June 1, 2020 • 30 mins
The world is full of people and things that can make you happy, but you have to notice them to get the full effect. Smartphones are technological marvels, but the hold they have over our limited attention is causing us to miss out on more than we realize.
Dr Laurie Santos finds that even having a phone nearby can reduce how happy you feel. Laurie chats with Catherine Price, a science journalist, founder of ScreenLifeBalance.com and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone.
For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm or visit screenlifebalance.com, the website for guest Catherine Price.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. One of the greatest lies our minds tell us
is that we're soaking up everything we see in here.
But that's simply not true. Our ability to pay attention
to the world around us is much more limited than
we think. We're missing out on way more than we realize. Okay,
(00:39):
thank you again for helping me into the study. X.
So you're going to be doing a classic experiment in
psychology where you're going to be counting the number of
basketball passes. I'm testing some of the students in my
residential college at Yale on an experiment that's now become
famous in the history of modern psychology. There's a decent
chance you may have taken a version of it yourself.
So there's gonna be six players, three people on the
(01:00):
white team and three people on a black team, and
your task is you have to count the number of
passes that the people on the white team. Make makes sense, Yeah, okay, one, two, three, four.
Since the teams are chriss crossing and the two balls
are constantly moving, there's a lot to keep track of.
Even so, most students are able to count the passes
(01:22):
pretty accurately. Fourteen fifteen, awesome, that's correct. But counting the
number of passes isn't really the point of the study.
Did you also notice anything else that was weird in
the video? I don't think so. Did you happen to
see a big grilla walk into the scene? No, no,
(01:43):
no way, I'll replay it again. Something very unexpected happens
in the middle of this video. A large man in
a guerrilla suit walks in and beats his chest. Now,
even though the gorilla walks right through the middle of
the frame, many people simply report not seeing it. Did
you see a huge grilla walk in the middle of
(02:04):
the pass? In fact, when researchers Dan Simon and Chris
Shabri originally ran the study, more than half of the
subjects failed to spot something right in front of their eyes.
O God, I you believe Simon's and Shabri christen this
phenomenon inattentional blindness, we're actually blind to anything we're not
(02:26):
actively paying attention to. When you focus on the people
passing the ball, you're simply unable to see a huge
gorilla even when you're looking right at it. Our minds
make us believe that we see everything we look at,
but that's just not true and the things we don't
notice matter for our happiness more than we think. Our
(02:48):
minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness
Lab with doctor Laurie Sanders. I guess the joy of
(03:13):
doing science is when we discover things that are like,
really surprising and counterintuitive about how our own minds work.
And you're more likely to be surprised about processes in
the mind that we don't have conscious access to. This
is my colleague Brian Schell. He's a professor of psychology
and cognitive science here at Yale. Brian studies the surprising
(03:34):
limits of our attentional abilities. There's just way too much
information coming in through our eyes at any given moment
to fully process even most of it, much less all
of it. We assume that the mere act of looking
at something means we'll be able to perceive it. That say,
if I'm looking at a computer screen, I'll naturally be
able to see all the stuff that happens on the screen.
(03:56):
But one of the most shocking discoveries of this research
is that that is not true. That in some cases,
you can completely fail to be consciously aware of something
that's right in front of you if you are not
paying attention to it. And Brian's work on an attentional
blindness has shown that we're missing gorillas all over the place.
His lab uses a slightly different version of the gorilla experiment.
(04:17):
Instead of basketball players, Brian has people track a group
of black and white circles and squares moving across a
computer screen. The gorilla in this case is just a
bright red cross. And so this bright red cross has
a completely different color, a completely different shape, a completely
different type of motion trajectory, and it literally passes across
the entire screen and moves right in front of your eyes.
(04:39):
But despite the fact that the red cross is totally
different from the other shapes, around thirty percent of people
failed to see it, even when they're looking directly at
the screen. Our window on the world is only that
which we attend to, and that is just a brute
fact of human nature. We all have things that make
us happy in life. A delicious meal, a sunny spring day,
(05:01):
rain drops on roses, whiskers on kittens. I mean, there's
lots of good stuff out there, but the limits of
our attention mean that our favorite thing can only influence
our mood if we notice them. I mean, when was
the last time you took a second to look up
at the blue sky and the trees, or really stop
to pay attention to your partner's smile, or notice the
warmth of your coffee cup. Research shows that all these
(05:25):
little times were not paying attention can have a big
impact on our well being. Psychologist Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel
Gilbert showed this in a clever study. They had their
subjects download an app that contacted them at random times
and ask three questions, what are you doing right now?
Are you paying attention to what you're doing? And third,
how are you feeling? They found that what people were
(05:47):
doing only had a small impact on what they were feeling.
What really mattered was whether people were paying attention. And
that's important. If we want to fully enjoy all the
good things in life, we actually have to notice them.
We need to make sure we're saving some of our
limited attention for the stuff that really matters. But if
we really want to use our attention to become happier,
(06:09):
there's something else we need to come to terms with,
and that's that it's really, really hard to recognize just
how bad our attention is. And that's because we tend
not to notice what we're not noticing. Philosophers sometimes call
this the refrigerator light illusion. The idea is, how would
you know if the light in your refrigerator is off
when the door is not open. Everybody has intuitions that
(06:32):
tell them that, of course, if a gorilla walked in
front of me, I would notice it. But those intuitions
are wrong. And if our brains are wrong about seeing
a huge gorilla walking directly across a screen, imagine all
the less salient, feel good gorillas we don't realize we're
missing on a daily basis, all the smiles we don't notice,
or the taste of a yummy lunch we didn't realize
we ignored because something else grabbed our attention. But these
(06:56):
days it's not just our limited minds that are causing
the problem. We've also added something else to our daily
routine that makes our usually bad attention much much worse.
Welcome that world. It's two thousand. Thank you for coming.
An Apple CEO, Steve Jobs is addressing the crowd at
the Macworld convention. We're going to make some history together today.
(07:16):
He pauses and takes a sip of water. He seems
to be psyching himself up for something important. Every once
in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Well,
today we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class, an iPod,
(07:41):
a phone, and an Internet communicator. Are you getting it?
These are not three separate devices. This is one device.
Apple didn't just reinvent the phone that day. Their innovation
(08:02):
was an attentional game changer, one that's brought a host
of changes to all of our lives, ones that even
Steve Jobs couldn't foresee. Take, for example, one seemingly irrelevant
economic indicator, chewing gum purchases. Since the iPhone came out,
chewing gum sales have dropped by double digits. Now, you
might think that this could be for a couple of reasons,
(08:23):
like maybe people are turning to breathmans or something. So
what's going on? Well, some scholars have argued that the
shift in purchasing behavior reflects less of a change in
our preferences and more of a change in our behavior,
specifically how we're spending our time in the spot we'd
normally be buying gum the checkout line, and that's where
Steve Jobs comes in. We're no longer tempted by all
(08:45):
those impulse buys because we simply don't see them anymore.
One study found that sixty two percent of people pulled
out a device while waiting in line, and more than
eighty percent of those people whip that device out in
less than twenty seconds. With our eyeball stuck to our screens,
we simply don't notice the other tempting stuff in the
checkout aisle. But could our phones be causing us to
(09:07):
miss stuff that's even more important than a pack of gum.
Brian used his Red Cross study to find out. So,
with a bunch of undergrads here a Yale, we repeated
this experiment, but we had half of the subject's talk
on a cell phone, and it was wonderfully awkward. We
just told them to talk to the research assistant on
the other end of the line and you know, find
(09:28):
out who they are, what their interests are, etc. But
we told them point blank, look don't let talking on
a cell phone impact your performance on this tracking task.
Brian found that subjects did fine. People were just as
good at tracking the movement of the white and black
shapes when they talked on the phone as when there
was no phone in sight. But of course that's not
what we were interested in. What we really cared about
(09:51):
is how many of them noticed this red cross our
gorilla in this case, so when they were not talking
on a cell phone, seventy percent of people saw the
red cross. About thirty percent of people were inattentionally blind.
With exactly the same displays. When they were talking on
the cell phone and trying not to let it affect
their performance, ninety percent of people missed the red cross.
(10:15):
Only ten percent of people saw it. Brian found that
using a cell phone dramatically increases the rate of an
attentional blindness. I mean, his subjects miss ninety percent of
the gorillas that cross their paths. Nine With over three
billion smartphones and pockets all over the world, just think
of all the things that are going unnoticed. When we
(10:37):
get back from the break, we'll talk more about all
the unforeseen consequences of these missed guerrillas. Because even though
we don't notice the effect our phones are having on
our attention, these missed moments might matter for our happiness
more than we think phones are useful, you know, ironically,
because of that value, they also provide a very, very
potent source of distraction that I do think vastly exceeds
(11:00):
anything else that we've ever seen in human history. The
Happiness Lab will be right back. About ninety five percent
of people report having used their smartphone during their most
(11:20):
recent social gathering. Perhaps more surprisingly, about ten percent of
people report having used their smartphone at least once during sex.
So these devices seem to really penetrate a broad array
of social interactions. I'm talking to Liz Done, longtime friend
of the Happiness Lab and professor of psychology at the
University of British Columbia. When smartphones first started appearing in
(11:44):
everybody's hands, I got curious about how they were influencing
the benefits that we get out of everyday social interactions. Now,
you might think Liz started her studies with all the
really egregious cases of phones messing with social interactions. Well,
my college students at Yale sometimes call fubbing the idea
of fubbing. The combination of like snubbing and phone is
(12:07):
that you are not paying attention to the other people
around you, and maybe in a way that feels sort
of hurtful and upsetting to them because you are paying
attention to your phone. But Liz is actually more worried
about all the less hurtful ways we use our phone.
She was concerned about what the mere act of having
your phone around does to your attention, like when you
(12:30):
stick your phone on the table at dinner. We were
able to get a local restaurant to let us come
in and basically take over one of their tables for
many months, and so we would have people come in
and have dinner with their friends or family. I mean,
the deal was, you know, we'll pick up the bill
if you fill out some surveys for us, and then basically,
(12:50):
by the flip of a coin, they're assigned to either
have their phones out and available during the meal or
to put them away, and then we just leave them
alone and let them do their thing, you know, have
their meal with their friends and family, and then at
the end of the meal, we ask them to just report,
for example, how much they enjoyed this time, how connected
(13:10):
they felt to their friends and family and so forth.
And what we see is that when phones are out
and available, they experienced significantly less enjoyment compared to when
phones are simply put away. Liza's experiment is just one
of a growing number of studies showing that the mere
presence of phones can negatively impact lots of different events.
(13:32):
Other researchers tested the impact of a simple notification buzz.
In their study, participants got a free massage. The only
caveat was that they had to place their cell phone
on a nearby table and not check it until the
massage was over. Half of the participants got a call
during the massage, while the other half didn't. Afterwards, they
all rated their experience on a nine point scale what happened,
(13:54):
while those who heard their cell phone vibrate had enjoyment
ratings that were significantly lower even when they didn't look
at their phone. Researchers saw similar effects when the enjoyable
event was watching a movie, we're playing a game of
Mario Kart. I find these results absolutely crazy. I mean,
we all kind of know that it's a bad idea
to pull out our phones and start using them in
the middle of some social interaction. But lots of us
(14:17):
have our phones sitting around us all the time. I mean,
mine is usually by my side when I'm working, or
watching a movie, or even at dinner. I always thought
that if it was faced down, that I was fine.
I had no idea that my phone's mere presence could
be systematically reducing my enjoyment. But in some sense, of
course I didn't. As we saw before, our brains simply
(14:37):
can't notice the many things we don't notice, and that
means we have no idea how much our phones are
stealing our attention. Well we see in our data is
that when people have access to their phones, they do
report feelings significantly more distracted. You know, this at least
provides us with some evidence that part of the reason
that phones are undermining enjoyment in the social setting is
(14:58):
that they're kind of pulling us out of the moment
a little bit, making us feel a little more distracted,
a little less focused on the present, and that is
kind of chipping away at our enjoyment. Liz us that
our phones are taking us out of moments that are
even more important than a simple dinner. She's found that
phones can affect the connection we experience with our kids.
In this study, we went out to a science museum
(15:20):
in Vancouver called Science World. We recruited parents and we
randomly assign them either to use their phones a lot
or to try to minimize their phone use, and then
we let them just go do their whole science museum thing,
and then at least thirty minutes later, we asked them
to complete a survey and tell us how they had
(15:41):
been feeling during their Science World visit. And what we
see there is that parents feel substantially more distracted when
they're using their phones a lot compared to when they're
minimizing phone use, and they also end up feeling a
lower sense of social connection in particular. And I think
that's really interesting because you know, here are these devices
(16:02):
that have been intentionally built to connect us with other people,
and yet in the context of this sort of positive,
everyday situation of visiting a museum with your kids, you
pull it out more, use it more, and you end
up feeling less socially connected because you're missing out on
these opportunities for connection that are kind of right there
in front of you. Liz has experienced this effect firsthand.
(16:24):
I take my six year old all over there all
the time, and like, you know, you can watch him
learn about gravity and like have all of these really
nice experiences, you know. At the same time, It's not
like I say to myself, Oh, I'm going to like
stop paying attention to my child and spend the next
twenty five minutes like learning what's going on with people
(16:46):
I haven't talked to since high school. Like I don't
make that plan, but I like look at my phone
for one second for to you know, check in with
somebody real quick about something, and then I see this
other thing on Facebook and get kind of stucked in.
We know we've had distraction for a really long time, right,
there's lots of stuff that distracts us. Why our phones
worse than most of the other stuff we've seen in
(17:07):
human history. I think phones are worse for two reasons.
And it's like this magical combination of portability and just
like incredibly rich and endless opportunities for information and entertainment
that they provide. Let's think for a second about all
(17:28):
this information and entertainment. On the other side of your
phone is the entire library of Alexandria, every film archive,
nearly every song ever recorded, infinite news sites, magazines, podcasts, quotes, maps,
celebrity gossip and recipes, a shopping cart for every department
store in the world, all the emails you received since
two twelve, infinite swipes on potential romantic partners, and thousands
(17:52):
upon thousands of funny cat videos plus porn. I mean,
never in the history of our species have we had
immediate access to so much exciting, addictive stuff. If you
had a giant wheelbarrow and you pushed it all around
with you and took it all out of dinner, like,
I'm sure you'd be just as distracted by that as
by your phone. It's just that people wouldn't have done that, right, So,
because it's so portable, it's easy to pull out this
(18:15):
phone even in social settings, even when you're right in
the middle of talking to somebody, you know, let me
just grab my wheelbarrow of like, distractions would not have
been a normal or acceptable thing to do. And Lize's
finding that a lot of what's being lost is social.
If you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab,
you've heard that social connection, even with strangers, is a
key part of our well being. But Liz's finding that
(18:37):
phones are causing us to lose more of those important
social moments than we realize. We basically just stuck strangers
together in a room for about ten minutes, kind of
like a mock waiting room, and either we took their
phones away or left them with their phones, and then
we videotape them and code their facial expressions. And what
(19:00):
we see is that when people are sitting there with
a stranger in a room for ten minutes in the
absence of phones, they smile quite a bit at that
other person, and they almost always interact with that other person.
You let both people hang on to their phones, and
what you see is a lot more people choosing not
(19:20):
to interact at all, and you see about thirty percent
less smiling between strangers. I just want to pause here
so we can take this in thirty percent less smiling
thirty percent. I mean, what have you multiplied that thirty
percent from one person in a waiting room to all
the people in the world walking around looking at their phones.
(19:41):
What is the scale of all this phone use doing
to basic social connection in our society. I think it's
so easy to overlook because what we think about is like, oh,
because I'm on my phone. You know, I found out
about this funny thing somebody posted on Facebook, and like,
I managed to send a quick text to my mom
and all of that, and we have no idea, like
how many friendly smiles with strangers just didn't happen as
(20:04):
a result of what we were doing on our phone.
It's just a part of this broader tendency to overlo
opportunity costs, where we don't realize what we're missing out
on as a result of what we're actually doing. So
what can we do to fix all this? We'll turn
to some practical strategies for improving your attentional hygiene when
the happiness slide returns in a moment. I think everyone
(20:34):
who's listening to this probably has the experience of looking
down and noticing their phone on their hand and not
really having any idea why it's there, or what they're
doing on it, or why they're in Instagram at that moment.
I'm talking to the person the New York Times called
the Maria Condo of Brains. I am Katherine Price. I'm
a freelance science journalist and the author of How to
Break Up With Your Phone. Before Katherine wrote an entire
(20:57):
manifesto about taming our smartphone addiction. She too was seduced
by all the amazing things our phones do for us.
I had been involved in a home renovation project and
had been spending a lot of time on eBay. There's
notion that smartphones of revolutionized shopping, but Catherine was about
to come face to face with the price we paid
for that revolution. I had had a baby around that time,
(21:18):
and I had a number of evenings where I would
be with her in the middle of the night and
I'd noticed that she was looking at me, and I
would be looking down at my phone, and more specifically,
I was often looking at door knobs on eBay, which
was like particularly ridiculous because by that point we finished
the renovation project and I didn't need to be doing
that at all. But anyway, when I noticed this happening,
(21:38):
I kind of had this out of body experience where
I saw the scene as if it would appear to
in an outsider, and it really disturbed me, this vision
of this baby looking up at her mother, and her
mother looking down at this glowing screen. And I also
remembered from something from my science journalism past, which is
that baby's eyes can only focus about two feet in
(21:59):
front of their faces, and that's specifically so that they
can bond emotionally with the person who's holding them. So
I found that to be deeply disturbing as well as
that she's got this evolutionary design that's there to facilitate
our connection, and here I am looking at eBay. So
that's the moment when I realized, Oh, I really want
to work on my own relationship. Catherine started working on
(22:20):
that relationship with some common sense phone hacks, like shutting
off her notifications and making her phone more boring looking
by turning the display to gray scale. She even went
one step further to delete the apps she found especially tempting.
Think about the ones that you feel compulsively drawn to
and then you kind of enjoy, but then you feel
gross afterwards. That's the easiest way to tell is just
tune into your own emotions before, during, and after using them.
(22:43):
And you basically want to have your home screen only
contain tools you don't want temptations, And for that I
really do recommend people approach this with a spirit of experimentation,
recognizing you can always reinstall things and readjust your settings
back to where they were, but see what it's like
to just delete some of your most problematic apps from
your phone for a day. See what it feels like.
(23:04):
But Catherine argues that the most effective strategy for fixing
our relationship with our phones involve some advice that many
of us haven't heard. She thinks we need to cultivate
a completely new attitude towards our phone use, one of mindfulness.
We need to take the time to notice how our
phones are making us feel. Now we've talked about the
power of mindfulness and other episodes on this podcast, and
(23:25):
that's because there's tons of research showing that becoming more
mindful generally can be a big booster shop for well being.
But Catherine contends that we can use the same strategy
to develop a healthier relationship with our devices, one that
can protect our fragile attention. It's a lot easier to
change a habit if deep down inside of you, you
just don't want to engage with the habit anymore. And
(23:48):
there were a fascinating series of studies done by the
Sky Judson Brewer where he basically trained a group of
smokers in a mindfulness based technique where they were basically
just supposed to notice what it was like to smoke
a cigarette, to notice what a craving felt like. Don't
fight it, just kind of notice. Notice what happens if
you do indulge in it, Notice how it feels if
you don't, notice how long last if you just kind
(24:10):
of observe it. And he found that the mindfulness based
group quit at twice the rate of the control group,
and then in the long run, they were five times
as successful in sticking with the quitting. And when he
spoke to the participants about what had happened, he heard
these really interesting comments from people along the lines of
One woman said, I really had never tasted a cigarette before,
(24:31):
and once I tasted it and really experienced it, I realized,
I thought this is disgusting, and I don't want to
be a smoker. Like a smoker trying to really taste
a cigarette. Catherine decided to examine why her phone had
such a powerful hold on her. There's interesting reasons that
we reach for our phones. They're like little security blankets.
And the more you understand your motivations, what your brain
(24:53):
is after when you reach for your phone, the easier
it will be to come up with alternatives to present
your brain with so that you can choose to do
something else instead. To help us become a bit more mindful,
Catherine recommends using the acronym www, which stands for what for?
Why now? What else? What for? Like what did you
pick up your phone for? Did you actually have any purpose?
(25:15):
And no judgment? I mean like there's no right answer here,
just why did you pick it up? Then the why now?
Is it the emotional or the situational question like what
was the trigger that caused you to do it in
this second? Were you feeling socially anxious? Is it just
an habitual thing? And then the last question is what else?
So what else could you do in that moment? What
do you actually want to spend more time and attention on?
(25:37):
What are some things that you used to enjoy when
you were a kid that you supposedly don't have time
for now, or that you want to learn but you
don't have time for. Catherine cautions that this process might
take a while. She even recommends doing a personal experiment
like this for at least thirty days. You actually have
to take some time to retrain your quote unquote muscle
of attention so that you can get it strong again.
(26:00):
But Catherine has seen firsthand that putting in the work
to regain your attention is worth it. Attention is like money.
I mean, it's fine, and people are constantly trying to
get it from you. And I would say that our
attention and time are even more valuable than money, because
even if someone does convince you to buy some stupid
thing like you can make more money, you won't get
(26:22):
that money back, but you can still get more money.
You can't get any more time, and you can't get
any more of your attention back. So we should be
very very careful with how and where and when we
spend it. In the last few years, Catherine has perfected
her own attentional spending by completely transforming her relationship with
her phone. Nowadays, she keeps her devices shut off and
(26:42):
far away through most of her family social life. But
the biggest improvement to Catherine's happiness came from repeatedly asking
herself that last www question, what else could she be doing?
Rather than spending time on her phone. After some soul searching,
Catherine realized that she'd rather be devoting her limited attention
to music. She'd played the piano since she was a child,
(27:04):
but never had time to practice, and she'd always wanted
to learn other instruments too. Having freed up all the
time and attention she wasted on her phone, she could
finally commit to this personal goal. I started taking this
adult guitar class. It was like byob We got together
Wednesday nights and learned chords. I just started taking percussion.
Last night was my first class as I now I'm
(27:26):
doing guitar and percussion. I've started playing music with some
of the people from my class out of class, and
I finally feel, after living in Philadelphia for eight years,
that I have a community. I mean, this has happened
in the past six months and it's all through music.
And the reintroduction of music into my life is a
direct result of re examining my relationship with my phone.
For me, this has been a really amazing experience. I
(27:50):
never could have anticipated how many ways my life would
change as a result of this project. And I feel
like concentrating on my phone and putting so much focus
on my relationship with it really has made me a
better mother, maybe a better partner, made a better friend,
you know, you name it, and so grateful for that.
(28:12):
Making this episode has caused me to take a good
hard look at what I'm spending my attention on. As
my friends can probably tell you, I've always been a
little addicted to my phone, but I didn't realize until
now just how much it was sapping my attention and
my joy even when I'm not really using it. And so,
inspired by Catherine's advice, I've started to try to become
(28:33):
more mindful about why I'm turning to my phone, and
I've started to think more about all the opportunity costs
of my phone use. What happiness grillis am I missing
without even realizing it? What else could I be paying
attention to instead. I've started to notice that using my
phone in public prevents me from the short moments of
connection that often make my day. A quick colo or
(28:54):
ketchup on the street that I would have squandered because
I was staring at my email, or that deep chat
with my husband that I'd be more involved with if
my iPhone wasn't unconsciously tempting me from the other side
of the table, or the taste of my morning coffee,
which I often ignore in favor of a quick social
media click. I hope this episode has caused you to
think a bit more about all the gorillas you might
(29:16):
be missing in life without even realizing it, so you
can start using your phone only for the things that
are really worth your attention, the stuff that actually brings
you joy, like calling a good friend or the occasional
cat video, or even clicking on your favorite podcast app
to hear the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and
(29:45):
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Friedman checked our
facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon.
Special thanks to mil LaBelle, Carl Migliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
(30:09):
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
Pushkin. One of the greatest lies our minds tell us
is that we're soaking up everything we see in here.
But that's simply not true. Our ability to pay attention
to the world around us is much more limited than
we think. We're missing out on way more than we realize. Okay,
(00:39):
thank you again for helping me into the study. X.
So you're going to be doing a classic experiment in
psychology where you're going to be counting the number of
basketball passes. I'm testing some of the students in my
residential college at Yale on an experiment that's now become
famous in the history of modern psychology. There's a decent
chance you may have taken a version of it yourself.
So there's gonna be six players, three people on the
(01:00):
white team and three people on a black team, and
your task is you have to count the number of
passes that the people on the white team. Make makes sense, Yeah, okay, one, two, three, four.
Since the teams are chriss crossing and the two balls
are constantly moving, there's a lot to keep track of.
Even so, most students are able to count the passes
(01:22):
pretty accurately. Fourteen fifteen, awesome, that's correct. But counting the
number of passes isn't really the point of the study.
Did you also notice anything else that was weird in
the video? I don't think so. Did you happen to
see a big grilla walk into the scene? No, no,
(01:43):
no way, I'll replay it again. Something very unexpected happens
in the middle of this video. A large man in
a guerrilla suit walks in and beats his chest. Now,
even though the gorilla walks right through the middle of
the frame, many people simply report not seeing it. Did
you see a huge grilla walk in the middle of
(02:04):
the pass? In fact, when researchers Dan Simon and Chris
Shabri originally ran the study, more than half of the
subjects failed to spot something right in front of their eyes.
O God, I you believe Simon's and Shabri christen this
phenomenon inattentional blindness, we're actually blind to anything we're not
(02:26):
actively paying attention to. When you focus on the people
passing the ball, you're simply unable to see a huge
gorilla even when you're looking right at it. Our minds
make us believe that we see everything we look at,
but that's just not true and the things we don't
notice matter for our happiness more than we think. Our
(02:48):
minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness
Lab with doctor Laurie Sanders. I guess the joy of
(03:13):
doing science is when we discover things that are like,
really surprising and counterintuitive about how our own minds work.
And you're more likely to be surprised about processes in
the mind that we don't have conscious access to. This
is my colleague Brian Schell. He's a professor of psychology
and cognitive science here at Yale. Brian studies the surprising
(03:34):
limits of our attentional abilities. There's just way too much
information coming in through our eyes at any given moment
to fully process even most of it, much less all
of it. We assume that the mere act of looking
at something means we'll be able to perceive it. That say,
if I'm looking at a computer screen, I'll naturally be
able to see all the stuff that happens on the screen.
(03:56):
But one of the most shocking discoveries of this research
is that that is not true. That in some cases,
you can completely fail to be consciously aware of something
that's right in front of you if you are not
paying attention to it. And Brian's work on an attentional
blindness has shown that we're missing gorillas all over the place.
His lab uses a slightly different version of the gorilla experiment.
(04:17):
Instead of basketball players, Brian has people track a group
of black and white circles and squares moving across a
computer screen. The gorilla in this case is just a
bright red cross. And so this bright red cross has
a completely different color, a completely different shape, a completely
different type of motion trajectory, and it literally passes across
the entire screen and moves right in front of your eyes.
(04:39):
But despite the fact that the red cross is totally
different from the other shapes, around thirty percent of people
failed to see it, even when they're looking directly at
the screen. Our window on the world is only that
which we attend to, and that is just a brute
fact of human nature. We all have things that make
us happy in life. A delicious meal, a sunny spring day,
(05:01):
rain drops on roses, whiskers on kittens. I mean, there's
lots of good stuff out there, but the limits of
our attention mean that our favorite thing can only influence
our mood if we notice them. I mean, when was
the last time you took a second to look up
at the blue sky and the trees, or really stop
to pay attention to your partner's smile, or notice the
warmth of your coffee cup. Research shows that all these
(05:25):
little times were not paying attention can have a big
impact on our well being. Psychologist Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel
Gilbert showed this in a clever study. They had their
subjects download an app that contacted them at random times
and ask three questions, what are you doing right now?
Are you paying attention to what you're doing? And third,
how are you feeling? They found that what people were
(05:47):
doing only had a small impact on what they were feeling.
What really mattered was whether people were paying attention. And
that's important. If we want to fully enjoy all the
good things in life, we actually have to notice them.
We need to make sure we're saving some of our
limited attention for the stuff that really matters. But if
we really want to use our attention to become happier,
(06:09):
there's something else we need to come to terms with,
and that's that it's really, really hard to recognize just
how bad our attention is. And that's because we tend
not to notice what we're not noticing. Philosophers sometimes call
this the refrigerator light illusion. The idea is, how would
you know if the light in your refrigerator is off
when the door is not open. Everybody has intuitions that
(06:32):
tell them that, of course, if a gorilla walked in
front of me, I would notice it. But those intuitions
are wrong. And if our brains are wrong about seeing
a huge gorilla walking directly across a screen, imagine all
the less salient, feel good gorillas we don't realize we're
missing on a daily basis, all the smiles we don't notice,
or the taste of a yummy lunch we didn't realize
we ignored because something else grabbed our attention. But these
(06:56):
days it's not just our limited minds that are causing
the problem. We've also added something else to our daily
routine that makes our usually bad attention much much worse.
Welcome that world. It's two thousand. Thank you for coming.
An Apple CEO, Steve Jobs is addressing the crowd at
the Macworld convention. We're going to make some history together today.
(07:16):
He pauses and takes a sip of water. He seems
to be psyching himself up for something important. Every once
in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Well,
today we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class, an iPod,
(07:41):
a phone, and an Internet communicator. Are you getting it?
These are not three separate devices. This is one device.
Apple didn't just reinvent the phone that day. Their innovation
(08:02):
was an attentional game changer, one that's brought a host
of changes to all of our lives, ones that even
Steve Jobs couldn't foresee. Take, for example, one seemingly irrelevant
economic indicator, chewing gum purchases. Since the iPhone came out,
chewing gum sales have dropped by double digits. Now, you
might think that this could be for a couple of reasons,
(08:23):
like maybe people are turning to breathmans or something. So
what's going on? Well, some scholars have argued that the
shift in purchasing behavior reflects less of a change in
our preferences and more of a change in our behavior,
specifically how we're spending our time in the spot we'd
normally be buying gum the checkout line, and that's where
Steve Jobs comes in. We're no longer tempted by all
(08:45):
those impulse buys because we simply don't see them anymore.
One study found that sixty two percent of people pulled
out a device while waiting in line, and more than
eighty percent of those people whip that device out in
less than twenty seconds. With our eyeball stuck to our screens,
we simply don't notice the other tempting stuff in the
checkout aisle. But could our phones be causing us to
(09:07):
miss stuff that's even more important than a pack of gum.
Brian used his Red Cross study to find out. So,
with a bunch of undergrads here a Yale, we repeated
this experiment, but we had half of the subject's talk
on a cell phone, and it was wonderfully awkward. We
just told them to talk to the research assistant on
the other end of the line and you know, find
(09:28):
out who they are, what their interests are, etc. But
we told them point blank, look don't let talking on
a cell phone impact your performance on this tracking task.
Brian found that subjects did fine. People were just as
good at tracking the movement of the white and black
shapes when they talked on the phone as when there
was no phone in sight. But of course that's not
what we were interested in. What we really cared about
(09:51):
is how many of them noticed this red cross our
gorilla in this case, so when they were not talking
on a cell phone, seventy percent of people saw the
red cross. About thirty percent of people were inattentionally blind.
With exactly the same displays. When they were talking on
the cell phone and trying not to let it affect
their performance, ninety percent of people missed the red cross.
(10:15):
Only ten percent of people saw it. Brian found that
using a cell phone dramatically increases the rate of an
attentional blindness. I mean, his subjects miss ninety percent of
the gorillas that cross their paths. Nine With over three
billion smartphones and pockets all over the world, just think
of all the things that are going unnoticed. When we
(10:37):
get back from the break, we'll talk more about all
the unforeseen consequences of these missed guerrillas. Because even though
we don't notice the effect our phones are having on
our attention, these missed moments might matter for our happiness
more than we think phones are useful, you know, ironically,
because of that value, they also provide a very, very
potent source of distraction that I do think vastly exceeds
(11:00):
anything else that we've ever seen in human history. The
Happiness Lab will be right back. About ninety five percent
of people report having used their smartphone during their most
(11:20):
recent social gathering. Perhaps more surprisingly, about ten percent of
people report having used their smartphone at least once during sex.
So these devices seem to really penetrate a broad array
of social interactions. I'm talking to Liz Done, longtime friend
of the Happiness Lab and professor of psychology at the
University of British Columbia. When smartphones first started appearing in
(11:44):
everybody's hands, I got curious about how they were influencing
the benefits that we get out of everyday social interactions. Now,
you might think Liz started her studies with all the
really egregious cases of phones messing with social interactions. Well,
my college students at Yale sometimes call fubbing the idea
of fubbing. The combination of like snubbing and phone is
(12:07):
that you are not paying attention to the other people
around you, and maybe in a way that feels sort
of hurtful and upsetting to them because you are paying
attention to your phone. But Liz is actually more worried
about all the less hurtful ways we use our phone.
She was concerned about what the mere act of having
your phone around does to your attention, like when you
(12:30):
stick your phone on the table at dinner. We were
able to get a local restaurant to let us come
in and basically take over one of their tables for
many months, and so we would have people come in
and have dinner with their friends or family. I mean,
the deal was, you know, we'll pick up the bill
if you fill out some surveys for us, and then basically,
(12:50):
by the flip of a coin, they're assigned to either
have their phones out and available during the meal or
to put them away, and then we just leave them
alone and let them do their thing, you know, have
their meal with their friends and family, and then at
the end of the meal, we ask them to just report,
for example, how much they enjoyed this time, how connected
(13:10):
they felt to their friends and family and so forth.
And what we see is that when phones are out
and available, they experienced significantly less enjoyment compared to when
phones are simply put away. Liza's experiment is just one
of a growing number of studies showing that the mere
presence of phones can negatively impact lots of different events.
(13:32):
Other researchers tested the impact of a simple notification buzz.
In their study, participants got a free massage. The only
caveat was that they had to place their cell phone
on a nearby table and not check it until the
massage was over. Half of the participants got a call
during the massage, while the other half didn't. Afterwards, they
all rated their experience on a nine point scale what happened,
(13:54):
while those who heard their cell phone vibrate had enjoyment
ratings that were significantly lower even when they didn't look
at their phone. Researchers saw similar effects when the enjoyable
event was watching a movie, we're playing a game of
Mario Kart. I find these results absolutely crazy. I mean,
we all kind of know that it's a bad idea
to pull out our phones and start using them in
the middle of some social interaction. But lots of us
(14:17):
have our phones sitting around us all the time. I mean,
mine is usually by my side when I'm working, or
watching a movie, or even at dinner. I always thought
that if it was faced down, that I was fine.
I had no idea that my phone's mere presence could
be systematically reducing my enjoyment. But in some sense, of
course I didn't. As we saw before, our brains simply
(14:37):
can't notice the many things we don't notice, and that
means we have no idea how much our phones are
stealing our attention. Well we see in our data is
that when people have access to their phones, they do
report feelings significantly more distracted. You know, this at least
provides us with some evidence that part of the reason
that phones are undermining enjoyment in the social setting is
(14:58):
that they're kind of pulling us out of the moment
a little bit, making us feel a little more distracted,
a little less focused on the present, and that is
kind of chipping away at our enjoyment. Liz us that
our phones are taking us out of moments that are
even more important than a simple dinner. She's found that
phones can affect the connection we experience with our kids.
In this study, we went out to a science museum
(15:20):
in Vancouver called Science World. We recruited parents and we
randomly assign them either to use their phones a lot
or to try to minimize their phone use, and then
we let them just go do their whole science museum thing,
and then at least thirty minutes later, we asked them
to complete a survey and tell us how they had
(15:41):
been feeling during their Science World visit. And what we
see there is that parents feel substantially more distracted when
they're using their phones a lot compared to when they're
minimizing phone use, and they also end up feeling a
lower sense of social connection in particular. And I think
that's really interesting because you know, here are these devices
(16:02):
that have been intentionally built to connect us with other people,
and yet in the context of this sort of positive,
everyday situation of visiting a museum with your kids, you
pull it out more, use it more, and you end
up feeling less socially connected because you're missing out on
these opportunities for connection that are kind of right there
in front of you. Liz has experienced this effect firsthand.
(16:24):
I take my six year old all over there all
the time, and like, you know, you can watch him
learn about gravity and like have all of these really
nice experiences, you know. At the same time, It's not
like I say to myself, Oh, I'm going to like
stop paying attention to my child and spend the next
twenty five minutes like learning what's going on with people
(16:46):
I haven't talked to since high school. Like I don't
make that plan, but I like look at my phone
for one second for to you know, check in with
somebody real quick about something, and then I see this
other thing on Facebook and get kind of stucked in.
We know we've had distraction for a really long time, right,
there's lots of stuff that distracts us. Why our phones
worse than most of the other stuff we've seen in
(17:07):
human history. I think phones are worse for two reasons.
And it's like this magical combination of portability and just
like incredibly rich and endless opportunities for information and entertainment
that they provide. Let's think for a second about all
(17:28):
this information and entertainment. On the other side of your
phone is the entire library of Alexandria, every film archive,
nearly every song ever recorded, infinite news sites, magazines, podcasts, quotes, maps,
celebrity gossip and recipes, a shopping cart for every department
store in the world, all the emails you received since
two twelve, infinite swipes on potential romantic partners, and thousands
(17:52):
upon thousands of funny cat videos plus porn. I mean,
never in the history of our species have we had
immediate access to so much exciting, addictive stuff. If you
had a giant wheelbarrow and you pushed it all around
with you and took it all out of dinner, like,
I'm sure you'd be just as distracted by that as
by your phone. It's just that people wouldn't have done that, right, So,
because it's so portable, it's easy to pull out this
(18:15):
phone even in social settings, even when you're right in
the middle of talking to somebody, you know, let me
just grab my wheelbarrow of like, distractions would not have
been a normal or acceptable thing to do. And Lize's
finding that a lot of what's being lost is social.
If you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab,
you've heard that social connection, even with strangers, is a
key part of our well being. But Liz's finding that
(18:37):
phones are causing us to lose more of those important
social moments than we realize. We basically just stuck strangers
together in a room for about ten minutes, kind of
like a mock waiting room, and either we took their
phones away or left them with their phones, and then
we videotape them and code their facial expressions. And what
(19:00):
we see is that when people are sitting there with
a stranger in a room for ten minutes in the
absence of phones, they smile quite a bit at that
other person, and they almost always interact with that other person.
You let both people hang on to their phones, and
what you see is a lot more people choosing not
(19:20):
to interact at all, and you see about thirty percent
less smiling between strangers. I just want to pause here
so we can take this in thirty percent less smiling
thirty percent. I mean, what have you multiplied that thirty
percent from one person in a waiting room to all
the people in the world walking around looking at their phones.
(19:41):
What is the scale of all this phone use doing
to basic social connection in our society. I think it's
so easy to overlook because what we think about is like, oh,
because I'm on my phone. You know, I found out
about this funny thing somebody posted on Facebook, and like,
I managed to send a quick text to my mom
and all of that, and we have no idea, like
how many friendly smiles with strangers just didn't happen as
(20:04):
a result of what we were doing on our phone.
It's just a part of this broader tendency to overlo
opportunity costs, where we don't realize what we're missing out
on as a result of what we're actually doing. So
what can we do to fix all this? We'll turn
to some practical strategies for improving your attentional hygiene when
the happiness slide returns in a moment. I think everyone
(20:34):
who's listening to this probably has the experience of looking
down and noticing their phone on their hand and not
really having any idea why it's there, or what they're
doing on it, or why they're in Instagram at that moment.
I'm talking to the person the New York Times called
the Maria Condo of Brains. I am Katherine Price. I'm
a freelance science journalist and the author of How to
Break Up With Your Phone. Before Katherine wrote an entire
(20:57):
manifesto about taming our smartphone addiction. She too was seduced
by all the amazing things our phones do for us.
I had been involved in a home renovation project and
had been spending a lot of time on eBay. There's
notion that smartphones of revolutionized shopping, but Catherine was about
to come face to face with the price we paid
for that revolution. I had had a baby around that time,
(21:18):
and I had a number of evenings where I would
be with her in the middle of the night and
I'd noticed that she was looking at me, and I
would be looking down at my phone, and more specifically,
I was often looking at door knobs on eBay, which
was like particularly ridiculous because by that point we finished
the renovation project and I didn't need to be doing
that at all. But anyway, when I noticed this happening,
(21:38):
I kind of had this out of body experience where
I saw the scene as if it would appear to
in an outsider, and it really disturbed me, this vision
of this baby looking up at her mother, and her
mother looking down at this glowing screen. And I also
remembered from something from my science journalism past, which is
that baby's eyes can only focus about two feet in
(21:59):
front of their faces, and that's specifically so that they
can bond emotionally with the person who's holding them. So
I found that to be deeply disturbing as well as
that she's got this evolutionary design that's there to facilitate
our connection, and here I am looking at eBay. So
that's the moment when I realized, Oh, I really want
to work on my own relationship. Catherine started working on
(22:20):
that relationship with some common sense phone hacks, like shutting
off her notifications and making her phone more boring looking
by turning the display to gray scale. She even went
one step further to delete the apps she found especially tempting.
Think about the ones that you feel compulsively drawn to
and then you kind of enjoy, but then you feel
gross afterwards. That's the easiest way to tell is just
tune into your own emotions before, during, and after using them.
(22:43):
And you basically want to have your home screen only
contain tools you don't want temptations, And for that I
really do recommend people approach this with a spirit of experimentation,
recognizing you can always reinstall things and readjust your settings
back to where they were, but see what it's like
to just delete some of your most problematic apps from
your phone for a day. See what it feels like.
(23:04):
But Catherine argues that the most effective strategy for fixing
our relationship with our phones involve some advice that many
of us haven't heard. She thinks we need to cultivate
a completely new attitude towards our phone use, one of mindfulness.
We need to take the time to notice how our
phones are making us feel. Now we've talked about the
power of mindfulness and other episodes on this podcast, and
(23:25):
that's because there's tons of research showing that becoming more
mindful generally can be a big booster shop for well being.
But Catherine contends that we can use the same strategy
to develop a healthier relationship with our devices, one that
can protect our fragile attention. It's a lot easier to
change a habit if deep down inside of you, you
just don't want to engage with the habit anymore. And
(23:48):
there were a fascinating series of studies done by the
Sky Judson Brewer where he basically trained a group of
smokers in a mindfulness based technique where they were basically
just supposed to notice what it was like to smoke
a cigarette, to notice what a craving felt like. Don't
fight it, just kind of notice. Notice what happens if
you do indulge in it, Notice how it feels if
you don't, notice how long last if you just kind
(24:10):
of observe it. And he found that the mindfulness based
group quit at twice the rate of the control group,
and then in the long run, they were five times
as successful in sticking with the quitting. And when he
spoke to the participants about what had happened, he heard
these really interesting comments from people along the lines of
One woman said, I really had never tasted a cigarette before,
(24:31):
and once I tasted it and really experienced it, I realized,
I thought this is disgusting, and I don't want to
be a smoker. Like a smoker trying to really taste
a cigarette. Catherine decided to examine why her phone had
such a powerful hold on her. There's interesting reasons that
we reach for our phones. They're like little security blankets.
And the more you understand your motivations, what your brain
(24:53):
is after when you reach for your phone, the easier
it will be to come up with alternatives to present
your brain with so that you can choose to do
something else instead. To help us become a bit more mindful,
Catherine recommends using the acronym www, which stands for what for?
Why now? What else? What for? Like what did you
pick up your phone for? Did you actually have any purpose?
(25:15):
And no judgment? I mean like there's no right answer here,
just why did you pick it up? Then the why now?
Is it the emotional or the situational question like what
was the trigger that caused you to do it in
this second? Were you feeling socially anxious? Is it just
an habitual thing? And then the last question is what else?
So what else could you do in that moment? What
do you actually want to spend more time and attention on?
(25:37):
What are some things that you used to enjoy when
you were a kid that you supposedly don't have time
for now, or that you want to learn but you
don't have time for. Catherine cautions that this process might
take a while. She even recommends doing a personal experiment
like this for at least thirty days. You actually have
to take some time to retrain your quote unquote muscle
of attention so that you can get it strong again.
(26:00):
But Catherine has seen firsthand that putting in the work
to regain your attention is worth it. Attention is like money.
I mean, it's fine, and people are constantly trying to
get it from you. And I would say that our
attention and time are even more valuable than money, because
even if someone does convince you to buy some stupid
thing like you can make more money, you won't get
(26:22):
that money back, but you can still get more money.
You can't get any more time, and you can't get
any more of your attention back. So we should be
very very careful with how and where and when we
spend it. In the last few years, Catherine has perfected
her own attentional spending by completely transforming her relationship with
her phone. Nowadays, she keeps her devices shut off and
(26:42):
far away through most of her family social life. But
the biggest improvement to Catherine's happiness came from repeatedly asking
herself that last www question, what else could she be doing?
Rather than spending time on her phone. After some soul searching,
Catherine realized that she'd rather be devoting her limited attention
to music. She'd played the piano since she was a child,
(27:04):
but never had time to practice, and she'd always wanted
to learn other instruments too. Having freed up all the
time and attention she wasted on her phone, she could
finally commit to this personal goal. I started taking this
adult guitar class. It was like byob We got together
Wednesday nights and learned chords. I just started taking percussion.
Last night was my first class as I now I'm
(27:26):
doing guitar and percussion. I've started playing music with some
of the people from my class out of class, and
I finally feel, after living in Philadelphia for eight years,
that I have a community. I mean, this has happened
in the past six months and it's all through music.
And the reintroduction of music into my life is a
direct result of re examining my relationship with my phone.
For me, this has been a really amazing experience. I
(27:50):
never could have anticipated how many ways my life would
change as a result of this project. And I feel
like concentrating on my phone and putting so much focus
on my relationship with it really has made me a
better mother, maybe a better partner, made a better friend,
you know, you name it, and so grateful for that.
(28:12):
Making this episode has caused me to take a good
hard look at what I'm spending my attention on. As
my friends can probably tell you, I've always been a
little addicted to my phone, but I didn't realize until
now just how much it was sapping my attention and
my joy even when I'm not really using it. And so,
inspired by Catherine's advice, I've started to try to become
(28:33):
more mindful about why I'm turning to my phone, and
I've started to think more about all the opportunity costs
of my phone use. What happiness grillis am I missing
without even realizing it? What else could I be paying
attention to instead. I've started to notice that using my
phone in public prevents me from the short moments of
connection that often make my day. A quick colo or
(28:54):
ketchup on the street that I would have squandered because
I was staring at my email, or that deep chat
with my husband that I'd be more involved with if
my iPhone wasn't unconsciously tempting me from the other side
of the table, or the taste of my morning coffee,
which I often ignore in favor of a quick social
media click. I hope this episode has caused you to
think a bit more about all the gorillas you might
(29:16):
be missing in life without even realizing it, so you
can start using your phone only for the things that
are really worth your attention, the stuff that actually brings
you joy, like calling a good friend or the occasional
cat video, or even clicking on your favorite podcast app
to hear the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and
(29:45):
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Friedman checked our
facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon.
Special thanks to mil LaBelle, Carl Migliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
(30:09):
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
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