How Technology Depletes Your Attention | Dr. Marc Berman & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | What I think is so important about your work is that you've identified at least one and clearly several ways that we can reset our levels, maybe even improve our abilities at directed attention.

00:00:13.600 | And again, I don't want to demonize social media, but social media is, it's a commercial product that we're engaging in and we get returns in likes, follows and some people get paid on there.

00:00:28.420 | But for the most part, it's a business and we're the customer and they're the owner.

00:00:36.060 | Right. And I'm just saying it's using directed attention.

00:00:39.040 | Like it's not a restful activity is basically, so you can choose to spend your directed attention allocation on that, but then you're going to have less, you know, for your work or for other things.

00:00:50.760 | So is it fair to say that low cognitive demand activities are not always restorative?

00:00:57.840 | That's right.

00:00:58.600 | I think people need to really understand that and hear that, I think because when I think about like, okay, like yesterday, I recorded a solo on the podcast.

00:01:05.480 | And those are extremely, I don't use a teleprompter except for ads because those have proper wording for legal reasons.

00:01:11.320 | The amount of attentional demand is immense.

00:01:14.080 | Right.

00:01:15.020 | So I didn't do this, but in the past, I would finish up, go home and I would, you know, I find that scrolling social media, it feels relaxed.

00:01:22.780 | You can do it reclined.

00:01:23.780 | Right, right.

00:01:24.160 | If I just want, it's passive participation.

00:01:26.420 | Right, right.

00:01:26.780 | Unless I'm posting or commenting.

00:01:28.000 | Right.

00:01:28.220 | I was like, you know, maybe use my thumb.

00:01:29.780 | Yeah.

00:01:30.120 | You know?

00:01:31.180 | Right.

00:01:31.540 | Like, you know, and like some things, but even though it's low cognitive demand, it's draining.

00:01:37.980 | That's what you're saying.

00:01:38.820 | Exactly.

00:01:39.300 | And I mean, that's, you know, Steve and I wrote this paper back in 2010, you know, then it was still television was still the kind of low cognitive load activity that we thought was not restful.

00:01:51.940 | And there's all these studies on television that people watching television after they watch for a couple hours, they report being fatigued and being irritable.

00:02:00.100 | Does cognitive performance decline after watching?

00:02:02.100 | Cognitive performance decline.

00:02:03.180 | So, so it's just, even though it's low cognitive load, it's, it's, it's depleting.

00:02:09.980 | It's depleting of directed attention.

00:02:12.060 | Well, I'm really extreme about this stuff and I'm, I'm excited to be able to incorporate more knowledge toward creating better opportunities for directed attention to the right things and not depleting that.

00:02:24.280 | I mean, I'm so maniacal that like before I do a solo, I'll tell my assistant when he comes to the house in the morning, like, please don't talk to me today.

00:02:32.380 | I'm sorry, I don't want to be rude, but I need to keep rehearsing it in my head.

00:02:35.420 | Yeah.

00:02:35.700 | I need to keep not the specific words, but the, the concepts in mind.

00:02:39.380 | Right, right.

00:02:39.700 | I'm literally thinking about like the structure of the vagus nerve.

00:02:41.900 | Yeah.

00:02:42.140 | I constantly for usually about 48 hours before in the same way that like you would obsess over something.

00:02:49.680 | Right.

00:02:50.020 | And then once it's done, it's done.

00:02:51.760 | Right.

00:02:52.340 | But anything that's introduced there.

00:02:54.420 | Right.

00:02:54.740 | Like, like having to make a decision about what to eat for breakfast.

00:02:57.900 | Yeah.

00:02:58.420 | Is interference.

00:02:59.340 | Right.

00:02:59.900 | The brain is amazing, but we're not that great at using our brain to its best advantage always.

00:03:06.500 | Yeah.

00:03:07.900 | Or our bodies.

00:03:08.720 | Well put.

00:03:11.440 | Yeah.

00:03:12.840 | I want to make sure that we get back into this discussion about rumination.

00:03:16.460 | So you discovered that depressed people ruminate about their problem in nature in a way that allows them to dump the problem.

00:03:25.500 | We don't know if depress, if people depression ruminate about the problems.

00:03:28.480 | We, in the experiment, we, we kind of forced them to, to ruminate, um, to see if people are in this ruminative state, would nature still have a benefit?

00:03:40.500 | And it turns out that it did.

00:03:42.460 | Now, one thing that we were kind of wondering about is like, do people just, maybe they just think less about their problems in nature than the urban environment.

00:03:50.500 | And we found that wasn't true.

00:03:52.600 | We were also kind of, this is actually work that we did, um, with Ethan Cross, uh, and actually my, my wife, uh, Catherine Kirpin was also, uh, an author in the study.

00:04:03.120 | We also thought maybe that, um, maybe interacting with nature might put you in this more third party distance kind of state.

00:04:12.400 | So instead of saying, you know, Mark is so unhappy, or instead of saying I'm so unhappy, you'd say Mark is unhappy.

00:04:19.700 | You know, this distant state, we didn't find evidence of that too.

00:04:22.940 | It wasn't that people thought about their problems from a more distanced perspective in nature either.

00:04:28.140 | So, so what I think is happening is I think we just increase their directed attention.

00:04:33.380 | And when you increase directed attention, you're able to do lots of things and, and maybe, um, they could just deal with the ruminations better because they had more cognitive resources to deal with those problems.

00:04:45.560 | So, um, you mentioned impulsivity, uh, aggression, and the probability of committing a crime.

00:04:51.680 | Uh, you have some data that, um, there are these ways of reducing impulsivity more broadly.

00:04:58.760 | Yeah.

00:04:59.060 | Right.

00:04:59.420 | Um, I, I don't think impulsivity is something that most people think they deal with, but I'll tell you, if you've ever found yourself picking up your phone just cause everyone else did.

00:05:08.800 | Right.

00:05:09.040 | That's impulsivity.

00:05:09.860 | Right.

00:05:10.060 | And, and by the way, I think perhaps I've been a little bit unfair to social media, uh, and I've spared that equally or maybe even more pernicious thing of modern life, which is texting.

00:05:22.760 | Yeah.

00:05:23.480 | I mean, it's amazing to me on a plane, how hard it is for people to disengage from texting.

00:05:28.980 | Right.

00:05:29.420 | And it's also amazing to me how we can all get into like three or four conversations over text or three or four conversations with one person within a text thread.

00:05:37.580 | I mean, if that were converted into like actual dialogue, it'd be crazy.

00:05:43.100 | Right.

00:05:43.340 | It'd be, you know, it'd be like switching back and forth between four different conversations.

00:05:47.400 | I mean, that party is nuts, but in the form of texting, it's like, we're, we're doing it.

00:05:56.240 | Are there any data on, on what texting is doing to directed attention?

00:05:59.400 | I haven't seen any on it, but I, again, I would say it's, it's gotta be depleting.

00:06:03.980 | There was some interesting work.

00:06:05.880 | Um, actually I think by one of your colleagues at Stanford, Anthony Wagner, who did work on these multimedia multitaskers.

00:06:12.400 | So people that text, uh, and are doing email or social media and, you know, something on the computer, like you're using multiple media devices simultaneously.

00:06:26.420 | Does that train attention or does it deplete attention?

00:06:30.860 | And I think those studies is quite evident that it depletes attention.

00:06:34.480 | It's not training people's attention.

00:06:36.080 | It's just depleting their attention.

00:06:38.880 | Um, so I would say, yeah, I, I, you know, managing all those conversations is going to be very taxing of, of directed attention.

00:06:47.340 | Again, I, I'm not somebody who's totally against smartphones.

00:06:51.200 | I have a smartphone.

00:06:52.120 | I don't do social media, but I do text a lot.

00:06:54.880 | Um, I guess I try not to always be so fast.

00:06:59.640 | You know, I, I say sometimes I'm just going to have my time, um, and not, not always be so fast to respond.

00:07:07.980 | Um, but it's, it's hard.

00:07:09.920 | It's very difficult.

00:07:11.320 | You have to be really mindful and protective of your directed attention.

00:07:15.960 | And people get angry if they have kind of an expectation of response latency, and then you depart from that.

00:07:24.160 | Right.

00:07:24.640 | Which is just nerd speak for sometimes I'll text back fast.

00:07:28.720 | Sometimes it will take me several weeks or months.

00:07:30.640 | I think that's starting to normalize a little bit out there because of the sheer volume of communication that people are getting.

00:07:37.160 | Right.

00:07:37.660 | A few years ago, that was considered rude.

00:07:39.660 | Right.

00:07:40.160 | I've heard more and more discussions that I have no, uh, you know, no real knowledge of what the discussions were, but there was a, there's a very popular podcast, um, in particular for women, um, where the host was talking about this the other day.

00:07:54.920 | Someone sent it to me and they were like, oh, it's, it's, uh, the, the texting three weeks later thing is, is becoming a norm.

00:08:00.720 | I think some people are just bombarded with, with text messages.

00:08:03.980 | I guess our species is really good at creating technologies and then figuring out like, darn, like we, we, we need to backtrack a little bit.

00:08:11.440 | Right.

00:08:11.720 | Um, because all the programs to like, um, the program Freedom, for instance, which shuts down the internet for a certain interval of time on your computer.

00:08:20.220 | That was great.

00:08:20.820 | Hardly anyone uses it.

00:08:22.120 | Yeah.

00:08:22.600 | And hardly any of the people I know who used to use it use it anymore, forgive me, uh, Freedom, uh, designers, but it's like, it starts to just disappear because the culture drifts in a, in a new way.

00:08:33.260 | Right.

00:08:33.540 | Um, and people like Cal Newport or you who don't have social media or me who put social media on a separate phone and takes a month to reply to a text.

00:08:43.940 | Right.

00:08:44.200 | Unless it's urgent.

00:08:45.080 | Right.

00:08:45.500 | Um, we're considered the weirdos.

00:08:47.900 | Yeah.

00:08:48.340 | So it's, it's, it's hard, but again, it's, you know, I've seen people that like an email where they'll have an auto reply that just says, I'm not going to respond really quickly.

00:08:57.180 | Or I only respond to email, you know, at this time and this time, you know, and I think that makes sense, you know, again, because we have to protect our directed attention.

00:09:08.820 | We're just not going to be, um, good functioning humans if we're just constantly being depleted.

00:09:15.520 | Okay.

How Technology Depletes Your Attention | Dr. Marc Berman & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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