May 19, 2026 • 39 mins
Brain rot is a slang term for the cognitive decline we're experiencing these days due to screentime, social media, and the like. But is it a real thing? And is technology making us dumber? Kal sits down with neuroscientist David Eaglemann to delve into the relatively new idea of brain rot -- and whether it's so new after all.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's been a couple of years since I deleted Twitter
or ex or whatever you want to call it from
my phone, mostly because it had me super bummed out,
like there was nothing good on it anymore. It was
just people yelling and screaming, even though I had all
of the filters up of like no politics on either
side of the aisle, et cetera, et cetera. But what
I realized is that instead I just ended up spending
(00:21):
tons of time watching Instagram reels, Like a lot of
Instagram reels. I'm a little too old to watch TikTok reels.
I just like wait for them to show up on Instagram.
And what I learned from these videos was absolutely nothing nothing.
They're really fun. It's a lot of dog content, a
bunch of good DROPPI jokes, no news, no politics. I
still have those filters up, but I felt like a
(00:43):
bit of a drug pusher because I'm sending these reels
to my friends, wasting hours of their time. I do
know they watch them because they send reels back to me,
but I couldn't help. But wonder, does this mean I'm
getting dumber. It's not just those videos, it's also the
ways in which I'm constantly using my phone in ways
that reduce the necessity of brain function, like using Google
Maps to get to a place that I legitimately do
(01:04):
know how to get to using just my brain. For
all the good that technology has done, is it also
scrambling our brains.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
The circuitry of your brain is reconfiguring every moment of
your life, from cradle to grave. By the time you
are several years old, you're already absorbing everything that all
the Homo sapiens have done before us. And then you
progress and you can springboard off the top of that.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. He's the
author of eight books. His most recent is called Live Wired,
which tells the story of brain plasticity. And he's also
heavily researched the brain's relationship to sensory substitution, time perception, vision,
and synesthesia. And he works with and advises tech companies
(01:53):
in the Silicon Valley, which is why he's here today
to help me understand the concept of brain rot What
is it? And have we been here before?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Here we ad ad A.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Hey, I'm cal Penn and this is here we go again?
A show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks
why does history keep repeating itself? Here we go.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
All right, hey, Cal, how are you doing good?
Speaker 1 (02:37):
How are you?
Speaker 4 (02:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Good to see you. Last time I saw you, I
was in twenty nineteen. I don't know if you remember this,
but I you can't. I'm David Eagleman.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I am a neuroscientist at Stanford and I run a
podcast called Inner Cosmos.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
David, welcome, thanks for coming on the show. Great to
see you again, Cal, So, I was excited.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
To talk to you.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
We did do this documentary. I couldn't re remember the location,
but twenty nineteen, right before COVID in Palo Alto, this
docu series called This Giant Beast that is the Global Economy,
which is still on Amazon. It's a limited series. So
I couldn't remember if we did that in Palo Alto,
in Cyprus or in Germany, because we shot this show
(03:20):
I think in like twenty three different locations around the world.
And this is now relevant to our conversation here because
the fact that I couldn't even remember that I had
always chalked up to just like, oh, it was pre
COVID and we you know, we were in twenty three
different locations. But since we're here to sort of talk
about brain rot, I was like, is that the reason
or is it just that I'm like living life through
my fucking screen that my brain is slowly decaying. But
(03:43):
before we get into all that, just tell us quickly
about yourself. Where were you born. Did you come from
a family of scientists?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Actually so, I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My
father was a psychiatrist and my mother was a biology teacher,
and so I thought that was the last thing I
was going to do. But neuroscience ended up being this
real gravitational pull for me, and I ended up there.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
What's the gravitational poll? Did you have like a first
memory of it of wanting to do it?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Well?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
You know, the truth is, when I was a kid,
I fell off of a roof and I broke my
nose very badly on the floor below, and the whole
event seemed to have gone in slow motion.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
It seemed to have taken a very long time to fall.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And when I got to high school physics and I
calculated it, it turns out it's zero point six of
a second to get from the top of the roof
to the bottom, and I.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Was really I was really interested in that.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
How had it seemed to have lasted such a long
time even though it didn't. And it turns out when
I grew up and became a neuroscientist, no one had
ever done an experiment on that, and so I ended
up running what remains the only experiments of putting people
in life threatening situations and measuring what's going on with
time perception. There the one sentence punchline of all this
(05:01):
is that it has to do with when you're in
a life threaning situation, your brain writes down everything, as
in your writing down all these memories, and therefore when you.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Read it back out, when you say what just happened?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
What just happened, it seems to have taken a long time,
because you've got such detailed memories, like when people get
in car accidents and they say, look, I watched the
hood crumple and the rear view mirror fall off and
the facial expression of the other guy, and so your
brain says, well, that must have taken several seconds, even
though it was shorter. But anyway, all of these things
(05:34):
are part of what got me into neuroscience. Plus, I
grew up watching Carl Sagan on PBS, and I know
you also are a Sagan lover, and you know it
was so influential on me. It turned me onto the
beauty of science, and I thought, someday, I'm going to
do that.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
When your brain does that and registers everything, is there
a chemical that's released that allows it to happen? Why
does that happen chemically or by whatever the word is.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, it's not a chemical.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
It's because of You've got essentially an emergency control center
in the brain called the amygdala, which says, WHOA, everything
is hitting the fan, everybody pay attention. So normally your
brain is doing fifty things. You're thinking about what you're
geting for lunch and how you have this deadline and
blah blah. But when something that, when something salient, is happening,
(06:26):
your brain recruits everything to pay attention to what's going on.
And part of that paying attention has to do with
writing everything down, which.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Is actually a great transition to this idea of brain
rot and I think about it the most. Into two scenarios. One,
so I'm a New Yorker and I have been for
quite some time, and I remember I still prefer a
physical book to bring with me instead of reading on
(06:56):
a screen. But I've noticed that over you, over like
a decade and a half, people have gone from reading
a physical book to reading a kindle to just like
scrolling through videos or playing games on their phones on
the subway. And also then just the idea that you're
in a public park or a place that used to
be for conversation and more human to human interaction, and
(07:19):
half the people are sort of on their phones or
taking pictures of their hot dog before they eat it
and things like that. And so I guess my question is,
as somebody who studies neuroscience, is there a fear that
these things will change our short term perception? Does it
change our ability to focus? Or am I just now
old and think that these are real things that we
(07:41):
actually shouldn't worry about.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, here's what I would say.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I think it's much more nuanced than many people take.
And one thing I love about this podcast that you're
doing is then it really asks the question of which
things are new and which things are all The fact
is that people not paying much attention nothing new about that.
We're probably about the same age you know, if you
can remember back to when people would take airplane flights,
(08:07):
they'd play solitaire all the time. Now they play solitaire
on their phone. But it's not meaningfully different. I think
that people did plenty of things to just waste time.
So what I see is the big differences is we
have much more choice now than we did. So when
you're scrolling TikTok or Instagram, you can swipe if something
(08:30):
isn't holding your attention.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
There are pros and cons to that.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
The pro of course, being that there's just there's a
lot of wonderfully produced stuff out there, and you can
find the stuff that maximally floats your boat instead of
having to sit through along, you know, watching The Brady
Bunch or Gilligan's Island or something and thinking, okay, well
that's the only choice that I have, and so I'm
just going to do that. Whether this affects attention span,
(09:00):
I don't know. We all sort of share that intuition.
But it's very difficult to test these things because in fact,
it's impossible to test these things. Here's why there's no
control group that you can find. So let's imagine you
took kids growing up now and you said, hey, we
want to know if their attention is, you know, better
or worse than people who came a generation before. The
(09:22):
problem is there were one hundred other differences the generation before,
you know, differences in politics and diet and pollution and
every I mean, there's just a culture is different, and
so you wouldn't be able to say, oh, it's because
of the Internet if you do find a difference, and
you can't find a control group within their generation, because
all kids are growing up with the Internet, except for
(09:45):
let's say Amish kids or kids somewhere in the world
who are incredibly impoverished, and there are one hundred other
differences between those groups, and so you wouldn't be able
to find something and say, oh, it's because of the
Internet that they have this. Here's the thing, Because of
what's called brain plasticity.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
We are wired up by our.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Culture, by our moment in time, by our neighborhood, by
everything going on around us. And so it is the
case that the brain is influenced by all the inputs
that we're putting in. So that tells us that when
we put in different inputs, we're going to get different outputs.
It's just very difficult to know exactly how that is.
And by the way, every generation has differences in that
(10:29):
depending on whether there's a war going on, or the
radio gets invented, or the steam engine gets invented, or
whatever the printing press suddenly allows the proliferation of books.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
All these things change generations along the way.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
What interests me is how each generation thinks that the
kids are now going to be worse off in some way.
One example that I recently came across is I hadn't
realized this, but when the printing press was invented in
fourteen forty, immediately people started saying, look, this is a
real problem.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
The kids of the next generation are going to be morons.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Why because as soon as they want to know the answer,
it's right there. They just pull the book off the
shelf and there's the answer, and they're not going to
memorize things, they're not going to understand things anymore. They're
just gonna find it right there. So what we see
from that is, in fact, we all became much smarter
as a civilization because of the availability of information. And
(11:24):
I think the same thing happened thirty years ago with
Google the Internet. More generally, everyone said, look, these kids
are going to become morons because if you ask them
what's the capital of France, they'll.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Just google it.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
But in fact, the availability of information has made the
whole society smarter. And you know, I run into thirteen
year old kids all the time who say something really
smart and I say, wow, how did you know that?
And they say, oh, I saw it on a Ted
talk or you know, I just looked this up. And
now we've got chat GPT, and again, I think this
(12:00):
is going to make kids even smarter. I'll tell you
why I'm saying this, because back in the day, when
we were in school, we got a lot of just
in case information, like just in case you ever need
to know that the Battle of Hastings was in ten
sixty six, there you go, and then we're testing on
that stuff and so on. But what kids get now
(12:22):
is just in time information. As soon as they are
curious about a subject, they get the answer right then.
And that makes an enormous difference from a brain plasticity
point of view, because when you are curious about something,
you have the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present so that
the change actually sticks. So if you say, hey, how
(12:45):
do I fix this bicycle tire? Or what's the answer
about you know, venus and the temperature or whatever. All
of this stuff sticks if you're the one asking the question.
And so I think it's going to be a massive
opportunity for education, and I'm quite sure that our children
(13:06):
and grandchildren will be smarter than we are.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So how do you then, as a how do you
respond to the lay person who says, well, why are
we getting dumber and dumber?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Here's what I would say is, look at a graph
of human history. So we invented agriculture many thousands of
years ago, that we you know, and there was the
invention of writing thousands of years ago, and then stuff
moved along pretty slowly for a long time. And what's
happened is essentially, ever since the industrial revolution, the pace
(13:40):
of discovery has gone up, and now we are on
this part of the curve that is so steep it
you know, you look at it, and so it looks
vertical because everyone is getting an education, or at least
has the opportunity for education. So now instead of having
a few people on the planet who are educated and
(14:02):
making the wark happen, you've got almost eight billion brains
who have access to information, and the pace of discovery
has outstripped anything that we've ever seen. I mean in
my field of neuroscience, and this is true across scientific fields.
Most of what we know has been discovered in the
(14:24):
last five or ten years.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
I mean, the.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Huge majority of the data that we're sitting on, the
new theories, the new everything, it's all happening right now.
It's the most exciting time to have ever been alive.
The pace of what's going on is so incredible that
it would be very hard for me to accept any
(14:46):
argument that somehow, as a species, we are getting dumber.
And I understand that what I've just been talking about
is people who are making these discoveries. And somebody might
counter argue, yeah, but the average person is getting dumb,
But I don't think so. Because now the average person
has access.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
They don't have to.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Get over the momentum of driving over to the library
and finding a book and seeing if they can find
out about something. They can find out about stuff right away.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
You touched on this idea of neuroplasticity. You wrote a
book called Live Wired about the neuroplasticity of our brain.
Can you explain what live wired means where it comes from.
And then how does neuroplasticity of our brain speak to
this notion colloquially of brain rot if it does at all.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yes, So neuroplasticity just means that the circuitry of your
brain is reconfiguring every moment of your life, from cradle
to grave. And so this is what is special about brains,
and human brains in particular, we have more plasticity than
any other species. So what Mother Nature figured out was, hey,
if I drop these creatures into the world half ached,
(16:01):
they will absorb the rest from everything happening around them.
And what that has led for us as a species
is that by the time you, you know, are several
years old, eight years old, whatever, you're already absorbing essentially
everything that all the Homo sapiens have done before us.
And then you know, you progress and you can springboard
(16:23):
off the top of that. Contrast this with let's say
an alligator, who you know, an alligator born thirty thousand
years ago and born now.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
They have the same life.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
They have certain neural circuits that just say okay, eat,
may swim whatever, And there's no difference with alligator culture.
But with human culture. We just keep getting better every
single generation, precisely because we are able to absorb the
lessons that people have figured out before us. So this
is what has allowed us to build skyscrapers and compose
(16:57):
symphonies and invent the Internet and get off of the planet.
I call that live wiring, but it's the same idea.
It's that every one of your eighty six billion neurons,
these are the specialized kind of brain cells. Every one
of these your whole life, they're plugging and unplugging and
seeking and replugging, and it's like if you can imagine
a circuit.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Board that's actually alive and moving around.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
So what does this mean for brain rot Again, Unfortunately,
I think it's really difficult to know because people have
always pursued goofy ways of wasting time, whether that is
card games, are watching Gilligan's Island or whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
People have always done that.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And there's a lot of retrospective romanticization where we say, oh,
when I was a kid, you know, we did this
and that, and we you know, we read Plato and
discussed this at the dinner table, and it's generally not true.
I mean, obviously that happened in some families, but not
in most.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
You know, when I think about younger people, the fact
that research you can just do on chetch apt like
you mentioned obviously, the the benefits of like getting an
answer right now, hoping it's accurate. You don't know for sure,
but generally the framework of something is there. That's obviously
a plus. The downside of that is, I just remember
because I had to look things up, whether it was
(18:14):
on an early early form of the internet or physically
going to the library and reading long articles with a highlighter.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Is that to me?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
It taught me both patients and critical thinking skills because
you had to sit with the information a lot longer
than if you're just immediately typing it in getting the
answer and moving on with your life. You had mentioned
analog solitaire versus playing it on your phone on a plane,
for example. Is there a difference between how screen time,
(18:42):
let's say, scrolling on social media affects the brain versus
let's say that same thirty minute period you listened to
an audiobook or a podcast like yours. Is there a
difference there?
Speaker 3 (18:56):
You know, that's a good question.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
The initial studies that we have right now don't seem
to indicate one. For example, my colleagues at Berkeley did
a study where they looked at what if you read
a book versus listen to an audio book, and they
found no difference in the brain. Now, I actually found
this not surprising, and I'll tell you why. It's because,
let's add a third group. Even though they weren't looking
at this. People who are blind read with braille, so
(19:21):
they're touching bumps with their fingertips. They're reading, let's say,
the same book. All the brain is doing in any
of these cases, whether you're taking it in through your
eyes or your ears or your fingertips, your brain is
translating that into meaning, as in, oh, this character just
said this, and what did she mean by that? And oh,
what's this next character going to do?
Speaker 3 (19:41):
And so on.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
When you're reading a book, your brain doesn't care whether
it's coming in through squiggles that you're getting through photons
through your eyes, or air compression waves through your ears,
or bumps on your fingertips, because all it cares about
is okay, fine, how do I translate this into social meaning?
And that's why I think it just doesn't make a difference.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So then the follow up to that is, I guess relatedly,
does the type of content make a difference? So, for instance,
is there a difference between watching a Wes Anderson movie
versus Planet Earth or a reality TV show like Real Housewives?
Is any of that valued differently by your brain? Does
(20:27):
it impact your brain in different ways?
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Aka?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
How should we be spending our time?
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Yeah? Great question. The truth is that what we always
want to be doing.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
With our brain is expanding the fence lines of our
internal models. So let me explain internal models. Your brain
is locked in silence and darkness, and it's trying to
build a model of what the world is. And we
all have different internal models because we've had different trajectories
through space and time, so we all have these, you know,
(21:02):
slightly different models. But what you really want to do,
from the point of view of brain plasticity is constantly
expand that often, you know, challenging that. One way to
do it is to watch things that are really meaningful,
things that are surprising and meaningful. And you've never seen
a documentary on this. You had no idea that animals
(21:24):
could do this or that people have done that.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
That's definitely matters.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
If somebody watches Real Housewives of course it's compelling because
it plugs right into these very basic things about, oh,
there's conflict, there's drama, and so on, but you're not
expanding your brain in any meaningful way. And I'll just
mention that for people who retire, the most important thing
you can do for your brain is to keep it challenged.
(21:51):
I'll just mention, because I think this is really important.
There's a study that's been ongoing for a few decades
now where a bunch of nuns, Catholic nuns, agreed to
donate their brains when they passed away. So for years,
the researchers, when the nuns passed away, they autopsy the
brain and they look at what's going on. And what
they discovered is that some fraction of these nuns had
(22:14):
Alzheimer's disease, but nobody knew it.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
When they were alive. They didn't have the cognitive deficits
that you would.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Expect because of God.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Yeah, sorry, that's one hypothesis.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
The other one is it's because they lived in convents
till the day they died, and so they had social responsibilities.
They were having, you know, fights and arguments with their
fellow sisters, and they were doing chores, and they were
playing games, and they were singing songs. They were doing
things all the time. And therefore, even as their brain
(22:48):
was physically degenerating with Alzheimer's disease, they were building new
roadways and pathways. And so what this tells us is
that it is just massively important to always challenge the brain.
And by the way, I just want to say for
your listenership, it might be useful. It is so easy
to do this. So one of the things do this tonight.
(23:09):
Brush your teeth with your other hand.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
It's not hard, easy to do.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Drive a different route home from work every day. It's easy.
You take a slightly different route, you see new things,
anything to keep.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Novelty in your life. Just to make sure you're switching
stuff up. It's there. There are a million ways to
do is really important for the brain.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Awesome, right on. So the nineteen seventies key party crowd
had it right. Just continue to switch things up.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
There are probably other consequences. Yes, I was kidding.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
I want to go back to the to the Bay
area of it all. You're a neuroscientist at Stanford, you
live in Silicon Valley. I love that you are a neuroscientist.
In that world, tech giants are obviously in your backyard,
and so I have the rare opportunity to ask you
sort of when you engage in conversations with people who
are at the forefront of leading all of these tech
(24:10):
technological advancements, you have the skill set to not panic
like the rest of us do when you talk about
the impacts of these things on the brain. What do
you talk about and have you found yourself like, is
this also a job? Do you get to work with
these tech companies or are they strictly like podcasts or
(24:30):
academic conversations.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I am a scientific advisor for several you know, probably
a dozen different startups doing things oh cool. I generally
lean optimistic about this stuff because, by the way, the
only companies that advise for ones doing meaningful, amazing stuff.
But there's plenty of ways to do that a lot
(24:53):
of us can really change education for the better.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
In terms of the digital revolution. There was an interview
and correct me if I'm wrong where I think you
said there is a widespread feeling that the digital revolution
has already changed the mechanisms of the mind in fundamental ways,
And I was curious what you meant by that, Is
it that we should be excited that our brains are
moving in a particular direction. Should we be worried? Or
(25:20):
is it what you had mentioned earlier that no matter
what happens, because we're humans and we evolve, our brains
are always going to move in a particular way.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
You know, That's exactly it. As you can see, I
tend to lean optimistic on this.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
One thing that is worth mentioning is this concept of
misinformation or disinformation, which everybody loves to throw around as
though it is.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
A new thing. This is the oldest thing in the book.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
I mean, just look at let's say, the last century,
the twentieth century. You look at Nazism in Germany, or
fascism in Italy, or you look at pol pot in Cambodia,
or you.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Look at the Hutu and the Tutsi in.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Rwanda, or the communist revolutions in China and Russia. What
you see in all of these cases, pre internet, pre
digital revolution is massive polarization, massive misinformation and disinformation, people
taking up arms against their neighbors. I mean, collectively, just
(26:20):
with those things I just mentioned this, hundreds of millions
of murders.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Where we are now.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
We happen to be in a pretty polarized part of
the cycle right now. But boy, there is nothing new
about this sort of thing. But the part that I
find hopeful about the Internet is people can find out,
people can sort through the stuff and figure out, Okay, well,
what do I think given all these different claims.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I totally agree with you that the misinformation disinformation is
nothing new. But what I find deeply concerning is that
the way these social media algorithms work is they continue
to feed you the things you all already agree with
or that you've engaged on. So it's these private companies,
many of which are well documented, run by hard right guys.
(27:10):
And I'll say this independent of what somebody's beliefs are,
because I would say the same if it was run
by somebody who was hard left and maybe a little
more aligned with my politics. I would find it equally
agregious that if the thing that you're getting pushed is
the misinformation that you already agree with, then there's no debate.
So that's kind of the piece of it that it's
not that misinformation is new, but to me and the
(27:32):
people who I talked to about those concerns. Those are
the concerns that people have, is that the mechanism of
that silo being run for profit is equally concerning the
way that it may have been when governments were controlling it.
Do you find that in the work that you do
with these companies? Does it concern them or what's their
view on that?
Speaker 3 (27:53):
I mean, look, the fact is you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
You know, Twitter was left leaning, then became act right leaning,
then blue Sky came along, which is left leaning, and
so on. Nonetheless, on all of those you can always
find the other side. I totally agree that the algorithm
tends to serve up to you what you already believe.
But the Internet in general, and even those platforms in particular,
(28:16):
you can always find other voices and it's not that hard. Again,
this comes back to education. The really important thing for
us to be teaching in schools is how to not
accept the particular story that you are friends or maybe
your online people that you follow are saying, but how
(28:38):
to dig deeper what.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Your pitching I agree with, which is that we should
each independently have the desire to fact check things. And
I would say also to your point that goes beyond
just digital stuff, like when The New York Times says
that Maduro and Mamdani are both socialists, as if they're
both the same type of politician, is like obviously egregious,
(29:00):
and there's a reason they do that because of their
own political slant. But it's up the fact that it's
up to us to actually google that or to look
and research that. I feel like very few of us
would do it because at New York Times or a
source that you might keep getting pushed if you follow
somebody on Twitter that already aligns with you or someone
on Instagram, is they've already built that trust with you.
(29:21):
So the idea that you want to go and find
some other point of view, I may do that because
I'm a nerd, but I can understand how if this
stuff is designed, and I work, you know, I work
in media, so I can say we plenty of the
stuff that we put out there is based on making
you feel good or feel angry right away. Even old school,
you know, nightly news broadcasts are like they keep you
(29:44):
around through the commercials by scaring the shit out of
you on purpose. And there is I promise there's a
neuroscience question here, which is that since so much of
that is based on the I don't know if it's
an actual dopamine hitter. We just colloquially say that it is.
But the thing that makes us feel good like, Okay,
I'm angry at this, and this is somebody who I
agree with, and so this must be the facts. When
(30:06):
I feel that way, I certainly don't immediately think like,
let me go and read the opposing point of view.
So I guess that's my concern. But also the question
of does that affect our brains?
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yes, So again, as we've been discussing, there is nothing
new about it in the sense that in all, you know,
if you lived in Rwanda and the state sponsored media
is saying the Tutsi or cockroaches and doing that kind
of stuff over and over, you could go and research
and see if the Tutsi actually have you know, nice
things about them and so on. But this stuff does
(30:39):
have an effect on us. It's absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
And we are humans.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
But I want to come to this point about things
making us feel good. This is just a little hypothesis
I've been working on on this side. But I definitely
have been feeling lately like the things that attracts people
to one political party or the other, or one speaker
isn't so much it makes me feel good. It actually
has to do with anger towards the other side. That's
(31:07):
the thing that seems to really hook us in to
one side or another. So it wouldn't even colloquially be
the dopamine hit, but it's something deeper. It's like, I
hate those guys so much that then you're willing to
listen to the things on your side and say, yeah,
you know what, maybe the thing that the person is
saying is a little cruel and a little unfair, but
(31:27):
I don't care. I like it anyway because I want
to get at them. So let me pull all these
s threads together. So what I recently patented a new
social media algorithm that I think might be able to
solve some of these points. So here's the whole way
that it works. It's very simple. It's just that people
get connected with each other based on things they have
(31:50):
in common that are not political. So let's just imagine
you and I don't know each other, and but we
both happen to love surfing, we have happened to love
this kind of dog, and we both happen to love
this baseball team and whatever.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
So we get connected.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
You know, your stuff gets surfaced to me and vice versa,
the way that TikTok er Instagram works where you see
lots of strangers and so on. So the idea is
we become pals. We become linked through all these great
things that we have in common, and only later do
we ever find out if there's something that we disagree on.
There's some we're on opposite sides of the aisle, or
(32:28):
we have different opinions about abortion or gun control. Because
the important part is once we've reached a certain connection threshold,
then if I find out, well you're on the left,
I'm on the right, we can listen to each other.
We can lean in and say, okay, you know, I
really want to understand this. The reason I came to
this idea was because of this thing that I'm working
(32:48):
on about complexifying relationships. I actually think this is the
most important thing we can do to reduce polarization. Let
me give you a historical example, which is the Irroqui
Native Americans who live up in sort of you know,
New York Wisconsin area. In the eighteen hundreds, there were
five tribes. They were constantly killing each other. And what
(33:09):
happened is they got a new leader who came in,
this guy Dnagawa, who came to be known as the
Great Peacemaker because what he did is he took the
five tribes and he assigned to each person within the
tribes membership in a clan. So he said, you're a
member of the Elk Klan, you're a member of the
Beaver clan, You're remember the Eagle clan.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And it was cross cutting.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
So I belonged to this tribe, but this other clan,
which other tribes might have that clan member also. So
now you say to me, hey, David, let's go over
the hill and attack that other tribe. And I say, ah, you.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Know what I would.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
But that guy is a member of the Elk Klan
and I'm a member of the Elk Klan, and so
we're kind of connected.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
So what we've got is.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
This cross cutting relationships now and now it's not so
easy to say us versus them. And that's the root
of this social media algorithm is finding all the complexities,
finding for people on opposite sides the aisle, the places
where they do have things in common.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
I love that especially in a world where we are
we're you know, all overuse whatever that adage is, but
we're you know, we're more connected than we've ever been,
but physically so distant that that's a very cool opportunity.
So given all of this, why are our attention spans
getting smaller and smaller? Is it just me? Or is
(34:29):
it an actual thing?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I don't actually know if it is an actual thing,
and I don't know any way to test that. Everyone
asserts that it is, but again, as I mentioned earlier,
there's just there's no way to test it. We don't
have some sort of attention span tests that we can
use through the ages.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
That fascinating. Okay, The reason behind the reason I'm asking
you is so I had a book that came out
in twenty twenty one, and one of the conversations with
not with my editor, but with a couple of people
in the book world was you should think about making
your paragraphs shorter and your chapters shorter, and divide up
a longer chapter into three different parts so that the
(35:10):
reader is more attracted to your book when they thumb
through it before they buy it, and it keeps going
back to people don't have an attention span anymore. So
if there isn't actually a scientific basis for this, I'm
assuming there's a dial Group business basis for this, But
the merger of the two somebody could make bank on
with your background.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Here's the thing. I don't know that there's any change
and attention span, but what there clearly is is more
pulls on our entertainment time. We have so much more
content available to us than we ever did.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
It used to be, I don't know, call it one
hundred years ago. You know, your.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Dad comes home with a book and it's like, wow,
we have thirty books in the house.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Now we have thirty one books. And I'm going to
dive into this.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Why Because there doesn't exist to television, There is no
phone in TikTok and Instagram like that was a thing,
and so you could write a big, thick book with
big long paragraphs.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
What we have now is.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Like infinite channels of well produced stuff that people have
really put effort into. What this means, I mean, Look,
I'm a book author. I've been writing books my whole life,
and I do worry a little bit that I'm like
a cathedral architect in an era where no one's building
cathedrals anymore because writing a five hundred page books, a
(36:34):
book with really deep ideas and thoughts like who's got time?
Speaker 3 (36:38):
And I don't blame them.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
So what this means is is it that we have
a change in our attention span or there's just more
on the table and we're all trying to figure out
how to distribute our time.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
All of which leads me to my last question. You're
a cyber optimist, which is what makes talking to you refreshing?
What makes you optimistic about the future of our brains.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
I think it's everything that we've been talking about, which
is just the amount of input and the instant access
to our curiosity to saying, hey, I want to know this.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Has anyone ever even thought this thought before?
Speaker 2 (37:17):
And then you ask chat GPT and you find out,
Oh my god, there's a whole world to uncover here.
This is the most incredible thing for our brains. And
I know a lot of people are worried that we're
just going to put stuff off to AI and not learn,
But I've found it, for at least for myself, to
be exactly the opposite, which is that you can get
(37:37):
smarter at any topic that you want in a way
that sticks. So this is what I think is so
good for the human brain is just the fact that
we've been able to take all the knowledge, the data,
the scattered facts in the world and compile them in
this way where now you can just ask the question
(37:58):
and get that information and feed the perfect data into
your brain whenever you need it.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
David, thank you so much. This was a real joy
to see you again and to get to talk to
you a little more.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Great you too, Cal Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Next time on Here we Go Again. We're going to
keep digging more into the idea of brain rot, but
with particular ways to combat it. Stay tuned for part
two of our brain rot series with Manush Zamarodi, a
journalist and host of the Ted Radio Hour podcast as
well as author of the books bored and Brilliant and
Body Electric. Manush has done lots of studies to try
(38:34):
to understand the benefits of boredom and movement for our
brain and bodies, things that might, to be honest, counteract
all the rotting. So stay tuned and I'll see you
next week. Here we Go Again as a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media in association with New Metric Media.
Our executive producers are me Calpen, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo,
(38:57):
Alissa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan.
Meghan tan is our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is
our producer and editor. Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino.
Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly,
logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline
Johnson and Meghan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham,
(39:21):
Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but
especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour. Thanks for listening. Everybody,
tell your friends write a review. All of this helps.
I appreciate you listening, and until we go again, I'm
Kelpen
It's been a couple of years since I deleted Twitter
or ex or whatever you want to call it from
my phone, mostly because it had me super bummed out,
like there was nothing good on it anymore. It was
just people yelling and screaming, even though I had all
of the filters up of like no politics on either
side of the aisle, et cetera, et cetera. But what
I realized is that instead I just ended up spending
(00:21):
tons of time watching Instagram reels, Like a lot of
Instagram reels. I'm a little too old to watch TikTok reels.
I just like wait for them to show up on Instagram.
And what I learned from these videos was absolutely nothing nothing.
They're really fun. It's a lot of dog content, a
bunch of good DROPPI jokes, no news, no politics. I
still have those filters up, but I felt like a
(00:43):
bit of a drug pusher because I'm sending these reels
to my friends, wasting hours of their time. I do
know they watch them because they send reels back to me,
but I couldn't help. But wonder, does this mean I'm
getting dumber. It's not just those videos, it's also the
ways in which I'm constantly using my phone in ways
that reduce the necessity of brain function, like using Google
Maps to get to a place that I legitimately do
(01:04):
know how to get to using just my brain. For
all the good that technology has done, is it also
scrambling our brains.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
The circuitry of your brain is reconfiguring every moment of
your life, from cradle to grave. By the time you
are several years old, you're already absorbing everything that all
the Homo sapiens have done before us. And then you
progress and you can springboard off the top of that.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. He's the
author of eight books. His most recent is called Live Wired,
which tells the story of brain plasticity. And he's also
heavily researched the brain's relationship to sensory substitution, time perception, vision,
and synesthesia. And he works with and advises tech companies
(01:53):
in the Silicon Valley, which is why he's here today
to help me understand the concept of brain rot What
is it? And have we been here before?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Here we ad ad A.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Hey, I'm cal Penn and this is here we go again?
A show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks
why does history keep repeating itself? Here we go.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
All right, hey, Cal, how are you doing good?
Speaker 1 (02:37):
How are you?
Speaker 4 (02:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Good to see you. Last time I saw you, I
was in twenty nineteen. I don't know if you remember this,
but I you can't. I'm David Eagleman.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I am a neuroscientist at Stanford and I run a
podcast called Inner Cosmos.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
David, welcome, thanks for coming on the show. Great to
see you again, Cal, So, I was excited.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
To talk to you.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
We did do this documentary. I couldn't re remember the location,
but twenty nineteen, right before COVID in Palo Alto, this
docu series called This Giant Beast that is the Global Economy,
which is still on Amazon. It's a limited series. So
I couldn't remember if we did that in Palo Alto,
in Cyprus or in Germany, because we shot this show
(03:20):
I think in like twenty three different locations around the world.
And this is now relevant to our conversation here because
the fact that I couldn't even remember that I had
always chalked up to just like, oh, it was pre
COVID and we you know, we were in twenty three
different locations. But since we're here to sort of talk
about brain rot, I was like, is that the reason
or is it just that I'm like living life through
my fucking screen that my brain is slowly decaying. But
(03:43):
before we get into all that, just tell us quickly
about yourself. Where were you born. Did you come from
a family of scientists?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Actually so, I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My
father was a psychiatrist and my mother was a biology teacher,
and so I thought that was the last thing I
was going to do. But neuroscience ended up being this
real gravitational pull for me, and I ended up there.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
What's the gravitational poll? Did you have like a first
memory of it of wanting to do it?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Well?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
You know, the truth is, when I was a kid,
I fell off of a roof and I broke my
nose very badly on the floor below, and the whole
event seemed to have gone in slow motion.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
It seemed to have taken a very long time to fall.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And when I got to high school physics and I
calculated it, it turns out it's zero point six of
a second to get from the top of the roof
to the bottom, and I.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Was really I was really interested in that.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
How had it seemed to have lasted such a long
time even though it didn't. And it turns out when
I grew up and became a neuroscientist, no one had
ever done an experiment on that, and so I ended
up running what remains the only experiments of putting people
in life threatening situations and measuring what's going on with
time perception. There the one sentence punchline of all this
(05:01):
is that it has to do with when you're in
a life threaning situation, your brain writes down everything, as
in your writing down all these memories, and therefore when you.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Read it back out, when you say what just happened?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
What just happened, it seems to have taken a long time,
because you've got such detailed memories, like when people get
in car accidents and they say, look, I watched the
hood crumple and the rear view mirror fall off and
the facial expression of the other guy, and so your
brain says, well, that must have taken several seconds, even
though it was shorter. But anyway, all of these things
(05:34):
are part of what got me into neuroscience. Plus, I
grew up watching Carl Sagan on PBS, and I know
you also are a Sagan lover, and you know it
was so influential on me. It turned me onto the
beauty of science, and I thought, someday, I'm going to
do that.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
When your brain does that and registers everything, is there
a chemical that's released that allows it to happen? Why
does that happen chemically or by whatever the word is.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, it's not a chemical.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
It's because of You've got essentially an emergency control center
in the brain called the amygdala, which says, WHOA, everything
is hitting the fan, everybody pay attention. So normally your
brain is doing fifty things. You're thinking about what you're
geting for lunch and how you have this deadline and
blah blah. But when something that, when something salient, is happening,
(06:26):
your brain recruits everything to pay attention to what's going on.
And part of that paying attention has to do with
writing everything down, which.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Is actually a great transition to this idea of brain
rot and I think about it the most. Into two scenarios. One,
so I'm a New Yorker and I have been for
quite some time, and I remember I still prefer a
physical book to bring with me instead of reading on
(06:56):
a screen. But I've noticed that over you, over like
a decade and a half, people have gone from reading
a physical book to reading a kindle to just like
scrolling through videos or playing games on their phones on
the subway. And also then just the idea that you're
in a public park or a place that used to
be for conversation and more human to human interaction, and
(07:19):
half the people are sort of on their phones or
taking pictures of their hot dog before they eat it
and things like that. And so I guess my question is,
as somebody who studies neuroscience, is there a fear that
these things will change our short term perception? Does it
change our ability to focus? Or am I just now
old and think that these are real things that we
(07:41):
actually shouldn't worry about.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, here's what I would say.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I think it's much more nuanced than many people take.
And one thing I love about this podcast that you're
doing is then it really asks the question of which
things are new and which things are all The fact
is that people not paying much attention nothing new about that.
We're probably about the same age you know, if you
can remember back to when people would take airplane flights,
(08:07):
they'd play solitaire all the time. Now they play solitaire
on their phone. But it's not meaningfully different. I think
that people did plenty of things to just waste time.
So what I see is the big differences is we
have much more choice now than we did. So when
you're scrolling TikTok or Instagram, you can swipe if something
(08:30):
isn't holding your attention.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
There are pros and cons to that.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
The pro of course, being that there's just there's a
lot of wonderfully produced stuff out there, and you can
find the stuff that maximally floats your boat instead of
having to sit through along, you know, watching The Brady
Bunch or Gilligan's Island or something and thinking, okay, well
that's the only choice that I have, and so I'm
just going to do that. Whether this affects attention span,
(09:00):
I don't know. We all sort of share that intuition.
But it's very difficult to test these things because in fact,
it's impossible to test these things. Here's why there's no
control group that you can find. So let's imagine you
took kids growing up now and you said, hey, we
want to know if their attention is, you know, better
or worse than people who came a generation before. The
(09:22):
problem is there were one hundred other differences the generation before,
you know, differences in politics and diet and pollution and
every I mean, there's just a culture is different, and
so you wouldn't be able to say, oh, it's because
of the Internet if you do find a difference, and
you can't find a control group within their generation, because
all kids are growing up with the Internet, except for
(09:45):
let's say Amish kids or kids somewhere in the world
who are incredibly impoverished, and there are one hundred other
differences between those groups, and so you wouldn't be able
to find something and say, oh, it's because of the
Internet that they have this. Here's the thing, Because of
what's called brain plasticity.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
We are wired up by our.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Culture, by our moment in time, by our neighborhood, by
everything going on around us. And so it is the
case that the brain is influenced by all the inputs
that we're putting in. So that tells us that when
we put in different inputs, we're going to get different outputs.
It's just very difficult to know exactly how that is.
And by the way, every generation has differences in that
(10:29):
depending on whether there's a war going on, or the
radio gets invented, or the steam engine gets invented, or
whatever the printing press suddenly allows the proliferation of books.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
All these things change generations along the way.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
What interests me is how each generation thinks that the
kids are now going to be worse off in some way.
One example that I recently came across is I hadn't
realized this, but when the printing press was invented in
fourteen forty, immediately people started saying, look, this is a
real problem.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
The kids of the next generation are going to be morons.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Why because as soon as they want to know the answer,
it's right there. They just pull the book off the
shelf and there's the answer, and they're not going to
memorize things, they're not going to understand things anymore. They're
just gonna find it right there. So what we see
from that is, in fact, we all became much smarter
as a civilization because of the availability of information. And
(11:24):
I think the same thing happened thirty years ago with
Google the Internet. More generally, everyone said, look, these kids
are going to become morons because if you ask them
what's the capital of France, they'll.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Just google it.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
But in fact, the availability of information has made the
whole society smarter. And you know, I run into thirteen
year old kids all the time who say something really
smart and I say, wow, how did you know that?
And they say, oh, I saw it on a Ted
talk or you know, I just looked this up. And
now we've got chat GPT, and again, I think this
(12:00):
is going to make kids even smarter. I'll tell you
why I'm saying this, because back in the day, when
we were in school, we got a lot of just
in case information, like just in case you ever need
to know that the Battle of Hastings was in ten
sixty six, there you go, and then we're testing on
that stuff and so on. But what kids get now
(12:22):
is just in time information. As soon as they are
curious about a subject, they get the answer right then.
And that makes an enormous difference from a brain plasticity
point of view, because when you are curious about something,
you have the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present so that
the change actually sticks. So if you say, hey, how
(12:45):
do I fix this bicycle tire? Or what's the answer
about you know, venus and the temperature or whatever. All
of this stuff sticks if you're the one asking the question.
And so I think it's going to be a massive
opportunity for education, and I'm quite sure that our children
(13:06):
and grandchildren will be smarter than we are.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So how do you then, as a how do you
respond to the lay person who says, well, why are
we getting dumber and dumber?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Here's what I would say is, look at a graph
of human history. So we invented agriculture many thousands of
years ago, that we you know, and there was the
invention of writing thousands of years ago, and then stuff
moved along pretty slowly for a long time. And what's
happened is essentially, ever since the industrial revolution, the pace
(13:40):
of discovery has gone up, and now we are on
this part of the curve that is so steep it
you know, you look at it, and so it looks
vertical because everyone is getting an education, or at least
has the opportunity for education. So now instead of having
a few people on the planet who are educated and
(14:02):
making the wark happen, you've got almost eight billion brains
who have access to information, and the pace of discovery
has outstripped anything that we've ever seen. I mean in
my field of neuroscience, and this is true across scientific fields.
Most of what we know has been discovered in the
(14:24):
last five or ten years.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
I mean, the.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Huge majority of the data that we're sitting on, the
new theories, the new everything, it's all happening right now.
It's the most exciting time to have ever been alive.
The pace of what's going on is so incredible that
it would be very hard for me to accept any
(14:46):
argument that somehow, as a species, we are getting dumber.
And I understand that what I've just been talking about
is people who are making these discoveries. And somebody might
counter argue, yeah, but the average person is getting dumb,
But I don't think so. Because now the average person
has access.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
They don't have to.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Get over the momentum of driving over to the library
and finding a book and seeing if they can find
out about something. They can find out about stuff right away.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
You touched on this idea of neuroplasticity. You wrote a
book called Live Wired about the neuroplasticity of our brain.
Can you explain what live wired means where it comes from.
And then how does neuroplasticity of our brain speak to
this notion colloquially of brain rot if it does at all.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yes, So neuroplasticity just means that the circuitry of your
brain is reconfiguring every moment of your life, from cradle
to grave. And so this is what is special about brains,
and human brains in particular, we have more plasticity than
any other species. So what Mother Nature figured out was, hey,
if I drop these creatures into the world half ached,
(16:01):
they will absorb the rest from everything happening around them.
And what that has led for us as a species
is that by the time you, you know, are several
years old, eight years old, whatever, you're already absorbing essentially
everything that all the Homo sapiens have done before us.
And then you know, you progress and you can springboard
(16:23):
off the top of that. Contrast this with let's say
an alligator, who you know, an alligator born thirty thousand
years ago and born now.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
They have the same life.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
They have certain neural circuits that just say okay, eat,
may swim whatever, And there's no difference with alligator culture.
But with human culture. We just keep getting better every
single generation, precisely because we are able to absorb the
lessons that people have figured out before us. So this
is what has allowed us to build skyscrapers and compose
(16:57):
symphonies and invent the Internet and get off of the planet.
I call that live wiring, but it's the same idea.
It's that every one of your eighty six billion neurons,
these are the specialized kind of brain cells. Every one
of these your whole life, they're plugging and unplugging and
seeking and replugging, and it's like if you can imagine
a circuit.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Board that's actually alive and moving around.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
So what does this mean for brain rot Again, Unfortunately,
I think it's really difficult to know because people have
always pursued goofy ways of wasting time, whether that is
card games, are watching Gilligan's Island or whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
People have always done that.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And there's a lot of retrospective romanticization where we say, oh,
when I was a kid, you know, we did this
and that, and we you know, we read Plato and
discussed this at the dinner table, and it's generally not true.
I mean, obviously that happened in some families, but not
in most.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
You know, when I think about younger people, the fact
that research you can just do on chetch apt like
you mentioned obviously, the the benefits of like getting an
answer right now, hoping it's accurate. You don't know for sure,
but generally the framework of something is there. That's obviously
a plus. The downside of that is, I just remember
because I had to look things up, whether it was
(18:14):
on an early early form of the internet or physically
going to the library and reading long articles with a highlighter.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Is that to me?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
It taught me both patients and critical thinking skills because
you had to sit with the information a lot longer
than if you're just immediately typing it in getting the
answer and moving on with your life. You had mentioned
analog solitaire versus playing it on your phone on a plane,
for example. Is there a difference between how screen time,
(18:42):
let's say, scrolling on social media affects the brain versus
let's say that same thirty minute period you listened to
an audiobook or a podcast like yours. Is there a
difference there?
Speaker 3 (18:56):
You know, that's a good question.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
The initial studies that we have right now don't seem
to indicate one. For example, my colleagues at Berkeley did
a study where they looked at what if you read
a book versus listen to an audio book, and they
found no difference in the brain. Now, I actually found
this not surprising, and I'll tell you why. It's because,
let's add a third group. Even though they weren't looking
at this. People who are blind read with braille, so
(19:21):
they're touching bumps with their fingertips. They're reading, let's say,
the same book. All the brain is doing in any
of these cases, whether you're taking it in through your
eyes or your ears or your fingertips, your brain is
translating that into meaning, as in, oh, this character just
said this, and what did she mean by that? And oh,
what's this next character going to do?
Speaker 3 (19:41):
And so on.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
When you're reading a book, your brain doesn't care whether
it's coming in through squiggles that you're getting through photons
through your eyes, or air compression waves through your ears,
or bumps on your fingertips, because all it cares about
is okay, fine, how do I translate this into social meaning?
And that's why I think it just doesn't make a difference.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So then the follow up to that is, I guess relatedly,
does the type of content make a difference? So, for instance,
is there a difference between watching a Wes Anderson movie
versus Planet Earth or a reality TV show like Real Housewives?
Is any of that valued differently by your brain? Does
(20:27):
it impact your brain in different ways?
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Aka?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
How should we be spending our time?
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Yeah? Great question. The truth is that what we always
want to be doing.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
With our brain is expanding the fence lines of our
internal models. So let me explain internal models. Your brain
is locked in silence and darkness, and it's trying to
build a model of what the world is. And we
all have different internal models because we've had different trajectories
through space and time, so we all have these, you know,
(21:02):
slightly different models. But what you really want to do,
from the point of view of brain plasticity is constantly
expand that often, you know, challenging that. One way to
do it is to watch things that are really meaningful,
things that are surprising and meaningful. And you've never seen
a documentary on this. You had no idea that animals
(21:24):
could do this or that people have done that.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
That's definitely matters.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
If somebody watches Real Housewives of course it's compelling because
it plugs right into these very basic things about, oh,
there's conflict, there's drama, and so on, but you're not
expanding your brain in any meaningful way. And I'll just
mention that for people who retire, the most important thing
you can do for your brain is to keep it challenged.
(21:51):
I'll just mention, because I think this is really important.
There's a study that's been ongoing for a few decades
now where a bunch of nuns, Catholic nuns, agreed to
donate their brains when they passed away. So for years,
the researchers, when the nuns passed away, they autopsy the
brain and they look at what's going on. And what
they discovered is that some fraction of these nuns had
(22:14):
Alzheimer's disease, but nobody knew it.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
When they were alive. They didn't have the cognitive deficits
that you would.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Expect because of God.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Yeah, sorry, that's one hypothesis.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
The other one is it's because they lived in convents
till the day they died, and so they had social responsibilities.
They were having, you know, fights and arguments with their
fellow sisters, and they were doing chores, and they were
playing games, and they were singing songs. They were doing
things all the time. And therefore, even as their brain
(22:48):
was physically degenerating with Alzheimer's disease, they were building new
roadways and pathways. And so what this tells us is
that it is just massively important to always challenge the brain.
And by the way, I just want to say for
your listenership, it might be useful. It is so easy
to do this. So one of the things do this tonight.
(23:09):
Brush your teeth with your other hand.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
It's not hard, easy to do.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Drive a different route home from work every day. It's easy.
You take a slightly different route, you see new things,
anything to keep.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Novelty in your life. Just to make sure you're switching
stuff up. It's there. There are a million ways to
do is really important for the brain.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Awesome, right on. So the nineteen seventies key party crowd
had it right. Just continue to switch things up.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
There are probably other consequences. Yes, I was kidding.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
I want to go back to the to the Bay
area of it all. You're a neuroscientist at Stanford, you
live in Silicon Valley. I love that you are a neuroscientist.
In that world, tech giants are obviously in your backyard,
and so I have the rare opportunity to ask you
sort of when you engage in conversations with people who
are at the forefront of leading all of these tech
(24:10):
technological advancements, you have the skill set to not panic
like the rest of us do when you talk about
the impacts of these things on the brain. What do
you talk about and have you found yourself like, is
this also a job? Do you get to work with
these tech companies or are they strictly like podcasts or
(24:30):
academic conversations.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I am a scientific advisor for several you know, probably
a dozen different startups doing things oh cool. I generally
lean optimistic about this stuff because, by the way, the
only companies that advise for ones doing meaningful, amazing stuff.
But there's plenty of ways to do that a lot
(24:53):
of us can really change education for the better.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
In terms of the digital revolution. There was an interview
and correct me if I'm wrong where I think you
said there is a widespread feeling that the digital revolution
has already changed the mechanisms of the mind in fundamental ways,
And I was curious what you meant by that, Is
it that we should be excited that our brains are
moving in a particular direction. Should we be worried? Or
(25:20):
is it what you had mentioned earlier that no matter
what happens, because we're humans and we evolve, our brains
are always going to move in a particular way.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
You know, That's exactly it. As you can see, I
tend to lean optimistic on this.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
One thing that is worth mentioning is this concept of
misinformation or disinformation, which everybody loves to throw around as
though it is.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
A new thing. This is the oldest thing in the book.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
I mean, just look at let's say, the last century,
the twentieth century. You look at Nazism in Germany, or
fascism in Italy, or you look at pol pot in Cambodia,
or you.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Look at the Hutu and the Tutsi in.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Rwanda, or the communist revolutions in China and Russia. What
you see in all of these cases, pre internet, pre
digital revolution is massive polarization, massive misinformation and disinformation, people
taking up arms against their neighbors. I mean, collectively, just
(26:20):
with those things I just mentioned this, hundreds of millions
of murders.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Where we are now.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
We happen to be in a pretty polarized part of
the cycle right now. But boy, there is nothing new
about this sort of thing. But the part that I
find hopeful about the Internet is people can find out,
people can sort through the stuff and figure out, Okay, well,
what do I think given all these different claims.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I totally agree with you that the misinformation disinformation is
nothing new. But what I find deeply concerning is that
the way these social media algorithms work is they continue
to feed you the things you all already agree with
or that you've engaged on. So it's these private companies,
many of which are well documented, run by hard right guys.
(27:10):
And I'll say this independent of what somebody's beliefs are,
because I would say the same if it was run
by somebody who was hard left and maybe a little
more aligned with my politics. I would find it equally
agregious that if the thing that you're getting pushed is
the misinformation that you already agree with, then there's no debate.
So that's kind of the piece of it that it's
not that misinformation is new, but to me and the
(27:32):
people who I talked to about those concerns. Those are
the concerns that people have, is that the mechanism of
that silo being run for profit is equally concerning the
way that it may have been when governments were controlling it.
Do you find that in the work that you do
with these companies? Does it concern them or what's their
view on that?
Speaker 3 (27:53):
I mean, look, the fact is you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
You know, Twitter was left leaning, then became act right leaning,
then blue Sky came along, which is left leaning, and
so on. Nonetheless, on all of those you can always
find the other side. I totally agree that the algorithm
tends to serve up to you what you already believe.
But the Internet in general, and even those platforms in particular,
(28:16):
you can always find other voices and it's not that hard. Again,
this comes back to education. The really important thing for
us to be teaching in schools is how to not
accept the particular story that you are friends or maybe
your online people that you follow are saying, but how
(28:38):
to dig deeper what.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Your pitching I agree with, which is that we should
each independently have the desire to fact check things. And
I would say also to your point that goes beyond
just digital stuff, like when The New York Times says
that Maduro and Mamdani are both socialists, as if they're
both the same type of politician, is like obviously egregious,
(29:00):
and there's a reason they do that because of their
own political slant. But it's up the fact that it's
up to us to actually google that or to look
and research that. I feel like very few of us
would do it because at New York Times or a
source that you might keep getting pushed if you follow
somebody on Twitter that already aligns with you or someone
on Instagram, is they've already built that trust with you.
(29:21):
So the idea that you want to go and find
some other point of view, I may do that because
I'm a nerd, but I can understand how if this
stuff is designed, and I work, you know, I work
in media, so I can say we plenty of the
stuff that we put out there is based on making
you feel good or feel angry right away. Even old school,
you know, nightly news broadcasts are like they keep you
(29:44):
around through the commercials by scaring the shit out of
you on purpose. And there is I promise there's a
neuroscience question here, which is that since so much of
that is based on the I don't know if it's
an actual dopamine hitter. We just colloquially say that it is.
But the thing that makes us feel good like, Okay,
I'm angry at this, and this is somebody who I
agree with, and so this must be the facts. When
(30:06):
I feel that way, I certainly don't immediately think like,
let me go and read the opposing point of view.
So I guess that's my concern. But also the question
of does that affect our brains?
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yes, So again, as we've been discussing, there is nothing
new about it in the sense that in all, you know,
if you lived in Rwanda and the state sponsored media
is saying the Tutsi or cockroaches and doing that kind
of stuff over and over, you could go and research
and see if the Tutsi actually have you know, nice
things about them and so on. But this stuff does
(30:39):
have an effect on us. It's absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
And we are humans.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
But I want to come to this point about things
making us feel good. This is just a little hypothesis
I've been working on on this side. But I definitely
have been feeling lately like the things that attracts people
to one political party or the other, or one speaker
isn't so much it makes me feel good. It actually
has to do with anger towards the other side. That's
(31:07):
the thing that seems to really hook us in to
one side or another. So it wouldn't even colloquially be
the dopamine hit, but it's something deeper. It's like, I
hate those guys so much that then you're willing to
listen to the things on your side and say, yeah,
you know what, maybe the thing that the person is
saying is a little cruel and a little unfair, but
(31:27):
I don't care. I like it anyway because I want
to get at them. So let me pull all these
s threads together. So what I recently patented a new
social media algorithm that I think might be able to
solve some of these points. So here's the whole way
that it works. It's very simple. It's just that people
get connected with each other based on things they have
(31:50):
in common that are not political. So let's just imagine
you and I don't know each other, and but we
both happen to love surfing, we have happened to love
this kind of dog, and we both happen to love
this baseball team and whatever.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
So we get connected.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
You know, your stuff gets surfaced to me and vice versa,
the way that TikTok er Instagram works where you see
lots of strangers and so on. So the idea is
we become pals. We become linked through all these great
things that we have in common, and only later do
we ever find out if there's something that we disagree on.
There's some we're on opposite sides of the aisle, or
(32:28):
we have different opinions about abortion or gun control. Because
the important part is once we've reached a certain connection threshold,
then if I find out, well you're on the left,
I'm on the right, we can listen to each other.
We can lean in and say, okay, you know, I
really want to understand this. The reason I came to
this idea was because of this thing that I'm working
(32:48):
on about complexifying relationships. I actually think this is the
most important thing we can do to reduce polarization. Let
me give you a historical example, which is the Irroqui
Native Americans who live up in sort of you know,
New York Wisconsin area. In the eighteen hundreds, there were
five tribes. They were constantly killing each other. And what
(33:09):
happened is they got a new leader who came in,
this guy Dnagawa, who came to be known as the
Great Peacemaker because what he did is he took the
five tribes and he assigned to each person within the
tribes membership in a clan. So he said, you're a
member of the Elk Klan, you're a member of the
Beaver clan, You're remember the Eagle clan.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And it was cross cutting.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
So I belonged to this tribe, but this other clan,
which other tribes might have that clan member also. So
now you say to me, hey, David, let's go over
the hill and attack that other tribe. And I say, ah, you.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Know what I would.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
But that guy is a member of the Elk Klan
and I'm a member of the Elk Klan, and so
we're kind of connected.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
So what we've got is.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
This cross cutting relationships now and now it's not so
easy to say us versus them. And that's the root
of this social media algorithm is finding all the complexities,
finding for people on opposite sides the aisle, the places
where they do have things in common.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
I love that especially in a world where we are
we're you know, all overuse whatever that adage is, but
we're you know, we're more connected than we've ever been,
but physically so distant that that's a very cool opportunity.
So given all of this, why are our attention spans
getting smaller and smaller? Is it just me? Or is
(34:29):
it an actual thing?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I don't actually know if it is an actual thing,
and I don't know any way to test that. Everyone
asserts that it is, but again, as I mentioned earlier,
there's just there's no way to test it. We don't
have some sort of attention span tests that we can
use through the ages.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
That fascinating. Okay, The reason behind the reason I'm asking
you is so I had a book that came out
in twenty twenty one, and one of the conversations with
not with my editor, but with a couple of people
in the book world was you should think about making
your paragraphs shorter and your chapters shorter, and divide up
a longer chapter into three different parts so that the
(35:10):
reader is more attracted to your book when they thumb
through it before they buy it, and it keeps going
back to people don't have an attention span anymore. So
if there isn't actually a scientific basis for this, I'm
assuming there's a dial Group business basis for this, But
the merger of the two somebody could make bank on
with your background.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Here's the thing. I don't know that there's any change
and attention span, but what there clearly is is more
pulls on our entertainment time. We have so much more
content available to us than we ever did.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
It used to be, I don't know, call it one
hundred years ago. You know, your.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Dad comes home with a book and it's like, wow,
we have thirty books in the house.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Now we have thirty one books. And I'm going to
dive into this.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Why Because there doesn't exist to television, There is no
phone in TikTok and Instagram like that was a thing,
and so you could write a big, thick book with
big long paragraphs.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
What we have now is.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Like infinite channels of well produced stuff that people have
really put effort into. What this means, I mean, Look,
I'm a book author. I've been writing books my whole life,
and I do worry a little bit that I'm like
a cathedral architect in an era where no one's building
cathedrals anymore because writing a five hundred page books, a
(36:34):
book with really deep ideas and thoughts like who's got time?
Speaker 3 (36:38):
And I don't blame them.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
So what this means is is it that we have
a change in our attention span or there's just more
on the table and we're all trying to figure out
how to distribute our time.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
All of which leads me to my last question. You're
a cyber optimist, which is what makes talking to you refreshing?
What makes you optimistic about the future of our brains.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
I think it's everything that we've been talking about, which
is just the amount of input and the instant access
to our curiosity to saying, hey, I want to know this.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Has anyone ever even thought this thought before?
Speaker 2 (37:17):
And then you ask chat GPT and you find out,
Oh my god, there's a whole world to uncover here.
This is the most incredible thing for our brains. And
I know a lot of people are worried that we're
just going to put stuff off to AI and not learn,
But I've found it, for at least for myself, to
be exactly the opposite, which is that you can get
(37:37):
smarter at any topic that you want in a way
that sticks. So this is what I think is so
good for the human brain is just the fact that
we've been able to take all the knowledge, the data,
the scattered facts in the world and compile them in
this way where now you can just ask the question
(37:58):
and get that information and feed the perfect data into
your brain whenever you need it.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
David, thank you so much. This was a real joy
to see you again and to get to talk to
you a little more.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Great you too, Cal Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Next time on Here we Go Again. We're going to
keep digging more into the idea of brain rot, but
with particular ways to combat it. Stay tuned for part
two of our brain rot series with Manush Zamarodi, a
journalist and host of the Ted Radio Hour podcast as
well as author of the books bored and Brilliant and
Body Electric. Manush has done lots of studies to try
(38:34):
to understand the benefits of boredom and movement for our
brain and bodies, things that might, to be honest, counteract
all the rotting. So stay tuned and I'll see you
next week. Here we Go Again as a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media in association with New Metric Media.
Our executive producers are me Calpen, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo,
(38:57):
Alissa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan.
Meghan tan is our producer and writer. Dave Shumka is
our producer and editor. Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino.
Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly,
logo by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline
Johnson and Meghan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham,
(39:21):
Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but
especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etour. Thanks for listening. Everybody,
tell your friends write a review. All of this helps.
I appreciate you listening, and until we go again, I'm
Kelpen
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