Episode 2
Just One More Minutes
Intro
Welcome back to Brain Matters, a podcast where we explore how the brain works and how neuroscience can help young people learn, think, and take care of their mental well-being.
In the last episode, we talked about gut feelings and heuristics, the mental shortcuts our brain uses to make decisions quickly. At the end of that conversation, we started asking a new question: if our brain naturally wants to save energy, what happens when technology makes it even easier to avoid effortful thinking?
In this episode, we continue our conversation with Dr. Tracy Tokuhama-Espinosa, an educational neuroscience expert who studies how brain science can help us understand learning and decision-making. We’ll talk about cognitive offloading, doomscrolling, ChatGPT, and how young people can use technology as a tool without letting it take over the thinking we need to practice.
Vivian: Dr. Tracy, if we use our brain less, or we lean towards lower cognitive kinds of actions, maybe like scroll on your phone, do we get cognitive decline and worse judgment?
Tracy: Huge insight. You were so smart. In fact, that was a paper that came out of MIT last summer, just before the summer school started talking about big problems with CGPT. mainly, it's called cognitive offloading. So you're deciding, I'm not going to have a heavy cognitive load, I'm going to pass off the heavy load to a machine, to an app, to something that will save me energy. So you think, okay, this is terrific. But what they found over the long term, over several months of use, is that habituated cognitive offloading means you stop thinking. You stop doing the deep work of, yeah, investing energy, making those connections and deciding to learn at a higher level, because all you're doing is presuming that a machine can tell you everything. So this means you stop rehearsing those core neural networks that underpin higher order thinking. So the big red flag there was, yeah, don't always just offload things, don't always just, you know, turn to your phone because it's lighter load. It feels better. It feels better in the short run. Long run, you know, you lose two, three hours, goofing around, scrolling on your phone, doom scrolling, and then at the end of the day, what did you get out of that? You got almost nothing out of that, but you, yeah, you felt like you reduced your energy load, but the truth in the matter is, you have to invest energy if you want to grow as a human being. And so taking the time to decide not to do that is a big piece of what I hope will be our maturing understanding of how to use and leverage technology, which can be great and relieve us. You know, it's great to toggle around and have lighter load things and heavier load things on our brain. But coming back to the idea that, you know, use it or lose it, and no pain no gain, you do have to invest energy to actually get something out of it, right?
Vivian: Yeah, I also just want to say, doom scrolling for hours just feels so terrible, but the next day, I habitually almost forget how bad it feels. And that just reminds me of what some people have said about alcohol and how after you drink alcohol, it sucks, but you'll do it again.
Tracy: but you have just hit the nail in the head and this was just what Meta was just sued for, right? This idea that there's a level of addiction in social media structures, even in the whole negativity of doomsswing or whatever, something is a psychological concept that negative attention is better than no attention. And so people, you know if we use our brain less, then, or, like, we lean towards more, like, lower cognitive kind of actions, like, maybe like scroll on your phone or something, do we get cognitive decline, like, worse judgment?
Vivian: Yeah I just want to say, doom scrolling for hours just feels so terrible, but the next day, I habitually almost forget how bad it feels. And that just reminds me of what some people have said about alcohol and how after you drink alcohol, it sucks, but you'll do it again.
Tracy:but you have just hit the nail in the head and this was just what Meta was just sued for, right? This idea that there's a level of addiction in social media structures, even in the whole negativity of doomsswing or whatever, something, is a psychological concept that negative attention is better than no attention. And so people, you know, the energy, you're using, doom scrolling through things is kind of lower energy. But the point is, every once in a while, you're getting this dopamine kick of watching this really crazy thing happen. Okay. Then you get another dopamine kick of this other crazy thing that happens, right? And so these short form videos, these doom scrolling that you, you know a lot about because of your own research, really gives that punch to you so that people do get addicted to that. There is a kind of addiction to even the negativity of that. And so we're just learning about this, and the problem is that we've been building an airplane where we're flying it. We don't have regulatory structures that actually help us understand, because we didn't have enough research before we just sort of let it out there. And so your whole generation, you've had 10 years, we've been experimenting on you, trying to figure out and all of a sudden we're realizing how negative so many things can be. I don't know if you've seen this book. I think it's called The Anxious Generation by Hadid. It really points out, you know, this perfect storm of living through COVID, being by yourself, and also having technology that's your friend, quote unquote, and then all of these ways that, you know, businesses are trying to hook you, so this addictive nature of this body, and what it does is not only what it's doing to your brain, it's what it's not letting you have time to do for yourself. So because you're doing scrolling, you're not reading a good book, because you're doing scrolling, you're not typing with your friends. So you're not doing certain things, but you are sort of sort of, in this circular negative spiral, creating this terrible rumination in your own brain, that's addictive. So get off your phone.
Vivian: I know. I deleted all my social media, and Instagram is the only thing I have left now. There's so many negative effects of using your phone so much, But we're attached to it, like, you talk to your friends and everything on it. So what is the solution to this? Or is there a solution?
Tracy: I don't think extremes are ever good, you know? Socrates even said, you know, thousands of years ago, everything in moderation, right? And so I think it's just knowing and giving yourself, you know, sort of boundaries that there's some things that are beneficial, some things that are not. I remember about 15 years ago, I was told I had to have a Facebook account because of some form of study thing that I was doing, and I had to do this. And then I realized, oh, my gosh, I could discover where all my old high school friends were in and I could do this, and I could do that. And I would lose hours. Like, I would come up for error and realize, "Oh, my gosh, where was I for the past four hours?"
Vivian: Coming up for error is the perfect way to say,'cause after I put my phone down, I'm just like, "What did I do to myself?"
Tracy: Exactly. So then I began to give myself sort of real, you know, good boundaries on that. And I do like you. I don't have a tent of social media, but I actually give myself choice. I say yeah, I look at my WhatsApp messages, maybe once in the morning and maybe early afternoon and maybe just before I go to bed, but then I'm just shutting everything off and just not needing to feel like I have to be connected in that sense. I do agree that it's a wonderful way to stay in touch with your friends. It's a wonderful, you know connector. It's very beneficial and friendly and wonderful. The positive side of it shouldn't be, you know, knocked down too far, but I do think that most of us don't know our own limitations. I think that the bottom line suggestion is what the Oracle Delphi said on this, you know, in the Greek times, the main lesson of all of life, of all of education is to know thyself. Do you know yourself well enough to know what those boundaries should be, and how much time you can afford to spend here, on what form of media or whatever, or do you know yourself well enough to value taking a walk of nature as much as you do doom scrolling? I mean, do you know yourself well enough to know what is good for you, for your own balance? And I think that's a really hard, hard, hard thing to expect of most humans, definitely, most, you know, adolescence, people just trying to figure themselves out, it's really hard.
Tracy: I'll give you one last example about what's going on. We used to consider adolescence to be the teenage years. Yeah. And we now have a new definition as a 2019 Adolescence is a time period that's, you, prepubescent timed. It's about eight to nine years old, depending on, eight for girls, nine for boys, and it goes all the way into your 20s, is adolescence. And one of the reasons they've decided to make this huge scope is that part of the definition of adolescence for all mammals, by the way, all mammals go through adolescence, which is kind of funny. Like monkeys and dogs, everything, they are, go through adolescence. But what all adolescents try to do, all species, is they try to figure themselves out, you know, who am I? Who am I in the pack? Who am I in the group? Who am I, am I community? Is there is a lot of boundary setting, and what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, and how far can I go or push, you know, this person or these buttons before I get in trouble or whatever? That's all part of adolescence. The real strange thing that we've discovered now is that adolescence figuring out who you are is lasting longer because before Vivian you would go outside, you'd look at your neighbors, you'd know the kids in your school, and your brain is always comparing and contrasting to other people and other things. How am I like that person? How am I different? How am I similar, how am I different? Who do I want to be? And you had a group of people that helped you decide who you were. Yeah. Now, because of social media, you do not just have your community or your neighbors. You are comparing yourself to everybody in the world. You are comparing yourself to that friend you have somewhere, you know, in Europe, who you've never even met. You're comparing and contrasting. You're looking at their life, and you're trying to say, "Oh I want to be like that, I don't want to be like that." And it takes a lot longer for you to decide who you are. And I find that absolutely fascinating. So the basic advice in life is no life self, and it's taking longer, because we know more people. We know more contexts. And I don't know if in the long run, that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Vivian: Yeah, I think truly knowing yourself is like the hardest thing to do.
Tracy: It's the hardest thing.
Vivian: I feel that's like ever changing as well, right?
Tracy: It is, and that's why it's a lifelong goal. That's what Oracle Delphi was saying. This is what your quest is in life is to figure yourself out. It takes a long time to do that, right? And it takes knowing the other, other people around you, all the different others you have in your world will influence how you chisel away when you decide is you. And so that's a huge it's a huge task. It's a lifelong task. It's pretty ominous, but I think it kind of gets back to this. You very first question. Today was talking about gut feelings, and I think that heart and my very first answer was about know thyself, you know, know that interception, can you read your own body? Do you understand your body and your mind are working together? Do you understand yourself? And that comes little by little. And so understanding is the gut feeling is a positive thing for you, or a negative thing, really depends on you knowing yourself well enough to read your own signals that you're sending to yourself.
Yeah. Oh, that was really interesting, but going back to what we were saying before about cognitive load in like lower cognitive load bees, can having lower cognitive like activities be good as well because it's like a good mix of like high intensity and low intensity. So do you like need that as well? And what you do you say are like some good low intensity cognitive activities. Because like scrolling on your phone is definitely not good.
Vivian：
That’s really interesting. I want to go back to what we were saying earlier about cognitive load. Are low-cognitive-load activities ever good for us? Like, do our brains need a mix of high-intensity thinking and lower-intensity recovery activities? And since scrolling on your phone probably doesn’t count as healthy rest, what would be some better examples?
Tracy: Well, there's some wonderful research called it's something called the default mode Network. And this is basically daydreaming. There's wonderful, wonderful studies that connect daydreaming to creative insight. So they letting your mind go. And so basically, staring out the window are going for a walk or taking a long shower and thinking of nothing, which is impossible, but, you know, just letting it all go, allows you to connect stuff and really creative ways. And so, yeah, that's definitely a wonderful downtime and thank God you can't take your phone in the shower with you, but it seems like that, but finding activities in which you're sort of unconnecting. so that you're giving your brain, you know, the freedom to just sort of connect what it wants to connect and link things together. That's a wonderful thing you could do.
Vivian: Okay, yeah. You spoke to like what I saw a while ago about how people said, like, if you need a reset, just stare at the wall for 15 minutes. Like, you might look psychotic, but it'll work.
Tracy: That's kind of a possibility. Other things that are really very powerful things like them, well, the opposite of mind wandering is to be mind full. So for them people think, I'm going to be mindful, I'm going to sit here and concentrate on the weight of my feet or on the sound or whatever it is, and meditate, that's beneficial. That's really focused attention, though. What we're talking about right now is, no, none of that. Just let your mind go all by itself. And that means with no guidance from a phone, just a good walk in nature is incredibly rejuvenating. I mean, just sort of getting you out of your own headspace is really very powerful thing. And so that could be one thing. one kind of a suggestion.
Vivian: Okay, so last question, 'cause we're running out of time. It's kind of st everything up. Like, what is one thing that young people should understand about how our brain work when we're making decisions from, like, small to big ones?
I would say two things. One is two, number one, Know yourself. You know, take the time to get to know yourself. I mean, I really think that's that's easier said than done, but that's really a big. The other thing is to understand about learning, you know, how is it that your brain receives stimulus, then it checks, you know, for memory systems? Do I already know something about this? Does it invest energy, non invest energy? Just understanding how basic learning mechanisms work and how you get information in your brain and pull it back out, is is huge. And most people don't know, even the most basic things about their brains. And so just understanding that basic mechanism and how heuristics come to be, and then judging whether or not to use them or not becomes a lot easier when you understand yourself.
Vivian: That was great. Thank you so much for all the insight you gave today.
Tracy: Well, I'm gonna throw it back at you. I thank you for even having these questions because I think a lot of us older folks don't even presume that young people care or even ask these questions. So it's really wonderful that you do care and that you are asking the questions, and that you're kind of looking for very practical answers, but well, what do we do with this? Okay, I have a test tomorrow. What's my best approach, or whatever? It's huge that you're asking the questions and thinking about all the different ways that you can maximize your own, you know, optimal performance in your brain and body. And so, thank you for doing this.
Vivian: That’s all for today’s episode of Brain Matters.
One thing I’m taking away from this conversation is that technology itself isn’t the enemy. The real question is whether we’re using it to support our thinking, or using it to avoid thinking altogether.
So the next time you reach for your phone, open ChatGPT, or scroll without thinking, try pausing for a second and asking: am I using this as a tool, or am I offloading the thinking I actually need to practice?
See you next time on Brain Matters.