Stone Age Brain, Screen Age Problem - The Truth About Technology and Your Brain with Richard Cytowic
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Hello and welcome to Smart People Podcast, conversations that satisfy your curious mind. Chris Stemp here. Thank you for tuning in. If you're listening to this podcast, you are likely aware of the term technology addiction.

You've probably heard or read many things about the impact that technology has on us, on our children, in the contentious debate about its true effects. And yet, despite all of the information that is surrounding us, not only are we still unclear, but often I don't believe we take it to heart. I don't think we really understand what it means when we hear the idea that

that technology is like a drug. And so what I hope this episode does for you is the same thing it did for me, which is to make me rethink the role of technology, specifically screens and smartphones, in my life and in my kids' lives.

This episode will encourage you to think differently about the way in which we fill our time and its downstream effects of a harmless five minutes scrolling through social media. In fact, I was so moved or motivated by this episode that I not only have made changes such as deleting multiple social media apps,

But I did something I've been wanting to do for years, which is I recorded a short separate podcast about my take on the discussion. What were the key points for me? What got my brain churning? What did I take away? And we're going to release that in the coming days. So first, make sure you're subscribed to this show so that you don't miss it. And second, I'd like to know what you think of this podcast.

extra episode? Is this something you wish we did every time? It'll be short, 10 or 15 minutes once I get done with some quick edits. And it's pretty informal, but I just felt like I had to pause and think about the key moments of that episode and capture them for those who wanted it.

So again, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast. In a few coming days, that extra episode will come out and reach out to us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com to let us know what you think. In this episode, we are talking with Richard Cytoic. Richard is a neurologist and author. His newest book is called Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload.

So let's get into it. Hope you learn something and keep an eye out for that upcoming supplemental episode of Smart People Podcast. Here it is, our conversation with Richard Saitoic on his brand new book, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload. Enjoy. From your perspective, when I ask why are we addicted to our phones, how do you think about that question?

Well, first of all, I approach this problem from the point of view of the brain. Most people look at the external object, the screen, the laptop, the TV, whatever it is, and they think they're in this fight against me versus it, when in fact they need to be thinking about themselves.

And most people don't need to think about the way that they think, and they certainly don't need to think about their brain. They have no need to, but it's my job. It's my profession. So, of course, I take it from that perspective all the time. And when you think about it from that point of view, you start thinking, what's the role of emotion in our thinking?

I also think in terms of engineering, what's the energy cost of anything, doing anything? And what's the energy cost of scrolling through a screen, jumping from one thing to another? And so that's how I landed on the perspective of this addiction from the point of view of the brain.

Yeah. And, you know, it's funny you said people don't need to think about their thinking. They don't need to be thinking about their brain. Might be true. But the person listening definitely does.

The logo for the podcast is the brain. One of the things we cover the most is the brain. I will say, I still think it's maddening how, not just how little we know, but how much we feel like we cannot control it. You know, one of the things with screens is I think,

It's a constant battle of willpower that gets tiring. Is this something we should just give into? Should we accept it? It's not. Well, it doesn't really have anything to do with willpower because you're addicted and everybody knows the physical addiction to alcohol, cocaine, drugs, drugs.

But there are the behavioral addictions. So, you know, shopping, gambling, eating, excessive, you know, compulsive sex. These are all behavioral addictions. And those in the phone, therefore, isn't as a behavioral addiction. And your brain is reacting the same way as it does to, you know, nicotine and alcohol and all the all the physical hard stuff that we're familiar with. So.

You know, you have a phone in your hand and you're scrolling.

Well, when do you stop? Well, you don't stop because the scroll is infinite. There's always something coming on. And so it's designed with the slot machine in mind using what's called positive intermittent reinforcement. Now, everybody knows reinforcement from Pavlov's dog. You know, you train it to salivate when you feed it, then you just ring the bell and it salivates without having the food near it. That's classical conditioning.

Positive intermittent reinforcement is much, much stronger because you get rewards unpredictably and only some of the time. So you're scrolling and you get a you get a hit like, oh, this is interesting. This is funny. Oh, this is sexy, whatever. So you keep going thinking, well, maybe I'll get another one. Let's see. We get an interesting text you get and.

There's no cue that says, stop, you've had enough. It's not like eating. You eat to the point where you stuff yourself. You can't eat anymore. All right. Or most people say, oh, I'm full. I've had enough. And they get away from the table. But there is no cue that tells you to stop scrolling, stop looking at your phone.

So that's one way that we become addicted. And the others are just using it at night, for example, affects our sleep, both because of the blue light that comes from the screen, as well as just the intensity of the light itself. So there's a lot of little things we do that just sort of nudges to keep wanting to be

Look at look at our screens and the people who design them. They know this. The companies hire psychologists and behavioral economists that because they know that there are only fourteen hundred and forty minutes in a day and they fight fiercely for your eyeballs. They want to keep you on their platform as long as possible. Why? Because your engagement gets earns the money.

You know what I love about doing this? You just talked to us for about a minute and a half. I now have an entire episode worth of questions that I hadn't planned. I mean, it's incredible. So let's let's go through a couple. I'm glad I stimulated your imagination. You always do. I mean, so here's the thing. Let's first talk about Stone Age brain. You mentioned there is no what was the word used? There's nothing that signals us to stop.

Is that because, for example, you equated it to food? Food has been something since we started evolving, we have always needed it. Therefore, a body new, we need to put some kind of guard. Food is what we call a basic reinforcer, just like sleep is. Right. And so there's a physiological guard to it because we have evolved to know we need to stop at some point and start at some point.

However, is it fair to say that the reason this is such a problem today is because of the newness of the novelty of something like a screen or endless scrolling? There's nothing built into us. Yes, novelty has a lot to do with it. We have evolved to respond to any change in prevailing circumstances. So novelty, by definition, is something new, and we just zoom in on it.

Our attention just gloms on to whatever is new and shiny and moving or whatever it might be doing. And it could be, you know, in the Stone Age, it could be dangerous. It could be the scent of smoke or the scent of an animal or something like that.

So, you know, we are primed to do this. And I use the term Stone Age brain because today's brain is no different from that of our ancestors 3 million years ago. Technology is exponential in its growth, okay? But evolution doesn't work that way. Okay?

It works by accretion. Once it finds something that works good enough, it keeps it. So it's sort of like a New England add-on house where you add on one room after another and it looks sort of funky, but that's what they do up there. And this is what the brain does.

I think people, especially today and especially those listening, have an idea. They could write this off, right? They know, yeah, the brain's the same as it was a long time ago and we're wired for novelty. That's probably something they're aware of. But if you really stop to think about it, which is the goal of this podcast, and Richard, I'm saying this in hopes you can clarify where I'm correct in this and where I'm not.

Historically speaking, evolutionarily speaking, we live our lives in a way where there isn't a lot of novelty. We live in the same tribes with the same people. We do the same things. And therefore, our brain says we need to put extra resources towards when we notice something new in the environment. Is that preeminent?

pretty fair right off the bat, just that description? I think so. And it takes energy to do that, to focus on something new. And that's okay if it's just one thing. But when we flip from A to B to C to A back to D to F, or looking at different screens, going from one thing to another is the most expensive thing that the brain does. I mentioned from an engineering perspective that

The brain is an energy hog. It uses 20% of the calories that we ingest every day, but it only accounts for 2% of the body's mass. And most of that energy goes towards maintaining the physical structure by pumping sodium and potassium ions across membranes. And that leaves very, very little left for thought, which is what everybody wants to know about. So we don't have a big margin

And that's why it's impossible really to do two things at once. You cannot multitask because multitasking means you're going from one thing to another.

Our working memory is limited. The working memory is where we hold the fact of the moment, okay? And it's limited, as shown by the famous fiasco at the Oscars when they announced the wrong best picture. Why? Because Andrew Cunanan from PricewaterhouseCoopers was tweeting about Emma Stone as she walked off the stage when he should have been queuing up the next envelope.

So that shows that, you know, then they had this disaster. Well, this happens to us too, because the working memory cannot hold two things at the same time. So the best advice I have, which I've had for some businesses, is do one thing at a time. You will actually be more productive and more rested if you work on one thing to completion and then go on to the next thing, rather than trying to do two, three or five things all at once.

So if the experience of novelty is energy intensive, then is it fair to say one of the reasons we are walking zombies most of the time, many of us, is because we are passively subjecting ourselves to novelty constantly.

Oh, sure. Walk down a walk down the street like New York, for example, where they have it's the advertising industry calls it outdoor furniture. So you've got signs and names of buildings and stores that are six stories high. And you walk down the street and you encounter these kiosks.

whose content is changing every 10 seconds and rotating ads and all that. And this is why I have a whole chapter called Silence is an Essential Nutrient, is that our brains need a rest and we don't give them that rest. And even if we wanted to give them, we're often in environments where it's impossible not to look at this stuff. That's why I call screens are like secondhand smoke.

And everybody has experiences in a waiting room or an airport lounge. There's some screen showing the news or a show or whatever. And you try not to look at it and even trying not to look. It takes energy. And so these screens demand to be looked at. It's like it's like the alien character that just grabs hold of you and won't let go.

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Let's talk about this for a second, because you mentioned walking through New York City.

I always recall going to a mall being exhausting. Like genuinely, I go to one, this is true story. Like I go to one Macy's and I'm, I'm genuinely fatigued and I never quite knew why. And I think it's the stimulation, right? It's just too much. Is there a difference between my experience in a Macy's and my experience on a screen? Well, the reason you get tired, you get worn out, uh,

in Macy's and you think, oh, this is too much, is because that issue there is choice exhaustion. There are too many choices to make and choosing between this, that. I mean, so you walk through all these racks of dresses and suits and jogging where it just goes on and on and on and on. And you have to choose each time. Is this something I'm interested or not? And these little choices

these little decisions really weigh up. And so that's why you're feeling fatigued. It's a, it's like you go to the grocery store and it's like, there are 45 different kinds of bread. So like it's too many. And this, this is, there's great research on this. It's called choice fatigue. You know, I can, if I've show you four kinds of jelly,

for breakfast, that's easy. Okay. But if you have shelves that are showing you 80 different brands and flavors, then you've got to stand there and decide, well, what do I want? And do I want this kind? Do we want sugar-free? Do I want the fruit spread? I mean,

It's exhausting. Okay. So that's the choice. So that's the choice. And so then, so the screen is a different thing. I mean, the screen is saturating your energy energy because there's no end in sight. And we're, we're looking at it and it interrupts us all the time. So, I mean, you know, if you get a push notification or your email, you have an email arrival and you've got it set up to ding each time you get a message, you're,

That's bad. Turn those notifications off. Put the phone face down because even when the screen lights up saying you've got a push notification, your peripheral vision sees that and you're already off to the races in terms of your attention has been interrupted. And research shows that, you know, if...

When you do get interrupted, let's say at an office and a colleague says, oh, I just need a minute to ask a question. Well, it takes anywhere from 11 to 28 minutes to get back to the task that you are working on. This is why open offices and open cubicles are just a minefield in terms of productivity goes. It sounds like the issue with technology, the technology itself causes multiple problems.

downstream effects that impact our brain negatively. So it could be the novelty of it. It could be the task switching nature of it. It could be the all encompassing focus. It's not just one aspect of let's call it a phone for simplicity that negatively impacts our brain. It's what makes up this technology. Multi there's multifactorial nature of its impact on our brain. Right. I mean, we're using this phone. I mean, the,

This thing in my hand is more powerful than Star Trek. It's just fantastic. And it's a tool, but we use it in multiple ways. We don't just use it to make a phone call. We use it to search Google. We use the calculator. We use it to see what the weather is, do FaceTime with people. So we're using it in many, many, many different ways.

And that's a good thing. I mean, it's a wonderful tool, but we also have to know when to put it down, when to turn it off.

And, you know, I'm currently away at a Nardis colony and I've had to put my autoresponders on that say, you know, I am unavailable. I will not be reading your email. If you want me, email me after December 11th and I'll look at it then, but not now. I have to protect my time in order to do creative work. And it sounds harsh sometimes.

I know, but you have to learn to say no. And part of the no is I'm going to turn my phone off. Now, people think, oh, no, no, I have to be available at every moment. You know, I remember when I was a resident in neurology, we had beepers on our belt. Oh, man, that was such a status symbol. I meant, hey, man, I'm important. I have to be available at any time. Now, being unavailable is the greatest luxury.

You know, not being the privilege of not being disturbed and not being interrupted. So let me go back to my chapter on silence is an essential nutrient. And if you look at the definition of nutrients, it actually is. We are restored by nature.

the quiet, the sounds of nature, as opposed to the soundscape of your living room with the TV on or the office with everybody babbling away or outside on a busy street. And everybody knows that nature is restorative. I mean, go walk in the woods or take a walk in the beach and you come away refreshed. Do it without your phone, of course. And you come away refreshed. Part

Part of the reason is that nature doesn't have a very varied color palette. It doesn't look like Walt Disney at all. Other than the fall when the leaves are changing, the color palette of nature is pretty subdued. Okay. It's not, it's not giving, it's not coming at us with all this novelty. And when I say, you know, go to be in nature, it doesn't have to be, you know, a national park, right?

go sit on a bench under a tree and eat your lunch or just take a walk down the street. And instead of looking at your phone, everybody's looking at their phone. They walk into lampposts. We've seen this happen all the time. Look up at the buildings, look at the sky. And another way to get rest is to do what the Dutch call Nixon, which means nothing. Look out the window.

for 20, 30 seconds, look at the birds, look at the trees, look at the sky. That's doing nothing. And it doesn't take long. You only need to do this for 20, 30 seconds. And it's like throwing a circuit breaker that says, stop, stop, stop the wheel spinning. Give me a break. Let's reset here.

Why do we need to stop? Why take this 30 second break? Uh, because if you don't, then you get what we have today, which is crazy people, uh, and people, people who are just hyper, hyper focused and wound up, uh, and can't sleep and frazzled because they're trying to do, uh, too many things at once. Uh, there's, there's a great lesson. There's a great example from, from, uh,

zen buddhism i practice a variety called soto zen which means serene reflection so just sitting and trying not to think or neither to think nor not to think that's the essence of it and i remember the monk saying people say i don't have time i don't have time to sit and do this and he says well everybody has 30 seconds and so if you go out the you go out the uh

we go at the front door and get your keys. You have a little stick of incense or something there and you just touch it to your forehead and you say homage to the Dharma, homage to the Sangha, homage to the Buddha. And you have meditated just there in 15 seconds. And then you walk out the door and you're refreshed because that's another way of throwing the circuit breaker.

So it doesn't take a lot of time to do that. And you can do it standing in line at the grocery store or at the bank or wherever. What is the brain's intended or designed way of being? If you think about an average day, but in the best way, what environment is the brain designed to operate within? What would that look like? And let's show the contrast to today's world.

Well, you'd have to go back to, you know, three million years ago, you had people and I actually opened the book with the preface of hunter gatherers and all that. So you dealt, first of all, it's a very social book.

So you're dealing with a very small number of people, two dozen, maybe three or four dozen at the very most. Everybody knows each other. Everybody's interacting. I mean, Aristotle said man is a political animal, and he didn't mean that we're interested in matters of state, but that we live in a polis, which is a city.

So we grew up in small clans. The background of nature was pretty predictable. There wasn't much change that went on. I mean, the big change were the seasons and the position of the stars overhead. So that's not boring, but it's just it's just the way that we grew up.

The brain is extremely efficient. We're great at making it because if we're a decision maker, we have to. Every time everything that comes up, we've got to decide, do we go right? Do we go left? How do I avoid that panther that I see down there? Yeah, so it is designed for novelty. Oh, for problem solving that we really excel at making decisions based on incomplete information.

That's one of the greatest things that we do. Some people might call it intuition. Some people are much, much better at this than average. But all of us are great at making decisions based on incomplete information. So it fills in the blanks a lot. It knows how to anticipate. And how does it anticipate? By virtue of the experience that it's already had living in the world.

This is what a baby does. A baby, once it gets to be on the move and is crawling all over the place and it puts everything in its mouth and it's undergoing a visual and tactile apprenticeship with the world.

And that's how it learns and explores what it means to be living in a space. And this is why I say that an iPad is the absolute worst babysitter of all, because you're putting the screen of mediated images in front of its developing central vision.

I mean, a newborn has visual acuity of about 2,400, and yet nothing fascinates it more than a human face. You see its pupils dilate, its smiles and coos. Every parent and grandparent knows this. And then around age three or four, color vision develops.

And then the insecurity gradually comes down to about 2020 in the later months of life. And so if you're putting a screen in front of it in a bassinet or the iPod A trainer or the back of a car seat, you're robbing it of a chance to see what the real world is like. And also to socialize. The brain is a great social instrument. It wants to connect with other people.

So instead of slapping, and I know parents say, oh, it's the only thing that works, only thing that keeps them quiet. Well, that may be, but it's also the thing that's really robbing their development.

So instead, play with them. Play the games that you played as a youngster. You know, play patty cake and so big. And then later on, imaginative games like grocery store or restaurant. And then it's amazing. I mean, I have two grandnephews. And it was just fantastic to watch their imagination at that age. And it's like, oh, my God, they're making connections all the time. Mm-hmm.

The reason I asked the question about like what the brain was kind of designed for in the world it would live in or it used to live in versus today is because I know scientists and researchers such as yourself often can't make claims without abundance of data. But but I can I can make some inferences. Right. You're allowed to. Yeah. And what I'm feeling here is.

A lot of us are walking around in in states of opposite sides of the spectrum, either constant fatigue or hypervigilance. And that makes sense if we're saying what we were designed for is this

We wake up and there's a lot of predictability in the day, a lot of social interaction, which we're naturally wired for a lot of nature, which moves slowly, which moves predictably. And then moments of interruption or novelty, as well as leveraging that built up energy we have for tough problems, problem solving innovation. That's how we were designed. Right. And that puts us right at our peak.

But today we are, because of this bombardment and almost this hijacking of our brains, we either are overwhelmed and fatigued. So we, we, we absorb it. We try to understand it and it just, just exhausts us or we,

We aren't really focusing on it. We're just aware of it. And it leads to this hypervigilance. And that's what I see the most in people is one end of the spectrum, but nobody kind of, or very few in that middle where we were designed to be.

How do you feel about that? I think that was very well put. Can I quote you? I mean, say whatever you want. You asked what we're designed to do. Well, from an evolutionary standpoint of view, we're designed to survive, which we do by making shelter and eating. We're designed to procreate, which we do by finding a mate.

And then once we do that, once you have your children, once you reproduce, evolution doesn't care about you one whit. You can just go fall off a cliff as far as it concerns. But we are programmed, thanks to oxytocin, we're so attracted to the children that we reproduce that we have this protective influence when I raise them, et cetera. So then, you know, the millennia go by and now we're doing things, you know, we've taken care of all that.

And so what do we do with all this energy? Well, that's where creativity comes in. People say, you know, I like to write books. I mean, it's really, really hard to write particularly long forms. But it's so pleasant and so rewarding that we do it. You know, why does a 14-year-old girl practice the violin all day long? Well, there's something about it that she really likes and she's good about it and she gets...

positive reinforcement back that says, you know, bravo, the audience is clapping and all that. So we like to do, we like to do hard things. I mean, we develop athletics to challenge our bodies and, you know, puzzles to challenge our wits. We don't have any tasks that help us develop our emotions, for example.

Uh, and that's really peculiar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe the social interactions to an extent, I, or the raising of the kids. I don't know, but like, let me explain Richard kind of why I'm stuck on this loop. And if those listening, we're recording this pretty close after Thanksgiving, it's December 2nd. You know, many people had off for the past few days and are now returning to work, myself included. And, uh,

I always find this to be the case after days off. I feel energized. I feel calmer. I feel focused. All the ways I want to feel. Over this break, every day for at least six hours, I would go down into my basement and me and my dad are finishing my basement. So like hard work, two by fours, framing, electric, I mean, thinking, plans, like

We're amateurs, so it takes a lot of work. And I absolutely loved every second. And so although physically demanding, psychologically rewarding, and I feel refreshed and energized. I know today's Monday. I've got six hours of meetings in front of me. I can almost predict how I'm going to feel in four days after the chaos of modern life returns.

And so what we're talking about is directly explaining my internal experience, which I think is also many people's current experience if they were to listen to this on December 2nd. And what I think you're doing, this unintended consequence of us talking today is explaining why that is the break from the chaos, the break from potentially the overload of

which comes for many of us through our profession where we're required to be on. And so that's why I'm really stuck and enjoying this idea of energy utilization, because I wonder why am I more tired sitting at a computer for six hours than I am lifting two by fours and framing and going up and down ladders? It is this

mental fatigue that feels all encompassing. Yes. I mean, well put. And you're doing something that's rewarding, that's novel, that you know you're going to feel good about when it's done and say, oh, look at this, you know, and look what I did. So all part of that is part of resilience, part of emotional intelligence is that you're

you're able to get the feedback from this effort and know that, yeah, it may be hard. You may cut your fingers, but it's worth it. And the reward is really quite big. So you get a big dopamine hit at the end of it all. Right. Enduring it as well, I should say. Well, so, and let's contrast that with, as we stick to this idea of kind of energy and the impact of screens on it and how that aligns to our brains, right?

Why is it then when we are the most tired, do we often then lock into our screen? I mean, the idea of doom scrolling, which is so commonplace today, is essentially when I'm laying down, I scroll for hours and get lost in, let's call it TikTok. Yeah. We don't leave that feeling more energized, but we do it anyways. What is it accomplishing? Well, I mean, we may feel tired and exhausted.

buzzed out. And so we think, oh, I'll relax looking at this. I'll take a break. You think it's a break, but it's not a break. It's more of a drain on your energy. And we don't think that. We don't expect this thing to be sucking our energy out of it, but it does. So, you know, you're much better off, you know, lay down and stare at the ceiling. Notice all the little shadows on the ceiling. That'll leave you much more rested than doom scrolling will.

What are we seeking and what is actually happening?

We're getting that. It's the pause that refreshes and it's not Pepsi. It's just, it's doing nothing. So look at the, look at the spots on your ceiling. Look at the stripes, stripes on the drapery, whatever it takes. If you close your eyes,

Your mind's likely to wander, and that's no good. People think meditating means closing your eyes. When I meditate, so does Zen, is you keep your eyes open. You cast them down on the floor or the wall or wherever you're meditating. But...

you don't close your eyes. You're just, you're looking at nothing, a blank space. And that doesn't have a lot of pattern to it, et cetera. Because if you do close your eyes, you're going to start to daydream and you're going to be all over the place again, flitting from this, that, and the other. Uh,

William James, the father of psychology, called attention. He said, it's like the flight and perching of a bird. And when you think about how your mind operates, that's how it does it. You're thinking about this, then you're thinking about that, then you're thinking about this, and you're going boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

Why do we seek out our screens? What's happening in our brains at those moments of break or fatigue when we should be staring at the ceiling? Well, part of it is the addiction that you are addicted to the device and the experience. We've come to associate screens with pleasure and with novelty. And so we go to it thinking, oh, I'm going to get something. I'm going to get a good hit from this, you know, or I'm going to look at pornography or I'm going to do this, that or the other. But

And you expect that it's going to give you some kind of a reward that's going to make your fatigue that you just escaped from all better. It's going to it's going to be like an emotional bandaid. And it's not something I wrote down and I highlighted. And this kind of brings us back at the very beginning of our conversation. You equated and I'm paraphrasing here, but the phone to drugs such as alcohol or tobacco, whatever it might be.

I think we've all heard that. However, because you were coming at it at the start of this conversation, specifically from the experience of the brain, is it fair to say that the brain is experiencing a phone neurochemically similar to the way it would experience a

a drug as we think of it. Oh, like, like cigarette or cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and there's been studies with this, uh, you know, physiology and scanning and all that is that the brain activations are just the same as they are for, for alcohol and shopping and, uh, addictive sex. We are, you know, we have, we have basically one, one reward circuit, uh,

And that's what gets hijacked. So reward and anticipation. You know, what is so jarring about this is, again, there's so many common phrases today, especially for those who read and listen to podcasts such as like the phone is a drug. But if you really stop to think about

The impact on the brain, the thing that we use to sense and be and feel is almost directly the same as something as cocaine or gambling. Then the impact it has upon children becomes even more stark because all of the things we're talking about have age restrictions except technology, which is being almost often touted as a benefit to children.

And here's the paradox and the hypocrisy is all the Silicon Valley gurus who invent this stuff won't let their children near it. Then the nannies have to sign nondisclosure agreements that they will not be using their phone anytime around their children whatsoever or else they'll be fired.

And, you know, a huge number of executives send their children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula. And the Waldorf education, there's a number of these schools around. Their philosophy is no technology until, I don't know, around the age of 12 or so.

And the kids and they're busy with physical activities, going outside, playing with one another, learning how to take turns, settling their own differences, learning how to negotiate with other people. They know how to talk to one another, to their teachers, to their peers. Now, the kids don't miss technology at all. It's the parents who freak out. No, I have to be able to reach kids.

You know, Laura, at any time, it's like, no, you don't. This is a thing in Germany. It's called kid-a-fart outings in which the teachers take these youngsters, sometimes as young as three years old, and they take them out into the woods for a few days, for a long weekend. And they tell the parent, there's no technology allowed. And they tell the parents, we'll call you if we need to, period, period.

click. And the parents, of course, have been through this thing in their own childhood and they understand. And they're glad to have a weekend away.

And the kids learn to negotiate and they roast sausages over the campfire. They sing songs. It's all a thing for socialization. The older people, older kids help the younger ones, etc. The French have the same thing. It's called classe verte, the green classroom.

And we don't. It might help. But the Waldorf School does some of that, is that their kids are involved with felt work, with sculpture, modeling clay, etc. And

This whole notion, oh, they need to learn how to do this to succeed in business. Well, by the time they actually get to, I don't know, high school or college and need the technology, whatever they learned at the age of three is going to be obsolete. So what's the point? Wait until they actually need it. Can I go back to a point you made about addiction? Let's do it. Let's do it.

So people say, oh, I'm not addicted to my phone. You know, I can put it down anytime. Well, this is exactly what addicts say. I can stop drinking. I can stop smoking. I can stop taking, you know, crack cocaine. You know, I just but I don't want to. Well, if you don't think you're addicted to your phone, OK, do this. Turn it off. Put it in a drawer somewhere and then tell me how many days you can go without looking.

looking at it okay right most people aren't going to be able to go an hour right they're going to start jonesing for a fix yeah uh just like an addict says god i can't wait to get that needle in my arm you know you're really making me think about this i've got three kids uh one luckily is too young to have been introduced to technology at least in this household but the other two are not

And I know my proclivity to technology. Let me ask you this. What is the downside? Let's say for an adult, I think for kids, it seems a little bit more obvious, but for an adult to use their technology for quote unquote productivity purposes, uh,

relatively often throughout a day, as opposed to if we put it in a drawer or we went on a retreat or something like that, because we can't live that way. So I'm trying to find what is the optimal way of doing it.

Well, the optimal way of doing it is to develop some self-control, some self-awareness. And this is part of emotional intelligence, that you become aware of how you're feeling with these devices. You become aware of how often you're attracted to it, how much time you waste with it. Is it really making you more productive? Well, it depends how you're using it. So

use it intelligently and realize that there are times when it's best to put it face down out of, out of reach. There are studies showing that when, when you put the phone in the next room, then the subjects, they're all sort of okay. But when it's just there,

even knowing it's there, interferes with their productivity almost as much as if they're able to look at it during this test. Yeah. It's spooky. No, I could imagine. I'm thinking about it from the perspective of the control. It's almost as if

It's primarily social media. Now, I could be just projecting here. I mean, that's that's an oxymoron, but social media because it's not social at all. It's isolating. People feel isolated and lonely and depressed. But from the addiction component, you know, if it was just if you were using it for email and reading and podcasts and just kind of things like that, that get us by in today's society and that only conversations, etc.,

Maybe that's the goal to just leave it at that. I, well, I think that gets an awful lot done. Uh, I think it makes you very productive, uh,

And if you decide that you're going to like me, I look at my emails around four or five in the morning. I get up early. I'm older than we do that. So I look at my emails early in the morning and then again in the late afternoon. And that's it. And, you know, I'm one of the most easily reachable people on the planet. If you if you need me, you'll find me.

But I'm not going to be looking at emails all day long. And I don't have the little ding that's making a noise every time the message comes in. I have my outlook closed. So and if something is important enough, I'll get to it. It'll get to me. What's the rush? If there's a real emergency, you know, somebody will call me on the phone.

Yeah. And the funny thing is we have these smartphones and nobody uses them to make calls anymore. I know. It's all, it's all, it's a, we, you know, text. Yeah. Young people are terrified of doorbells. They don't know what to do. They expect the text to say, we're here outside. Yeah. Yeah. Telephones are the same way. A telephone ring. Oh my God. I don't know. They don't know what to do. Yeah. And what if they do answer it, they don't know how to talk to people.

Right. This is what Frank Rudy wrote a wonderful thing about the college snowflakes, his little darlings go away to their freshman year and they're just there. They fall apart. They don't know how to talk to people. They don't know how to make small talk. They don't know how to solve problems for themselves. You know, we talk about in critical thinking and connecting the dots. Well, if you don't have any dots to connect, you're not going to know too much.

It's one thing to be able to Google facts, you know, how tall is Mount Kilimanjaro? But if you don't know what you want to know in the first place, then what are you going to look up? And so people who read widely and who interact widely with other people gather experience as they get older.

They have a lot of dots to draw on, which is why somebody like me, you know, who's creative, I'm walking along and I have a stray thought that I filed away in my brain a long time. And all of a sudden something else happens. I said, oh, wait, that has that relates to this thing over here, which I haven't thought about in years. And like, boom, I make this connection, you know.

That's how I got involved in synesthesia, which is what I'm really known for. I was reading a book in the sub-basement of the library about this mnemonicist, a memory expert. The reason that he could remember things effortlessly and limitlessly is that he had a five-fold synesthesia. It is all his senses were connected together.

and I thought, oh, what a great word. Anesthesia, no sensation, synesthesia, joined or coupled sensations. I love words, of course, and I just filed that in the back of my mind until years later, a new neighbor who taught lighting design at the School of the Arts invited me to dinner to meet some people, and he said, oh, we'll be a few minutes. There's not a

there's not enough points on the chicken. Now his, his friends laughed and said, Oh my God, what are you smoking this time? And he turned to me and said, well, you're a neurologist. Maybe you understand when I taste something, I also feel it on my face and in my hands, a feeling sweeps down my arm and I feel weight, shape, texture, et cetera. And I said, Oh, you have synesthesia. See, I was just trying to be polite. And he looked at me and said, you mean there's a name for what I do?

And I thought, how could he not know? And that's when the light bulb went off on my head that said, this could be something important. So that was a dot, you see, and was connected to something I had read in the basement years ago. And the connection started a defining feature of my career for the past 40 years. Let me just pause here for a second, Richard. I get all excited.

First, we got to think about what our brain is designed for. And that's why I love the way you kind of talk about it in your book, The Stone Age Brain. We interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, who really brought this home for me, this idea that if you looked at a cadaver from tens of thousands of years ago and one of today, you could not tell the difference. I love that analogy because it really highlights we're the same person

are the same makeup, but in a vastly different world, the equivalent of being on Mars and Earth, genuinely, right? Okay. So we're operating off an iOS system, right? Designed for tens of thousands, millions of years ago, okay?

Well, why does that matter? Well, it doesn't unless you have goals. If you have hopes and dreams, you want to feel good. You want to accomplish. You want to, you know, which everyone listening does. You want to do something intentional with your time on this planet. Okay. So now I'm thinking first we have to identify that, but then realize, and this is the beauty that without intentional design of our day and awareness of the things you're talking about,

We can easily be manipulated or redirected because of the pull that technology has on that outdated operating system. Does that sound fair so far? I mean, is that so far so good? Okay. Because think about yourself, right? You're writing a book. You're in the woods, cut off from technology. Well, why? Why does this matter? Why are we talking about this? Why is it important?

And again, because to do the things we want to do, we need to operate at the things we're best at. And what you just described through synesthesia in my mind is creativity and innovation is what humans are best at, right? It is creating the currently non-existing, right? That's what we do. And the best definition of creativity I ever heard was combining disparate thoughts.

Just as you said. That's the definition of metaphor is seeing the similar in the dissimilar and the human brain excels at creating metaphor of seeing connections between this and that, that don't seem to make much sense, but there is a connection there. And so in synesthesia, a woman says, well, I know it's two because it's white. So there's something about whiteness and two-ness that's the same in her brain. And, uh,

The rest of us who are outside of that think, wow, that's so weird. We don't see that. But we do it all the time. We excel at making connections. And that is the definition of metaphor, seeing the similar in the dissimilar. And let's bring it back to your book. And what we're talking about is it's really hard to do that or to accomplish intentionally or to live at your best and feel your best. If you are constantly thinking

taking drugs, exogenous drugs to modify this old system. Yeah, but daily life is like a drug. I mean, it's marvelous to be alive. There's just so much. I don't understand people who say that they're bored. Because how could you be bored? There is so much to do. And I mean, you are a person who is

highly curious and inquisitive by nature. I mean, that's obvious. So when you learn something new, you're like a kid in a candy store. Yeah. And you can never know, and you can never get enough of it. And I'm the same way too, is like, Oh, something is new. It is just great to be alive. Now I don't have children. So evolution should have gotten rid of me a long time ago. I'm totally useless, but I'm doing something I think useful in terms of society and

And so evolution does that as well, is that when you look at families and like the aunts and uncles who are not married and all that, they're contributing in some way. So it's really sly that when you look at population genetics,

the population as a whole, um, you see these trends. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if it makes you feel any better and you just, you just said it, one of the best, um, ideas I've ever heard for why we actually are designed to live to 80, 90, a hundred is because the benefit of grandparents. So I did hear this theory, right? That, that, you know, uh,

Maybe we have evolved to live longer past the point of procreation because we can help the younger generations, which I'm going to choose to believe that because I don't want to believe now that I have kids, I can be discarded.

Well, you know, and you talked about creativity. A creative person just keeps going no matter how old they are. I mean, Verdi wrote Falstaff when he was in his late 70s. How hard is it to write an opera? Pretty hard. All right. But he did it. Wagner did the same thing. You see, you know, poets in their 90s, they just keep on going. Why? Because they're

They have to do it. There's something and this is my own experience is that I cannot not write. I just have to do it. It's like, I mean, the pen and the paper, it's like a drug for me, you know, or I have an idea. I'm full of ideas, but something comes up and think, oh, that could really work, you know.

And so you do it. And it's what it is. It's a method of discovery. So, you know, if I knew what I wanted to say in the beginning, I wouldn't have any interest in writing a book, none whatsoever. I already know the answer. But in the course of writing it, I am discovering what I think is.

You see, and that's the surprise. And then sometimes I'll go back, even look, even one of my textbooks and I'll read something. And I think, who wrote this? I didn't. I didn't write. Did I write this? Really? And this is what creative people say is that they will tell you that they are not the author of the thing that everybody attributes to them as their best skill.

You know, whether they're a musician or an actor or whatever, you're just in this zone and you're doing it. You're not thinking deliberately about it. Oh, and to go back to your podcast listening, you know, so yes, you can listen to podcasts while you drive or you walk the dog or you're cooking dinner. Well, all those activities are very automatic behavior. You're not having to think a hell of a lot while you're chopping up celery. Okay.

So you can listen to the podcast and it's not distracting you from this automatic task.

Knitting is another, you know, listen to a podcast while you knit or crochet. That's, you know, that's a muscle memory that's at work. And you can, your attention can then go to the podcast. Yeah, I love that. Listen, Richard, I know we're at time. So I, against my own wishes, I'm going to let you go here. Before we do, two last things. One is,

For those that made it this far, what are your like top couple, maybe one or two recommendations on now what? Right. We kind of understand the impact of screens and the drugs and all of that. We talked about take a break, stare at a ceiling instead. What's what's your other favorite one or two things to do to start kind of removing this issue from our from our lives? It's what I tell my medical students. Go to bed.

The best thing, you know, just stop everything. Go to bed at the same time, roughly the same time every night. Get up at the same time, even on the weekends. Getting enough sleep gives you the most bang for your buck.

You'll wake up rested and not frazzled. And particularly if you haven't been scrolling on your phone before you go to bed or put the phone under your pillow, put it across the room. If you use it as an alarm clock where you don't see it. So I was that would be the best thing. The other would be do one thing at a time.

Three, don't forget to socialize, be with other people, talk to other people, try to maybe pick up the phone. Speaking on the phone conveys an awful lot more information than text does.

We don't see body language as we do on a one-on-one interaction, but we're hearing the tone of voice, which carries in the pauses and the process of thinking, the ums and the ahs. That carries a huge amount of information. And it feels good to speak to somebody on the phone and the back and forth.

Well, Richard, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I've kept you longer than I promised. I know you got things to do, so I'm going to let you go. Before I do, the name of the book is Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload.

everything we talked about today, plus much more detail. You said you're an easily reachable person. Where would you like people to go if they want to learn more, find you, you know, read from other stuff you have, et cetera? You can go to my website, which is Cytoic.net. That's C-Y-T-O-W-I-C.net. And then if you really want to know more, you can just Google me and you'll find me.

You'll find him. That's how I did. Richard, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you so much for being on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. A thank you to this week's guest, Richard Saitoic. The episode was hosted, as always, by Chris Stemp and produced by yours truly, John Rojas. Richard's book, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Coping with Digital Distraction and Century Overload, is available wherever books are sold.

Now for the quick housekeeping items. If you'd ever like to reach out to the show, you can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com or follow us on Blue Sky at Smart People Podcast. And of course, if you want to stay up to date with all things Smart People Podcast, head over to the website smartpeoplepodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter.

All right. That's it for us this week. Make sure you stay tuned because we've got a lot of great interviews coming up and we'll see you all next episode.