Neurological Consequences and Paths to Recovery

From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story on Saturday I'm Man Vin Rana Most of us will have experienced it You pick up your phone for a quick look at social media On to look up an hour later Wondering where the time went That's thanks to something called infinite sccroll technology behind modern social media Biggest thief of your time It was invented in two thousand six by software designer Azer Raskin as a simple way to make browsing easier Now It's helped to create the endless feeds that power Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X Twenty years later, even its creator says he regrets the impact it's had With a new survey this week suggesting that people might spend up to five years their waking lives mindlessly scrolling So how did a feature designed for convenience, become one of the most powerful tools for capturing human attention And what is endless scrolling actually doing to our brains Fleur Britain. a writer for the Times, Met Raskin. And we asked her to read her article When an American software developer named Aza Raskin came up with the concept of the infinite Scroll back in two thousand six Little did he know that it would turn into one of society's most powerful time thieves The idea now used by nearly all social media platforms was simple newew content that automatically and continuously loads as you scroll on an app or a website Creating a never ending stream of videos, tweets, posts, messages, you name it If you've ever sat on the sofa at the end of the long day and opened Instagram just for a second, only to find you're still there three hours later, in the dark watching an endless supply of ten second videos You have been a victim of the infinite Sroll Its original purpose, Raskin explains on a video call from San Francisco, was to help users So they didn't have to keep refreshing a web page new information No need to click on page two, for example. No need to make a decision about whether or not to continue The content would just keep on coming He designed it while running his own software studio humanized. and decided never to patent it. Instead keeping it open source and sharing it with Google and Twitter during social media's infancy. By twenty thirteen Raskin could see that the thing I'd made to help people was instead damaging them You'd walk onto a bus and no one would look around bound to their digital master Heads down, finger scrolling, esophagus crushed changed our physiology The British government is concerned about infinite scroll. In its latest release on its proposal to limit social media for children It mentioned the possibility of requiring platforms Switch off addredictive features, for example, infinite scrolling and auto playay Since two thousand six Big teech has significantly refined Raskin's design making infinites grow even more sticky to keep us online For example, videos start playing automatically. without us clicking on them Jesus of subsequent videos Plfully bounce into view. algorithms prioritize provocative content which can prove irresistible Infinite scroll is, says Raskin to what these companies are now They've all changed to become these infinite slot machines What does it actually do to our brains The most important impact of infinite sccroll is on the dop immune system says Dr. Baib Bing Chen, a neurologist at Henry Ford Health in Michigan It works rather like gambling and is similarly addictive, he says You don't know what's coming next In gambling, you keep going back because you might win Online, you do so Amongst the drosss, you might see something brilliant or hilarious Infinite sccroll has a side effect. The experts call popcorn brain A term coined in twenty eleven by the American computer scientist and author David Levy. Because our brains are so overstimulated with incessant digital noise, our thoughts and attention rapidly bounce from one thing to another, like popping kernels Corn brain leaves our brain constantly craving novelty Jen explains that over time you become desensitized and it can make everyday things Reading, conversation, walking feel more difficult to find rewarding Yet Because your brain gets used to very short bits of information, it worsens your working memory and long term recall. frequent social media use has also been shown to literally change the structure of the brain, he says, citing a twenty seventeen study that found that young people, with an average age of twenty three point six, who checked Facebook multiple times a day teended to have less grey matter in a nucleus accumbence, where dopamine is released The Chen cautions that association is not causation What is clear, though Is that the more time we spend online the more likely we are to have some sort of cognitive decline It doesn't help that the urge to scll severely disrupts our sleep schedule The problem he sees the most in his patience Sleep is possibly the most important thing for preventing cognitive decline An interim report on young people and work by the former health secretary Anne Melbourne described how all of the twelve and thirteen year olds he talked to said that they went to bed between midnight and three AM because they had been scrolling on their phones And other major impact is on our attention spans The Harvard Medical School stress expert and author, Dr. Aditi Nuruka, cites a famous study by psychologist Gloria Mark have found that human attention spans when using screens had dropped by nearly seventy percent in the individuals she studied In the early two thousands, it was about two point five minutes Now it's forty seven seconds, says Naruka reduced tention is a hallmark of brain rot caused by over consonsumption of digital content Nurka is concerned by the effect of infant scroll on our amygdala part of the brain that controls the stress response Our amygdala is triggered by seeing disasters around the world in the palm of our hands. doesn't recognize the difference between something happening thousands of miles away. all in your backyard feeling a sense of stress pushes us back onto our phones as we seek quick relief creating what Nuka calls an unhelpful primal urge to scroll Your brain isn't broken. You are not weak. It's simply the way your biology is designed. None of this bodes well. for what might be happening to children's brains author and consultant pediatrician Dr. Sanjif Nichani of Leicester Children's Hospital, whose adolescent patients sometimes spend as many as twelve hours a day on their phone observes the developmental delay in the prefrontal cortexes of chronically online children The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that helps control emotional regulation, moral judgment and complex social behaviour What we're seeing in children addicted to social media is a loss of nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex and weakened white matter connections to it, he says. One effect is that some children are rendered, Illtise doing something as basic as talking to someone. He also observes A skyrocketing of mental health issues, anxiety, depression Eating disorders, suicidal thoughts. good news, he adds is that provided they're weaned off their addiction slowly, People can make a full recovery His advice is to start small Fast No phones at meal times offered short durations in the car The next step is no phones first thing in the morning because that leads to a dopamine surge. Slowly shrink usage down to two hours on weekdays, three hours on weekends One of the most powerful stimuli for recovery from phone addiction, he adds, is physical activity It doesn't have to be exotic or expensive Just regular and consistent. thirty to forty minutes. Four times a week. for a number of months to years Physical activity helpels exactly the same part of the brain affected by addiction, the emotional circuitry and white matter to recover Recovery in both children and adults is possible because of neuroplasticity Nirkar says brain can rewire itself Brain Rot suggests a permanent decay, but the good news is that it's reversible Small changes every day can have a big impact It's possible too, to change the technology itself to beat its addictive qualities It turns out there's a very simple solution, says Raskin All you have to do is start adding in little delays. It's like when an airplane's WiFi doesn't work well It gives your brain a chance to catch up with your impulse And you think, do I really want to be here No, I'm going to do something else In twenty eighteen, Raskin co founded the Center for Humane Technology, CHT a non profit addressing the harms of Bid tech's attention capturing designs, including infinite sccroll and algorithmic feeds acccording to CHT's research infinite sccroll has approximately tripled our engagement. And while there are no public figures showing how long users keep scrolling on one app for It is likely that without this technology, there would be no doomcrolling, the compulsive browsing of negative content on social media Part of the issue is that capturing our attention is how bigig tech converts products that are free to use, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok atel into trillions of dollars. They require you to be glued to the screen. says Raskin, ' if you're not around, you can't be influenced, and they can't monetise that shift in your behaviour in an attempt to loosen Infinite Scroll's grip Raskin and his colleagues have spoken to all the major tech companies brief heads of state and created courses Raskin testified against Meta in the recent New Mexico court case that found the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp It was liable for endangering children Mata was ordered to pay three hundred seventy five million dollars to the state in his testimony Raskin admitted Even though I know exactly how Infinite Scroll works as its creator I still found myself going to the bathroom at a friend's dinner and scrolling, unable to control my use I think that had a big impact on the jury He believes that it would only take a couple of courageous companies or jurisdictions to start regulating social media access and others would follow. The countries that do are going to reclaim their kids. I actually think there's going to end up being a race to the top That's an expression we haven't heard in noh. That was Fleur Britten, reading her piece titled I created infinite sccroll Now I regret how it damages our brains which you can find at thetimes. com The prodroucer and sound designer today was Dave Creasey, the executive producer was Edward Rummond Thanks for listening. We'll be back as usual tomorrow