Is Social Media Changing Our Brains?

Researching this topic, I found two categories. Articles that contained no actual substance and were clearly clickbait, and those that were so full of substance, research studies, and long scientific terms that I imagined someone without an understanding of neurobiology would gaze over. This can be frustrating to anyone who just wants to know how social media affects brain chemistry.

I’m going to explain what happens to our brains in very simple and easy to understand terms. I’m also going to express why I think understanding this is crucial to parents.

I was at my workbench doing workbench things, and as I do sometimes when I am performing a task that is relaxing yet repetitive, I played a show in the background. The show was Peaky Blinders, a recommendation of my fathers. I have only watched a couple of episodes, so, no spoilers since I don’t know anything. The show is set in 1919, post World War I England. I noticed a scene taking place in a pub where no singing was allowed. Later in the show, the creator of the rule asks for a song from a woman.

She asks, “Happy or sad?”

“Sad.”

“It will break your heart,” she warns.

My mind wandered on the idea of a time when singing a song could break a heart. It can still be done, but I fear we are losing that. There are two metrics that are being affected by social media that are obvious to me.

A New Attention Span

The first is an obvious one: attention span. How likely is it an audience would sit captivated by a woman singing a song in a pub, emotionally captivated without pulling out phones halfway through to scroll in today’s society? Have you experienced a friend pulling out their phone unconsciously while you’re in the middle of a story or sharing about difficulty in your day? To understand how attention span is shortened, let’s look at some examples from other shows you may be familiar with.

The Big Bang Theory was a great show featuring four young, highly intelligent university professors with social difficulties. They befriend a woman named Penny, who has some habits that annoy one of the characters, Sheldon. Sheldon tries an experiment in which he gives Penny chocolate any time she does something positive, reinforcing the behavior until she unconsciously repeats this behavior more often. This is called operant conditioning. 

Another example in popular culture appeared on The Office in which Jim offers Dwight a mint every time he reboots his computer. After assumed weeks of repetition, Jim starts his desktop, and at the sound, Dwight sticks his hand out for the mint that was never offered.

It’s dog training. Pavlovian, as it’s often referred from the experiment on dogs performed by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.

Advice given to content creators is simple. Keep your videos under thirty seconds, and you must grab attention within the first two. Scroll for ten minutes, and you’ll receive many reinforcements of the same message—pay attention for thirty seconds at the most. The piece of chocolate is the next new funny video.

How long does the average person spend on social media a day? Two hours and twenty four minutes. Can you imagine if you took two hours and twenty four minutes dedicated to training a dog every day for years? It would be a rock-solid service dog, for sure. You probably want to train him or her with some good stuff, not random useless or even harmful habits or tics. Not with that time investment. And here’s the thing about training a dog: after a short time, the dog doesn’t decide to take action because it wants a treat. It’s trained. It must do the thing when you say the word. The dog doesn’t know why any more than the person could explain why they pulled their phone out in the middle of your conversation or why they stopped paying attention after the first few sentences.

What is worthy of our attention? A recalibration.

The second metric that social media reworks mentally is the level of intensity that holds our interest. That social media feed is made up of what rose to the top out of millions of uploaded videos. Certainly not the best of the best as far as substance or value, but the most attention grabbing. This means videos that scare, enrage, trigger base instincts, or are so funny within the first few seconds that they get rewatched. Comment sections fill up when fights break out, bringing videos that trigger these feelings to the top. What is entertaining gets recalibrated within us. With daily training, the level of intensity needed to hold interest rises to unsustainable levels.

What is being triggered is a mechanism that is connected to our natural survival instinct. The thing that drove us as hunter-gatherers to keep walking and looking for food. We walked for two days and found nothing. Then, just enough food to carry us a little longer. Finally, quite randomly, a mammoth. Jackpot. This behavior loop is called the scarcity loop by Michael Easter, author of the book Scarcity Brain. This looping behavior creates an addiction very easily. It has three parts: Opportunity (to get something of value), unpredictable rewards (not knowing when or how valuable), and quick repeatability (immediately). Most habits don’t get repeated immediately. This loop fits social media perfectly. It’s easy and repeatable to scroll, and any second now, you could see something really great…

For Parents

How is this important as a parent? Several reasons, but I’ll focus on a highlight. Children are learning how to communicate.  As they do this, they rely heavily on feedback to develop a sense of self. The stories of a four-year-old may not be very interesting, and they may also be epic in nature. Your full attention will be requested at random and often inconvenient times. If you’re unable to pay attention for very long and have a high standard for what may interest you, giving this attention will become even more difficult. These requests for attention will be met with the often repeated words silently dreaded by young kids everywhere: “Not right now.”

What will be needed from you is reassurance. A person is asking for this reassurance and direction using the very best skills they have developed up to this point. A very young person is making the request, but still every bit a human being as you are. No less important. Their time is just as important.

So, if we can agree that spending two hours and twenty-four minutes a day training a dog rather than reprogramming our brains with social media would result in an extremely well trained dog, can you imagine what giving two hours and twenty-four minutes of your undivided attention to a child every day would do for their development? Four your relationship? I think the result would be soul healing.