous “something to be cured” bracket, that our increasingly neuro-inclusive society is trying to move away from. They offer little of substance in considering the impact of phones on our mental health and foster misunderstanding of neurodevelopmental difference.

As an ADHD brain myself however, I can say that whilst my phone has not created the different wiring of my brain, there are times where I feel I may be more vulnerable or affected by the beguiling machinations of the black box.

My phone can be an assault on my senses and the pinnacle of escape within the passage of a few minutes.

The barrage of available information and distracting notifications can be overwhelming, creating stress and anxiety, and in some cases worsening difficulties with attention.

On the flip side however, it offers me an easy hit…

With our lower baseline levels of dopamine, neurodiverse brains are already hard-wired for vulnerability to addiction.

In the case of smart phones, we begin medicating our brains with snapshots of interest and distraction throughout the day, and setting up a cycle of dependence.

But this doesn’t just happen in neurodiverse brains…

Dopamine signalling, addiction and smartphone dependence – a brief dive…

Smartphones present us with a problem. They present everything we need, as well as many many things we don’t, to our willing fingertips.

The sheer variety of applications, interventions, and innovative modes of communication for which they can be used is breath-taking.

And with this infinite variety, comes the infinite signalling of reward to our brains.

Dopamine is one of our most vital feel-good neurotransmitters, with a mind-boggling array of functions in brain and body.

It is stimulated by, and forever seeking, pleasurable activity, and one of its key activating pathways is the experience of the new – adventure, learning, surprise, variety.

On a smart phone, every notification that pops up on our screens, every new browser window, every distracting advert that leads us to a new shop, every new like, follow, or interaction on social media, is a mini-dopamine burst.

Like dopamine shots.

They are instant, extremely hard to resist the pull of, and happening near continuously.

Our brains and our senses become accustomed to this drip drip barrage of dopamine bites – mini bullets of the new and the momentarily distracting.

But this sets up a dangerous chemical recalibration as our brains try to adjust to the input.

You see, when the neurotransmitter receptors in our brain receive a sudden influx of something in one go (like Dopamine, which can be strongly stimulated by certain foods and alcohol) over time, they will downregulate their receptor sites.

This is a self defence mechanism, designed to maintain the brains equilibrium, by ensuring that no one neurotransmitter is allowed to become out of control – to run riot over its competitors.

The brain downregulates by decreasing the number of dopamine receptors, which stems and limits the perceived over abundant flow into the brain.

The effect of this is that less of the feel good hormone is allowed in, and it will therefore take correspondingly more of whatever stimulant is being used to create the desired effect.

And of course, if we bombard our brains with even greater amounts of its chosen stimulant in order to reap our reward, it will respond with yet further downregulation, setting up the vicious cycle of addiction and dependance.

This results in a brain which has, temporarily at least, closed its doors to pleasure, and may be unable to experience it from gentler, more everyday rewards.

This is a very simplistic explanation of some of the chemical factors involved in addiction, and it should be remembered that societal norms, family behaviours, and varied neurotypes all play a role in how an individual may be physiologically or mentally affected by excessive interactions with their phone.

In the big picture, there are nuances and intricacies, good and bad, to the way they are interwoven into our lives.

Smartphones as vehicles, and disablers of connection…

With social media, in its many and varied forms and applications, our friends are at our fingertips.

So are our colleagues.

So are their friends.

So is some bloke from down the road who is complaining about a noisy dog on a neighbourhood forum.

So are our enemies, our detractors…our bullies and our bores….

You get my point.

Yes, we have a good degree of agency over who we connect with, but with this comes countless decisions, curation of lists and communications, and constant mini-endeavours in diplomacy.

Some points of communication are outside our control. Like the WhatsApp group that we need to be part of to keep track of our child’s activity schedule, that inadvertantly subjects us to scrolling through reams of inane conversation in which we have no interest to find the relevant details.

Irrelevant input. Irrelevant connection.

Communications with friends, supportive networks, can be a lifeline, and nourishing for us.

But our ultimate lack of control over the connections we are exposed to uses up a lot of mental bandwidth – increasing our overall amount of communication with others, whilst simultaneously diluting its quality.

Our over connectivity means wider, diluted connectivity, and potentially less space for genuine in-depth connections.

Sometimes, because of this intrusive ease and abundance of communication, we lose perspective as to the hierarchy and importance of communication that matters.

I have seen countless couples sitting silently across from each other in pubs and cafes, both engaged in their phones.

Known family members to engage in social media communications with distant friends during visits from close relatives.

Parents, and there is no judgement here – we have all done it – unable to fully engage with the conversation of, or give their full attention to their child, because of a social media notification.

And still, we chase these generalised surface level interactions, which offer, at heart, more a warm blanket of numbness than the penetrative soothing of real friendship.

We won’t get this right 100 per cent of the time, but in life, we sometimes need to stop and recalibrate to factory settings on who and what is actually most important.

Smartphones and the curation of connection…

As well as broadening and diluting our connections, the use of phones and social media goes one step further.

In interviews in Australia, scrutinising the new social media ban for under 16s, a young girl commented that with SnapChat removed from her phone, her “Streak” had been removed, which meant, and I quote, she, “had no reason to contact her friends”

The saddest and scariest part of this was that the comment was made without a hint of irony. She has grown up in an age of social media, likely with parents who have never been without a phone.

She didn’t see anything inappropriate in her capsule assessment of the effects of social media removal, because connectivity through a digital filter has been normalised.

The girl remarked that if she were to contact her friends simply by message, she didn’t get anything for doing it, so it wasn’t very interesting, and she wouldn’t know what to say.

This highlights a darker, more insidious truth. The intervention of the social media app between herself and her friend had created a dopamine feedback loop for the mere act of using it, which was completely divorced from the feelings and nuances of friendship.

Her brain was instructing her to contact her friend, but her motivation for doing do was the reward she was being offered, in effect, just for using the app.

Her motivations had been skewed, disconnected from the base desire to communicate for communications sake, thereby negating and nullifying the simple action of contact that should be reward in itself.

If ever there was an advert for why the use of social media and smartphones needs to be given due caution and consideration, particularly for younger users, this was it.

Smartphones are being used to curate not just our connections…but our consumption…the fodder with which we fill our mental tanks…

I have mentioned that the over-availability of connection leads to less choice and control for us in our communications, and a dilution in their depth.

The same is true of what we consume.

How many times in a day do we pick up our phone intending to check the weather and end up opening an email, reading a fact sheet about the nocturnal habits of owls, or watching a reel of a cat farting itself off a counter?

In my case, a lot…

But whatever your neurotype or addictive tendancies, there is simply so much contained here on this little device, it’s all immediate, it’s all in your hand,

…and after all, it will only take a second of your time to look at….

How many little seconds of time are we actually totalling up all together?

If I was going to start a new book, or read a lengthy newspaper article, I would probably carefully select what I instinctively felt interested in, what I felt in the mood to consume, to fill my mind with for 15 mins.

In our current age, the idea of committing as much as 15 mins to a single media or reading interaction seems too big an ask for many, precisely because of our bombardment with titbit, easily consumable morsels.

The saturation with small details makes it hard to take in information on any deeper, more significant level, like with communication – rather than concentrating our learning with its wealth and breadth, it dilutes it, to surface level facts and soundbites.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for a silly cat video, and it’s not the short titbits of media in themselves that are the problem, but the way we interact with them.

Because they are so short, we end up just watching one more, then another after that. The immediacy of the information, and its arrival, strips us of our choice.

We end up not only not choosing what we are going to look at, but not choosing when we are going to look at it.

Subjects change rapidly, we are distracted, deflected, buffered back and forth between different images, ideas, subjects, so quickly, that it can feel difficult to come up for air.

Short sharp hits of dopamine.

With little to no control over their source, style, or intended impact.

Often, there is no real intended impact. Other than for you to watch.

And as we watch, we witness the removal of self in the creative process of engagement. With reading, with watching, with communicating, everything is both seen through, and curated by, a third party lens.

Our engagements are no longer being led by our base feelings, instincts, or preferences, and even they themselves are being perpetually modified by what is fed to us. Re-curated each day by the endlessly morphing algorithms of our life feeds.

We can end up giving significant portions of our day, or our “downtime” to things that we would never ordinarily have chosen to read or watch had we sat down and thought about it. Exercised our creative and indivdual control.

And “sat down and thought about it” is key here too. Because whenever we sit down, we likely pick up our phones. A five minute rest means a five minute look at whatever might pop up. The time disappears.

And because we fill each available spare segment of rest time with phone related chores, information overload, or snapshot entertainment, we fall victim to the false sense that we don’t have any time to rest, and further re-enforce the sense that reading anything that takes longer than 5 minutes is too large a commitment.

The act of choosing, what we consume, is not only empowering, in that we are curating our own time and lives, but it is part of the creative process. Choosing to read something, to watch something, can be a formative and creative act in itself, if we allow our brains to actually drive rather than being backseat passengers to media.

If anyone else reading is old enough to remember the time before ( said with the same dark and foreboding as Mordor) you will remember the delights of the video shop.

That’s right, videos, those chunky rectangular boxes with long spools of tape inside them that took about 14 years to rewind to the beginning.

As a teenager, going down to blockbuster (our local video hire shop) with my friend, was a highlight of my week. (no commentary on this required).

It was exciting. Being presented with all the myriad colourful colours and genres (as well as giggling at the naughty ones on the top shelf) and we would take genuine pleasure and entertainment from the process of browsing and choosing, even if we did end up hiring Die Hard for the 12th time.

This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, or it being better in the good old days, but it does raise the idea of how we think about, how much time we give to, and how we engage with what we consume.

The continued availability of communication, distraction, entertainment, also means there are no mental spaces left to fill. For our minds to wander, for organic thoughts to enter our brains, flourish, or bloom.

Our phones risk becoming not just carriages upon which we mentally ride, but the actual curators of our existence…

As we buy into the general curation of phones and social media, we start to curate ourselves…

As we allow our choices to be narrowed, our lives and consumption to be curated, we are also vulnerable to buying into, and feeding back into this curation. Buying into the idea that life through a third party lens is normal.

Sharing photographs, information, experiences with friends and others is in itself not a bad thing, but for some, it has become normal to record and annotate most of their life in this way.

Tools of social media are used to create snapshots of lives to feed back to others.

Well curated images, often filtered to remove the imperfections otherwise known as humanity.

It becomes normal to do this everyday, for any event, sometimes for any thought, reaction, or new experience.

They begin to create onscreen and online lives that are one step removed, diluted, and sanitised representations of their own.

Over time, blurring the line between the life being lived, and the continued curation of it in the online world, leading to disconnection and disassociation, from actual things and actual people.

Everything is seen through a filter, and becomes eventually experienced through a filter – divorcing us from reality and any depth of meaning.

I recently attended a very well known and popular UK attraction with my children – a fantastic experience with lots of amazing things to see.

What astonished me was the number of people at this very sizable place who spent their entire visit walking around filming everything on their phones.

Presumably so that they could go home and have the actual experience of being there later?

The constant videos, and videoing, that now dominate much of social media, are becoming a normality also in our experiences of life.

This, to me, is again, like placing a screen between you and the world, between you and the experience that you are actually supposed to be having.

I took plenty of photos on this excursion, but the rest of the time, well, I wanted to actually experience it, in the first person, not the third.

Too much time spent filming what is going on around you means not actually seeing or experiencing what is going on around you.

It doesn’t all have to be recorded. Be there, instead.

We have all seen people young and old, walking the streets, absorbed in their phones, completely oblivious to what is going on around them. But it’s not just the streets – you see people out in nature, walking just to exercise, or to get somewhere, seeing nothing, busily scrolling while rainbows and squirrels and the intricacies of life in general pass them by.

We know that nature is one of the strongest medicines in our toolbox for mental health, but so also is presence, mindfulness, the genuine experience of moments.

(See also – The ten second brain spa – Micro mindfulness to calm and fuel the brain )

Our phones and media can insert an extra layer between ourselves and the natural world.

An extra layer, or barrier, between us and our real friendships, as we curate our interactions.

They can insert an extra layer between us and our actual desires, preferences and choices, as they become curated for us.

And they can insert an extra layer between us and our own creativity, as we modify and curate our creations to soften their landings, to reach the widest audiences – to please the masses with palatable sentiment.

Media stretches its spindly invisible fingers into everything, unpicking and re-weaving the fabrics of our culture, our communications, and our understanding of ourselves.

It’s not about giving it all up, it’s about changing our mindsets towards phones and media…

We cannot deny, that used unwisely, phones and social media can be an intrusive and disruptive influence, changing our experience of life.

We also cannot deny, that they are, for the most part, a fundamental of modern life, and are needed for most everyday technological interactions like shopping and banking.

Contrary to what it may seem, given the bent of my discussion, I am not actually anti-technology. ( And I always say please to Alexa – I don’t want to be first in line when skynet becomes self-aware)

Yes, I may have focused heavily on the subtle infiltration and inveigling into our lives of the elusive digital layer, and the risks of this to our health.

But I am not saying that smartphones are bad per se. I am not saying that social media is bad per se.

Victoria sponge cake isn’t bad per se, but eating fifteen Victoria sponge cakes a day is nevertheless likely to be detrimental for your health.

I think we underestimate the power and the influence of these forces at our peril.

The technologies in our little black boxes have the power to help us, to genuinely connect us, to educate us, and perhaps even, on some levels, to calm or comfort us.

If we don’t become reliant on them.

Dependent on their superficial beepings for our sustenance.

This is about awareness. We need to start recognising the power of the beast.

Once we do that, and make peace with it, we can work out a more harmonious relationship with it. Even if it needs to go back into its cave at 7pm promptly every evening.

We have to stop taking our phones for granted as being a readily available arm attachment, and start respecting their impact and influence.

It all comes back to choice and control.

The time has come to engage, to choose, to ensure that we take the creative agency over our own lives, communication, and consumption.

To ensure that we are curating our phones, not the other way around.

We can’t live our lives through a third-party.

Sometimes, we need to take out the middle man.