is social media bad for our brains?
welcome to Log Off: a brief history of the human brain
Somewhere between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago, homo sapiens (the modern human) evolved. Around 200,000 years ago, spoken language appeared among humans. The agricultural revolution took place around 12,000 years ago. The first cities appeared around 9,000 years ago.
Written language emerged about 6,000 years ago, around the same time as the wheel. The gun was invented around 1,000 years ago; in the 13th century the printing press. In the past 150 years, humans have experienced the Industrial Revolution, the first human flight, transatlantic calls, the first atomic bomb, and particle accelerators.
In the last 30 years? The computer, the internet, the smartphone, social media, and artificial intelligence, creating a world that is more connected than ever. The growth of human technology over the course of our history hinges on exponential.
Despite all of the changes in the past 150 years, evidence shows that our brains have likely not changed in the last 300,000 years.
I’m sipping morning coffee and watching a bird outside. I’ve been trying to consume more meaningful media lately, after a long winter of spending a lot of time on social media. You know those limits you can put on how much time you spend on Instagram?
I set mine to one hour a day. I’ve been horrified at how quickly I reach it, how many hours I spend in the online world when the world I can touch and feel is right in front of me.
Trying to read and watch the birds, I set my phone on top of the fridge and walk away. It feels silly— do I not have the self-control to have my phone next to me but not check it?
I sit and read my article, and my eyes flicker to the top of the fridge; I am hyper conscious of my phone’s proximity to me. I keep reading the article and come across the line:
“Simply seeing a smartphone (not even using it) lowers working memory capacity and leads to decreased performance in cognitive tasks, due to the fact that part of the working memory resources are busy ignoring the phone” (Korte 2020).
I move my phone to a different room, and keep it there.
our brains on social media:
There are a few key psychological and neurological concepts/principles when it comes to understanding the foundation of how our brains interact with social media, and I outlined them first in an older essay, don’t pay Instagram.
To understand how social media effects us, we first need to understand:
Social media’s success hinges entirely on selling adspace to third-parties. There is no algorithm, rather a series of algorithms and mathematical processes used to calculate what content will keep people on the app the longest and sell the most adspace. The only goal of social media apps is to profit off its users.
To do this, apps like Instagram and TikTok use Variable Reinforcement schedule, the same technique used at casinos, to intermittently and randomly reward users for posting with likes and views, stimulating the dopamine reward pathways in your brain quite literally working to addict you to the apps. They do this knowingly, intentionally, and without meaningfully informing you. read about whistleblowers here,
Dunbar’s Number: human social networks are meant to contain about 150 individuals. Social media has rapidly expanded those networks beyond what our brains were meant to handle. We are not meant to be exposed to this many opinions. read people aren’t meant to talk this much, Ian Bogost, 2021.
Emotional and moralized content on social media is spread more quickly: in fact, 20% more quickly for each moral-emotional word. Content that provokes emotion, particularly negative emotions like rage or self-righteousness, keeps users on the app longer, thus selling more adspace.
Components of human brains exhibit high plasticity, especially at young ages; put simply, this means that our brains can actually change quite a bit based on environmental factors. Right now, due to the recency of social media there simply isn’t that much research on its long term effects on our brains. This is one of the best papers I’ve found detailing what we know and what we don’t.
image: searching for connection at a Minnesota dogsled race.
Welcome to Log Off: your brain on social media. In this section of Hello Stranger newsletter, I’m hoping to demystify what we know about the workings and intersection of social media and neuroscience, keep you up-to-date on neuroscience news as it relates to social media, and provide tools to help you set effective boundaries with social media.
Here, you can expect semi-monthly well-researched articles detailing current news on social media as it relates to neuroscience, clear explanations of how our brain works with respect to social media, and overall, compelling reasons to log off and go for a walk.
interested in learning more about social media and the brain?
This isn’t a new topic to Hello Stranger newsletter, but in the future all social media & the brain topics will be in this section specifically. If you’d like to read some of my previous work on this topic, start here:
don’t pay instagram: a link-rich article on exactly how instagram profits off of users and knowingly ignores mental health concerns regarding the app and young adults
are influencers people? the answer may surprise you: how sharing my life online has affected my own mental health and concept of privacy
stop influencing for amazon: unpacking Amazon’s influencer program
If you do not want to receive this section of Hello Stranger, and would only like to receive the main newsletter with travel and outdoors content, no worries! You can unsubscribe from this section specifically on the main newsletter page.
Another good read on this topic is Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari.