“Don’t use things that cause overstimulation,” Newport says. “The dopamine system is powerful, so don’t give it the targets it’s going to fire up for.”
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One of the biggest harms of the Internet is online pornography. While prostitution (which has the root word porneia) has been around since the dawn of human history, never before has access to explicit content been so easy and varied. Today the porn industry rakes in around $100 million globally, with the U.S. making up $12-14 million of that revenue. According to this report, 40 million Americans regularly view pornography, and 25 percent of all Internet searches are porn-related. These stats are shocking, to say the least, but it begs the question of how we best understand and treat porn addiction in today’s context. While most of us would naturally assume such addiction is related to sexual impulses, “Dr. K,” Read More ›
Many online creators and entrepreneurs give sensitive data to TikTok, the China-owned social media app, so they can do business on the platform. That includes social security numbers. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told Congress earlier this year that users’ data was stored outside of China in places such as Virginia and Singapore. Apparently, however, that is an inaccurate claim. According to a report from Forbes, TikTok has indeed been storing sensitive data on Chinese servers, where employees there can access it. Alexandra S. Levine reports, A trove of records obtained by Forbes from multiple sources across different parts of the company reveals that highly sensitive financial and personal information about those prized users and third parties has been stored in China. Read More ›
TikTok has gained a fair bit of fierce criticism over the last few months; the China-owned social media app is the most popular on the market, with tens of millions of users and downloads. That includes, of course, teenagers. Apart from the debate over espionage and data privacy, TikTok is a highly addictive app. We covered more on that here, but recent studies show that it’s not just the amount of time spent on the app that is troubling, but the specific kinds of content young people are ingesting every day. Julie Jargon writes in the Wall Street Journal, Data privacy, though, might be less worrisome than the power of TikTok’s algorithm. Especially if you’re a parent. A recent study found that Read More ›
In a recent Mind Matters podcast episode, host Robert J. Marks spoke with Kent Marks, former Boy Scout guide who now works with Trail Life USA. In the wake of Boy Scouts’ precipitous decline over the last decade, Trail Life offers boys the chance to get outside and go on wilderness adventures. This is a huge opportunity to help young men get off the screens and into the beauty of creation. Speaking about the gravity of the problem, Robert said, The impact of social media has just been terrible. Teenage suicides are up, depression rates are up. I think a third of all girls involved in social media have body image problems. And that’s terrible. These are the symptoms of Read More ›
How does excessive social media use affect our perceptions of the real world? Writers Mark Miller and Ben White wrote a piece at Aeon on social media through the perspective of “predictive processing,” a term used in neuroscience and cognition. Predictive processing involves the brain’s capacity to predict error, danger, or some future event, and urge us to act accordingly. (That’s my basic, layman’s understanding of it, full disclosure!) White and Miller use temperature as an example, noting how the body may respond to a change of the environment by closing a window or grabbing a blanket to keep warm. Being able to respond appropriately to our surroundings depends on the accuracy of our mental model of the real world. Read More ›
At the end of the day, do you ever feel like you’ve ingested so much information but have thought and contemplated so little? When do we take the time to simply be quiet and think? Discovery Institute’s Andrew McDiarmid encourages people to set aside their devices and embrace the discomfort of silence in a piece from The Epoch Times. He writes, A recent study reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that the act of “just thinking” can be more rewarding than we might realize. The authors of the paper acknowledge that the ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic in humans, yet we regularly underappreciate the benefits of doing so. This constant feed of Read More ›
Social media portrays a world where everybody is happy and having a good time. Everybody, of course, except for you. There must therefore be something wrong with you. You are a loser. Teenage boys without girlfriends feel like social freaks. One in three teenage girls who use social media suffers from body image issues. Social Media and Depression Young adults who use social media are three times as likely to suffer from depression. Depression can lead to suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, female suicides aged 15-24 increased by 87 percent over the past 20 years and male suicides increased by 30 percent. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry says suicide is now Read More ›
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy believes that age 13 is too young for children to start using social media, noting that their sense of self is still developing. Murthy gave his remarks on “CNN Newsroom,” saying, I, personally, based on the data I’ve seen, believe that 13 is too early … It’s a time where it’s really important for us to be thoughtful about what’s going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children.” Murthy’s remarks go hand in hand with a formidable body of research that shows the negative correlation between social media use and teens’ mental Read More ›
In a new article from Deseret News, Brad Wilcox and Riley Peterson equate Big Tech to “Big Tobacco.” They argue that the online world has the same dangers and negative effects as other drugs, and go on to cite alarming mental health data to back up their claims. Similar to how smoking was found to be dangerous in the 1970s and yet poorly regulated by the government, Big Tech is harming kids today yet is met with little intervention or pushback. They start with a powerful analogical anecdote, writing, Imagine if a man in a white panel van pulled up in your neighborhood and began enticing teens to look at pictures and videos featuring drug use, pornography and a range Read More ›
A 12-year-old girl from Argentina died after trying the dangerous “choke challenge” on TikTok, per the New York Post. The girl, Milagros Soto, was found in a closet hanging from a makeshift noose on January 13th. Soto’s family members think she was bullied and challenged to perform the horrible online fad while at school. Soto isn’t the only casualty of the TikTok challenge, which involves asphyxiating oneself until passing out. It’s also only one of many “fatal fads” circulating the TikTok sphere. Also known as the “blackout challenge,” Tiktok users chase virality and clout by forcing themselves to pass out. In light of the tragic death, people are begging parents to prohibit TikTok from their children. Several Twitter users spoke Read More ›
In the 1960s, neurosurgeon Benjamin Libet noticed there was a signal in the brainthat occurred before you knew you were going to do something. On the surface, it looks like you don’t have free will. But Libet noticed that humans do have the ability to say no to these brain signals. He called this free won’t. Dr. Robert J. Marks Read More ›
“Best Friend” at DUST by Nicholas Olivieri, Shen Yi, Juliana De Lucca, Varun Nair, David Feliu (Feb 16, 2021, 5:31) “In a near future, a lonely man is addicted to a product called Best Friend which offers him perfect virtual friends.” As is hinted in the title (so this is not a spoiler), we suddenly learn — via an effective plot maneuver — that all of the partying friends are virtual realities. I had already begun to wonder about the animated objects cheering along with the crowd but then maybe in the future our kitchenware will have enthusiasms … But no. It’s all in his head, as long as he keeps replenishing the supply of a chemical cocktail to a Read More ›
The brain can also both adapt and heal itself. How can we facilitate this healing in patients with brain challenges? Can this healing be accelerated without brain surgery? Using stimulation to the tongue can result in incredible changes to brain functions. Robert J. Marks and Dr. Jonathan Sackier discuss brain trauma, healing and stimulation. Show Notes 01:11 | Introducing Dr. Read More ›
If “the machines” ever do take over, it will be because we have stopped thinking, not because they have started to.
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A guy on a date is not checking his phone three times in ten minutes because the world outside the restaurant is changing that fast. He is in the grip of an addiction.
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