The alarming realization of our minds being structurally altered by social media.
On a recent trip to Rome, my girlfriend and I went to visit The Colosseum. One of the most recognizable historical architectural masterpieces, this massive amphitheater was a symbol of the Roman Empire’s greatness but also a reflection of the society that built it. The entertainment within those walls was designed to fill a blood-lust, a grandiose pageant showcasing the extent of the empire, creating self-important images of the empire used to indoctrinate and distract the population. The games were filled with gore and death for the participants, and drunkenness, gambling, and gluttony for the crowds. This distraction diverted the attention, ever briefly, of the Plebians (public) from the reality of entrenched class social structure, poverty, and government corruption. For a largely illiterate population, this was an ideal diversion.
As we approached the main facade of the colosseum, we encountered the expected mass of crowds that visit this site daily. What I was a bit unprepared for (although I should have not been surprised) was the huge number of people taking selfies. The posing of people to get just the right shot was almost more fascinating than the colosseum itself. Many were taking literally dozens of selfies trying to perfect every aspect of the photo. In fact, the selfie activity became a distraction from the site itself. Much of this activity was undoubtedly for social media consumption. With the colosseum in the background, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the symbol of an extinct empire that provided the distraction of the games to our society’s distraction by social media. This modern distraction creates the distortion of our self-image by placing ourselves as the important element in a reality that we wish to craft for others. The Roman emperors created an alternative reality to feed the psyche of a population while selfies create a version of our selves to do the same. These edited selves become part of our online personalities and become a careful image crafted story of our lives. And as we all know, selfies are one of the most ubiquitous features of social media which is now firmly entrenched in our lives.
How did social media become an over-arching consumption of our free-time and a major form of entertainment? How did social media, paired with the forward facing camera feature of a smart phone create this herd mentality of the selfie? Is it some sort of attempt to satisfy a desperate element in our personalities/psyche?
The combination of social media along with the smart phone creates a form of superficial social engagement along with voyeurism. I started to wonder how this significant use of our time was affecting our neurochemistry, brain structure and behavior. As it turns out, the design of all of the platforms-Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and the dozens of similar apps and sites take advantage of some well engrained neurological physiology and psychological impulses. Essentially, there is an engineered component for neural modification deliberately designed into each of these platforms which draws upon social and behavioral modification tools that are well-understood. A number of studies exist that show that these platforms prey upon our neurochemistry in an opportunistic way. The same evolutionary processes that were beneficial for developing survival awareness and strategies for our ancestors such as hyperawareness, social cohesion, and group behavior are being exploited. Our brain’s fundamental traits of curiosity and need for constant stimulation (distraction) are exactly what social media provides.
It is clear that social medial links into two aspects that are hard wired into our brains: reward processing and social acceptance. Researchers have been able to use imaging tools such as functional MRI studies of teenage brains. What they found was that a photo with more “likes” will excite the brain greater than the identical photo with fewer “likes”. Our brains will pay more attention to something that has been arbitrarily manipulated to be rated with more “likes” regardless of the content. The teens had increased activation in the reward pathways of the brain when their photos were accompanied with more likes. The researchers summarized the reward pathways using the scans and could actually see the difference caused by an image that simply had more “likes” than the same image with fewer: “The experience of providing Likes to others on social media related to activation in brain circuity implicated in reward, including the striatum and ventral tegmental area, regions also implicated in the experience of receiving Likes from others.” 1 The use of social media correlates very much with strengthening the neural pathways in our “reward centers” of the brain. 2 These changes are more demonstrable in the developing brain. 3 If you think that as an adult you are totally immune to this process, think again. Due to the concept of lifelong neuroplasticity, the adult brain undergoes alterations too. 4
It is no wonder, that the understanding of these potential negative brain alterations have the titans of the tech industry voicing the opinions that they do not let their children engage with these technologies or severely restrict them. 5 They recognize the dangers to the developing brain—even though they are getting extremely rich on this danger—all the while being purveyors of the platforms and technology that disseminate it ever wider.
In fact, Facebook designers themselves came out publicly to discuss the dangers of their product: “It was the result of countless Facebook decisions, all made in pursuit of greater profits. In order to maximize its share of human attention, Facebook employed techniques designed to create an addiction to its platform.” 6
Unfortunately, the news gets worse for our brains. The brain alterations created by social media use tend to reinforce certain behaviors such as shortening attention spans, reducing tolerance to boredom, and craving external social validation. The desire to keep strengthening this feedback loop (“likes”->activate reward center->inducement to create posts for more “likes”) leads to more frequent posting but also a behavior that all social media sites encourage: reciprocation. Reciprocation strengthens the feedback loop in a social circle using the concept: “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” but on a potentially global scale. This reciprocal behavior hack was also deliberately engineered into all social media platforms. 7 After hijacking our brains, our posts will gravitate into significant self-serving aspects.
Tim Urban writes in an article that sums up quite nicely the majority of status posts on Facebook:“… statuses typically reek of one or more of these five motivations:
1) Image Crafting. The author wants to affect the way people think of her.
2) Narcissism. The author’s thoughts, opinions, and life philosophies matter. The author and the author’s life are interesting in and of themselves.
3) Attention Craving. The author wants attention.
4) Jealousy Inducing. The author wants to make people jealous of him or his life.
5) Loneliness. The author is feeling lonely and wants Facebook to make it better. This is the least heinous of the five — but seeing a lonely person acting lonely on Facebook makes me and everyone else sad. So the person is essentially spreading their sadness, and that’s a shitty thing to do, so it’s on the list.
Facebook is infested with these five motivations — other than a few really saintly people, most people I know, myself certainly included, are guilty of at least some of this nonsense here and there. It’s an epidemic.” 8
Urban goes on to describe 7 of the most common posts that have one or more of the five elements of motivation mentioned above. The posts include: The Brag (including the humblebrag-“Apparently they now give PhDs to frauds and drunks. What a time to be alive!“ or “I just learned this yoga pose!”), The Cryptic Cliffhanger (“That’s it. I’m done!”), The Literal Status Update (“I’m going to the gym.”), The Inexplicably Public Private Message (“Dude, we have to hang out next time you’re in town!”), the Out-Of-Nowhere Oscar Acceptance Speech (“I just want to say how thankful I am for all of you who have touched my life.”), The Incredibly Obvious Opinion (“My thoughts and prayers are with the families in Newtown after this unspeakable tragedy.”), and The Step Toward Enlightenment (“‘Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.’ ~Buddha”). 8 As you review these, you start to realize that an overwhelming number of posts fall into these categories. Sadly, I am guilty of posting all seven types at some point in my social media existence.
To keep the artificial edifice alive that we do not have motivations like those above exists a slew of excuses and rationalizations. I thought of these excuses myself as a way to explain how I was different. For each excuse, it is clear that they were just simple justifications for continuing behavior I was guarding. For each excuse, I could feel a tugging in my mind of why the excuse was lame. I would say to myself: “This post is about my accomplishment so as to provide other people to dream big”—as if people cannot conjure up their own motivations. Or “this post of my kids is for my relatives and close friends”—then why not simply email or group text them? Or “this post is of an important opinion that I have”—exactly illustrating the narcissistic importance of social media posting. Or “I’m just on social media because it’s entertaining. It’s like any other entertainment.” This last excuse is the most stealth because the justification is used in regards to things like television. But social media is different. It invades the small time gaps in our lives constantly. If you want to watch Netflix, you don’t do it 1 or 2 minutes a time. You usually set aside a block of time for it. If you are watching a movie, you don’t typically do it waiting in the grocery line.
In these excuses lies the likely kernel of addictive behavior: a denial system to preserve the behavior. After all, the social media platforms were directly engineered to tweak our reward centers and this is the same component of the brain that’s associated with other addictive behavior. In fact the latest psychiatric diagnostician manual (DSM) recognizes the components of Internet addiction. What is more alarming is the lack of awareness that we have that this is actually addictive and creating negative aspects to our lives. Because the use of social media is pervasive and nearly inescapable, the social cues that we use to help define what would be considered a normal behavior have become distorted and this blunts awareness of the problem. This awareness does not exist like we have for drugs, alcohol, and gambling. I’m not suggesting an equivalency between social media and these other addictive behaviors, but the framework to think about our social media usage directly lies along the lines of these social behaviors.
Not only does this online behavior become self-serving, there are negative aspects that affect our offline behavior too. As mentioned earlier, the creation of shortened attention spans, and with it the loss of deep thinking which is required for serious work and creativity can seriously harm our ability to create quality. The enforcement of groupthink with its monolithic creativity has spread the sameness of the selfie. Entire instagram accounts and Facebook accounts contain tremendous amounts of the monolithic boring selfie. What has happened to the person’s mind that has 500-1000 images of themselves in the same pose? We also see monolithic tourism driven by social media creating degradation of the experience at the very places we visit.
Unfortunately, all this hacking of our brains by social media goes on at a level which even makes it difficult for the brain to discover that this is occurring. In other words, it blunts our metacognition facilities to discover that we are being re-engineered and manipulated.
I started to wonder if my brain was being modified by my social media exposure after conversations with my girlfriend. As a therapist that works with people experiencing psychological issues, she saw in many discussions with her clients that social media was contributing and exacerbating many of their mental and social issues such as bullying, body image disorders, conspiracy mongering, paranoia, social rejection. She also noted the difficulty that these people could not simply turn these sites off. Social media held them captive. Without these conversations with her, I’m not sure I could have developed some awareness of my very own behavior and I would have just kept up with one of several justifications. So I decided to pull myself off of social media in June of 2018 in order to determine what parts of my behavior were being influenced, and what I had lost by the constant distraction of social media. The grand experiment began.
After deleting the apps off my phone, I still found myself compulsively grabbing my phone looking for a social media stream. It took about a week to extinguish this behavior. There was a feeling of being disconnected and perhaps a bit more lonely when not having a 24 hour connection. This feeling took about 6 weeks to fade. Then I noticed the positives. One of my all time favorite hobbies is reading books. Magically, I had more time to engage in this. I felt my social interactions when face-to-face becoming more focused and I could concentrate on being present. Best of all, I felt some of my deep thinking creativity start to return. This was a feeling that had been lost at about the time I started an account on Facebook.
The brain has a tendency to gravitate to certain experiences based on evolutionary design. Social media platforms synergized with smartphone availability have created an “unhealthy platform for a healthy impulse.” 9 “In short, the tech industry used behavioral science to corrupt a technology that can be positive for human beings into something that turns them into “anti-social, self-obsessed zombies.” 10 “Instant text messaging, email, and social media provide a platform for our hungry need to be connected, but also for our need to watch and monitor others, and better still, for our need to be seen, heard from, thought about, monitored, judged, and appraised by others. We might call this the hyper-natural monitoring hypothesis.” 9
At some point, it becomes apparent that social media is the junk food of the mind-immediately satisfying, emotionally consoling, addictive, unhealthy, and ultimately, unfulfilling. Social media becomes the sugary snack for the brain, ultimately toxic and weakening. Much of junk food is enticing but we all understand that a healthy diet would be better for us. And just like a junk food diet, the additive affects creep up slowly, unaware until you look in the mirror a few years later and realize the weight creep or the visit to the doctor discovers diabetes. As humans, our predisposition is to gain social connection. Deeper social engagement and deeper thinking, the kind that is created with face to face engagement requires attention span and effort is the true healthy diet for the mind. As we substitute more and more superficial engagement, we have less time for the deeper engagements. As we rely more on social media, these deeper engagements become more foreign and difficult for us to engage in. This becomes a difficult cycle to break. And just like a bad diet, it becomes unhealthy. Our social media diet seems to be headed to evermore junk status. Facebook encouraged some longer form engagement. This became shortened by Instagram that reduces the time for engagement even further. Snapchat and Twitter accelerate this phenomenon as our minds search for evermore immediate satisfaction. The parallels between how the food industry has exploited our evolutionary tendencies to gravitate towards certain tastes and how the social media industry has exploited a similar phenomenon is a not lost on us. “Just like the food industry manipulates our innate biases for salt, sugar and fat with perfectly engineered combinations. Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook are built under the ¨variable rewards¨ scheme. According to Tristan Harris former Google design ethicist, the tech industry coerces our innate biases for: ‘Social Reciprocity (we’re built to get back to others), Social Approval (we’re built to care what others think of us), Social Comparison (how we’re doing with respect to our peers) and Novelty-Seeking (we’re built to seek surprises over the predictable)’.” 7
If we think of how our minds have been co-opted by social media, we can look at the mesmerizing behaviors it creates. Who hasn’t decided that the time on the toilet was the perfect time to check social newsfeeds resulting in sitting there long enough to develop “Facebook legs.” There used to be a time where you went to the toilet and stared at the ground, or at most flipped through a magazine. But when the job was done, the job was done. Now, social media will tyrannically steal the time away until you develop a form of brief paralysis. This represents an insidious stealing of our moments. How about when we are waiting in a check-out line? How quickly do we turn to something like Facebook? Or worse yet, at a stoplight? Social media and the smartphone have created such an impatience to our attention span that we cannot tolerate a minute without a glance at out phone. Our minds are streamlined to consume social media rather than tolerate even a moment of boredom. Social media has also changed our spending habits. It encourages the “keeping up with the Jones” effect by delivering a panoply of envy that is global rather than just from the neighborhood. This is termed virtual covetousness. Interestingly, millennials have caught on to this psychological ploy and a recent survey captured the way they are trying to gird their minds against this behavior: “The survey results suggest an interesting strategy to help them get there—ignore their friends’ social media posts. How’s that? Well, it seems virtual covetousness has taken on a life of its own for the digital generation. According to the survey, overspending because of what they see on social media (in tandem with the ease with which it takes your cash) was the largest ‘bad’ influence on how they managed their money.” 11
How can we improve our “mind’s diet?” Like most food diets, it is difficult to completely eliminate junk food indefinitely. Long-term resistance can be developed but requires persistence. For social media, as with a diet, we cannot rely entirely on will power since that fails in the majority of people that try it. Given the likely compulsive feelings that occur with posting daily selfies, posting a frequent status update, and knowing the dopamine reward brain chemistry that science has discovered, social media use represents a difficult behavior to extinguish. My own experience required a procedure akin to a dietary cleanse. I had to delete the apps from my phone.
In order to take any action towards improvement starts with self-awareness. As with most areas of social behavior that are pervasive, we have real limits to our awareness that it may have become a problem. I think that there are signs that can signal that there is too much social media in your brain diet: being on the platform every day, maybe for hours instead of engaging in a deeper social connection, not being able to read an article more than a couple of minutes before clicking away. Additional signs I’ve discovered include if you can recognize that your ability to concentrate has been impaired or that you cannot tolerate a moment of boredom. We should be welcoming more boredom in our lives! After all, boredom is often times the source of great creativity and motivation.
How else can one be aware of a personal social media problem? Sometimes the first step might be to ask a loved one who knows or lives with you whether they see these behaviors. Have them scroll through your social medial posts and see how many times you posted one of 7 types of posts that Urban described above. Another method of awareness is to try to look back and determine if significant creative hobbies started going by the wayside when social media became a constant. For younger generations, they do not have this luxury as social media has always been on for them. Still another might be loss of deeper engagement with friends, for fitting in the extra effort to meet with them. Or perhaps not engaging in intellectual activity which requires more effort like reading, playing an instrument, doing something creative not on the smartphone. Are we striving for self validation because we don’t have a strong enough internal construct to say that what we are doing in life is good enough? Are we so self-absorbed that we are deluded into thinking that many aspects of our lives are so important that others need to be informed of them?
I firmly believe that healing the brain anatomy changes wrought by social media is possible. The same aspect that changed the brain to begin with can reverse those changes—plasticity of the brain. Every time that an urge comes up to post a status update I realize that the world does not need some sort of social media entry to satisfy that urge. I try not to fall into the trap that thinks that these moments of my life need to be broadcast or are important to others. Now if I need to share these personal things, I do it directly with a text or direct message. If I think I have something of good informational value, I am more likely to post it in this blog rather than put it in a personal social media newsfeed, so that friends and acquaintances do not feel the need to create reciprocity with a “like“ if it really doesn’t interest them.
Are there reasons to be on social media? Of course there are. Charitable work, helping nonprofits, group organization for activities and events, contributing knowledge in a way that benefits a group of people that truly have an interest. A personal example of this last one is my hobby of backcountry skiing where I still embrace learning of status of an area for avalanche risks, trail warnings, maps and advice that might only be readily available on a social media platform. Sometimes as a way of asking for help or advice may be a reason. I also recognize that some professions need a constant social media presence-politicians and celebrities, for example. Business advertising would be yet another example. A litmus test to determine if posting is not merely motivated by self-image crafting might be asking yourself: “Would I pin this to a public bulletin board?” The bulletin board analogy goes further as you are trying to divorce yourself from the dopamine induced reciprocity feedback loop.
Is there anything intrinsically wrong with social media? My goal with this article is to not pass a moral judgment. Certainly adults are free to choose what they’d like to do with their time. I do want to increase awareness of the neurochemistry and anatomy changes that are occurring in the background and that may be interfering with other brain activities so that a reader can make an informed decision for themselves rather than being unknowingly manipulated. I also think that we can ask ourselves several questions when the impulse to open a social media app occurs. Are you deciding that you will post something that truly will help others or are you doing it as an image crafting exercise? Are you gaining information or are you just trying to avoid boredom or procrastinate from a task or are you missing out on an opportunity to engage with someone right next to you? I do not prescribe nefarious intent to social media companies but there is no doubt that their design is deliberate to increase dependence. In chasing the almighty dollar, they are reshaping the very structure of our minds and I resent that.
I do have some hope that social media will morph into something more beneficial for our brains and society as a whole. Platforms like Facebook are at least making the right noise to push in that direction with emphasis on groups, the willingness to eliminate hate speech, fake news, pseudoscience lunacy, and conspiracy based ideas not born in facts.
I do understand the irony of this article appearing on social media sites. However, I am not a Luddite to think that this ubiquitous medium is not valuable for idea that information exchange. It may be one of its best features. Once you try to engender this type of behavior rather than being plugged into our reward centers for self validation behavior, we may be finally getting at the valuable components that social media could truly provide.
My father, who was born before the advent of television, used to comment to me that he thought television was one of the most amazing inventions in that it could bring the world right into your home. In the same statement however he would usually a lament that the vast majority of television was utilized for wasteful programming. Social media has become the new television.
Do I still use social media. Yes. I have groups that I still get event invites and look for advice. I still respond to direct messaging. But I no longer believe in broadcasting a status update to the entire “Friend list” on a weekly or even monthly basis. I no longer scroll newsfeeds to have my senses inundated with the minutia of other’s lives. I can easily avoid the virtual covetousness.
Will some continue to argue that it is harmless entertainment? While they may, I do not believe the term “harmless” can be applied to an activity that risks our productivity, creativity, and social engagement. Chris Hedges in his book America, The Farwell Tour expresses a hope I have for myself: “Hope means rejecting the thirst for public adulation. It means turning away from the maniacal self creation of a persona that defines social media. It means searching for something else – a life of meaning, purpose, and, ultimately, dignity.“ In order to make this a reality is to remind ourselves that it is the price of our minds and the structure of our brains that is at stake in which the purveyors of social media are only more than willing to modify it to their purposes. Ultimately, the psychologists and scientists know it. The developers and inventors of this technology know it. We know it intrinsically and we know we are sometimes in denial about it. So the question is, will you go on a social media diet?
The Plebeians of Roman Society could not say no the emperor when called to the colosseum games. In this era, hopefully we have the freedom to say no to social media.
1. What the brain ‘Likes’: neural correlates of providing feedback on social media. https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/7/699/5048941
2. The Emerging Neuroscience of Social Media http://smnlab.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Meshi_2015_TICS.pdf
3. Teens: This is how social media affects your brain. https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/health/social-media-brain/index.html
4. 4. Technology is changing the Millennial brain https://www.publicsource.org/technology-is-changing-the-millennial-brain/
5. Why are Silicon Valley execs banning their kids from using social media? https://www.msn.com/en-ie/money/technology/why-are-silicon-valley-execs-banning-their-kids-from-using-social-media/ar-BBPcNZP
6. In 2017, key Facebook builders disowned their creation https://apple.news/AwdAEe4FBTNK6my-U4LLIlA
7. Social Media Giants Are Hacking Your Brain — This is How. https://medium.com/@orge/your-brain-is-being-hacked-by-social-media-584ac1d2083c
8. 7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_4081038
9. Hypernatural Monitoring: A Social Rehearsal Account of Smartphone Addiction https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00141/full
10. How Evolutionary Biology Explains Smartphone Addiction. Social media companies play on biology and psychology to enslave us. https://www.fastcompany.com/90163456/can-evolutionary-biology-explain-smartphone-addiction
11. How Much Money Do You Need to Be Wealthy in America? https://apple.news/AEK5qxS_8Rl28rEmLKaPsOg
Julian E. Kuz, M.D. 