About the guest: Richard Cytowic is a neurologist, poplar science writer and professor at the George Washington University.
Episode summary: Nick and Dr. Cytowic discuss: the effects of smart phones and social media on the developing and adult brain; artificial blue light vs. broad spectrum natural light; attention & addiction to technology; sensory overstimulation & “virtual autism”; synesthesia and multimodal sensory perception; and more.
Related episodes:
M&M 78: Nature vs. Nurture, Neurogenetics, Personality, Autism, Schizophrenia, Synesthesia, Perception, Agency & Free Will | Kevin Mitchell
*This content is never meant to serve as medical advice
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Episode transcript below.
Full AI-generated transcript below. Beware of typos & mistranslations!
Richard Cytowic 1:29
this is Dr Richard Cytowic. I'm a Professor of Neurology at George Washington University. I am a textbook author and an author of popular works as well. My background also is in neuropsychology. So my interest in neurology is not in reflexes and pin pricks and things like multiple sclerosis, but about higher cortical functions that is what makes us think and how we think.
Nick Jikomes 2:01
And so you're a neurologist, so, so you've got a medical degree, do you still see patients or
Richard Cytowic 2:05
no, I've been no, I've been retired. I don't see patients anymore, but I still teach and mentor medical students at GW. And
Nick Jikomes 2:14
how did you get like when you started neurology and when you were still practicing, was there like a specialty? You had a sub specialty? Were there certain types of patients that you did see?
Richard Cytowic 2:24
Well, you know, we, you know, I saw the I put together what was called capital neurology, which is a collection of 10 physicians who are all Nick up specialists. So now, neurology, neuropsychology, neurosurgery, ENT, ophthalmology, etc, because I also started out training in ophthalmology, and it was all about, you know, the higher cortical thinking. And so the kind of patient we know we saw that we saw the bread and butter, which was, you know, migraines, back pain, seizures in young children, etc. I mean, that's, that's the bread and butter of neurology, but I was always interested, and it was interested, I became interested in what's called closed head trauma. I had a I had a colleague who referred me a patient because he knew I did neuropsychology, and he said, Is this woman for real? She was hit by a garbage truck as she was backing out of her driveway, and then she claimed that she couldn't remember anything. She couldn't even remember the names of her children, etc, and she had what's called GS 15, the highest governmental rating that's possible. So I saw her and did the testing. I said, Oh my god, Joe, she's got, she's got a tamper load damage. And, you know, I thought that was the end of it. But then the lawyers came, oh my god, no. And so I was deposed, and I gave my spiel and why I thought this woman had brain damage. And it was Geico, the auto insurance, who was trying to fight this. And Her lawyer said, Doc, we have got to have you on the stand. And so he had me on the stand. And the dramatic moment of all that was when the insurance company said, But doctor, her cat scan is normal. And I said, well, a dead person has a normal CAT scan, you know, and that did it. That they did, the judgment was $300,000 in lawyers favor. So that's but that's how it became. And I thought, why don't these people have any kind of representative? Here are people who are? They fall down the stairs. They're they're hurt and support a. Injuries. Stuff falls in their head in the warehouse, and they really suffer. And yet they go to the emergency room and they take X rays and says, Everything is okay, so you're good, you're good to go, but they're not good to go. They really suffered severe, closed head trauma, and I think I'm very interested in that. And so I actually wrote a chapter about that, a chapter with with an ophthalmologist and a neurosurgeon, about this acrylic of head closed head trauma. When
Nick Jikomes 5:33
you say close head trauma, it sounds like you mean basically someone has a brain injury, but it's not macroscopically visible from the outside, the
Richard Cytowic 5:43
their skulls and bashed open and all that they again, they've fallen down the string stairs. They've had a whiplash injury from an auto accident. So it's not the damage isn't obvious from the outside, and yet, all the damage occurs within the first 25 microseconds of that, if you have an impact, then the brain is shoved up against the skull, and all the damage happens within the first quarter of a second.
Nick Jikomes 6:19
Wow. And so, yeah. I mean, when we think of brain injury, obviously you can crack your skull open, and it's obvious just by looking with the naked eye, but you can also bump your head, and you know, it's not obvious the naked eye, but there's still shearing that happens, bruising in the brain is damaged. This
Richard Cytowic 6:34
is, yeah, this is the Sabrina stretch. Was a pathologist who first described these sheer strain injuries. Is that what happens is that the brain is accelerated against the skull, and it's like pulling taffy, and you're you're shearing these neurons and all that. And this is what happens. You know, we now know this from sports injuries, the the you they make people make a joke about it, about getting your bell wrong. Well, it's not a joke. It's serious. And,
Nick Jikomes 7:07
you know, I think one of the things we'll talk about is, you know, the brain can also be negatively impacted by things, even if there isn't overt physical trauma of any kind. And that's, you know, in a sense, I think that's what your your newest book is about.
Richard Cytowic 7:19
Well, thank you. Yes,
Nick Jikomes 7:21
what so why don't you just give us, like, a basic, high level introduction to what this book is about, what's the general subject matter, and why did you draw your
Richard Cytowic 7:29
stone age brain and screen age? Basically, the title talks about how to deal with digital distractions. Is that everybody admits that our attention spans have gone to hell, and yet they continue to be to focus and stare at their screens and do the endless scroll all the time, and while complaining that they're addicted to their phones, and yet doing nothing about it to stop that addiction.
Nick Jikomes 7:59
And what like so I want to think about this historically for a minute. So, like, I I'm sort of an interesting age, because I am just the right age where, for most of my childhood there was no cell phones. I didn't even, you know, have a computer, till, you know, I was in middle school, basically, and then we got the computer. And then, you know, when I was a teenager, we got the flip phones, regular phones, and then when I got a little bit older, then we got the smartphones and the iPhones by the time I was in college. And then, of course, we get social media and all of the the internet based stuff that's now packed into the smartphones. And then, of course, you've got, you know, everything that we have today. So I sort of saw the full progression while I was still, you know, young enough to be developing and all that, so I'm old and I'm I'm old enough to have lived a childhood without most of these, yes, yeah, and then see them sort of all come online, and we all intuitively recognize that they are obviously can be very problematic, especially for younger minds. The question I want to start off with here is, is it the cell phone, per se? Is it the smartphone with an internet capability? Is it the social media applications in particular? Is, is one of these aspects particularly problematic? No,
Richard Cytowic 9:12
it's the it's the person, it's the brain. There's there. You know, these devices are fantastic. I mean, the my smartphone is better than anything Star Trek could ever come up with. It's so much more powerful than the Apollo computers that's sent an end to the moon. But it's it, I'll tell you this my, my late husband and I, we were in New York, written we were and we only had track phones at the time because we didn't need to call anybody and other so they were just for the occasional outgoing call, and we were trying to find an address, and at that point, this is a city that's based on a grid for God's sakes. And we couldn't find it. It's like, How stupid are we? So at that time, all the phone books and public phones had been ripped out, and we looked at each other and said, we have got to get a smartphone, if only for the maps. So we did get a smartphone, and within two days of me playing with it and scrolling, I thought, Oh, my God. No wonder these things are so addictive, because it's like a slot machine. You keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, waiting for some kind of hit, and so when do you stop? You don't. There's no signals ever to stop. So whether you're looking at Tiktok or Instagram or whatever, you're constantly scrolling and there's no there's no break that says, Hey, knock it off. Stop. You've got to rest now. That's enough. And so the the tech companies are much better at distracting us than we are at protecting our distractible brain.
Nick Jikomes 11:08
And you know, again, on an intuitive, experiential level, we can all see that some of this stuff is happening. We all know that that attention spans are are being lessened, that that were, our ability to sustain attention is being interfered with by this technology. But in neurological terms, do we know much about, like, what's actually happening to the brain that is that underlies those changes in
Richard Cytowic 11:33
these are, these are behavioral addictions. I mean, we're familiar with physical addictions like alcohol and cocaine and methamphetamine and all that. But there are also behavioral addictions such as, you know, smoking, gambling, obsessive sex, shopping, etc. And so these kinds of behavioral addictions activate the same brain pathways as the physical addictions do. And so when people, when, when young high schoolers, say, I'm addicted to my phone, they really are, and they can't stop. They're so addicted that they can't stop. Just as any addict can't stop, they say, Oh, I can stop anytime, except they don't or they won't, and that proves the point.
Nick Jikomes 12:27
And what? What do you think so? So I want to talk about developmental aspects of this. So most people are getting smartphones these days, pretty young, certainly by the time they're teenagers, oftentimes even first
Richard Cytowic 12:40
grade, no first grade, they all have smoke. Yeah, are there? So what are,
Nick Jikomes 12:44
sort of the unique risks that are posed by introducing a technology like that to a very young mind?
Richard Cytowic 12:52
Well, you, yeah, I think you need to understand that the the brain isn't fully developed until the age of 25 and so young people don't have any kind of resistance to impulse control in this, this, this fascination with with with Scrum, with with phones, they don't have the ability to control themselves.
Nick Jikomes 13:22
And so I Yes, go ahead, yeah. And, like, why is that exactly? It's just that is there, like, particular parts of the brain,
Richard Cytowic 13:29
they're too mature. Mean, the frontal cortex isn't anywhere near developed. I mean, if you're talking about school age kids, or even teenagers, I mean the whole reason that that teenagers are, that teenagers are just so freaking unbelievable is that their frontal lobes aren't developed, and so they're full of they're full of drama and this and that, and their parents, you Know, freak out like, How can I control this kid? Because for them, everything is, like, crucial and immediate, and I need this now. And look what my friends are doing to me. They don't have the emotional intelligence and the resilience to counteract these forces that are very, very common in their lives.
Nick Jikomes 14:28
And like, there's lots of statistics we could point to, but basically, there's been a deterioration in mental health that's been going on for a number of years in in teenagers, in particular, people in that age range, and it seems pretty obvious, and I know people have certainly written and spoke about this, that there's a connection there between social media, smartphones and all that. But what can you tell us there that's really concrete, how much of some of the mental health problems that teenagers and young people are having can be directly tied to the use of technology?
Richard Cytowic 14:58
Well, you have you. Know the increase of anxiety and depression, the you know the smartphone, you're always particularly selfies and Instagram. You're always comparing yourself. Your life has become one of performance, rather than just being who you are. So you're always aiming to post the most wonderful, exciting, envy inducing things that you can look what I'm doing. And so there it becomes, narcissistic. Look at what I'm doing, look at me. And the problem is that 10 million other people are saying, Look at me, look at me. And so you're competing against this unrealistic cohort of other people when you could just be being yourself. So so anxiety and depression, and of course, especially in young girls. I mean, this is what the Facebook files showed about Facebook and meta, is that the these the posts, were particularly corrosive to young girls who, you know, were cutting themselves, starving themselves. The negative effects are really just quite awful, and yet nobody holds Mark Zuckerberg to account. Nobody says, Oh, look what you're doing. And when, when, when he was asked, he reverted to the past tense. Was always, which is always an indication of evasion. He said, Oh, for how my products were used against me, I beg your forgiveness. Well, they weren't used against him. They were his products, and he did it so that that's that, that's just the whiny escape on his part,
Nick Jikomes 17:00
and when we so, like, you know, part of the, you know, part of what you're talking about is, there's, there's, like, a social psychological component to this. The social media apps and the phones enable people to constantly be comparing themselves to other people and worried about their peers. And, you know, obviously that's going to lead to anxiety and self esteem issues. But there's also a lot of what we might just call more physical or physiological effects these things can have. One in particular that I'm hoping you can speak to is just the effect of looking at the artificial light and being exposed to a different spectrum of light. Oh, right. How does that start to tie into brain?
Richard Cytowic 17:36
There's two aspects there. One is the fact that, um, you know our our circadian clock in our brain is set every day by morning sunlight and by sunset in the sunset in the evening. And so when you're looking at light, any kind of light after sunset, whether it's TV or just your room room illumination, you are affecting your pushing back your circadian clock. And so when you have a screen that just a few inches from your face that's very, very bright, and these screens are very bright, you're really affecting your melatonin secretion and your circadian clock. So the other effect, then, is the wavelength component, is that these screens emit a huge amount of short wave or blue light. That's the wavelength that that first evolved when all life evolved in the ocean. That's the wavelength that penetrates the ocean most where all life evolved. And so every living creature is since it has a photoreceptor that is sensitive to light. And we're no different. And you know, even though we think that we're so sophisticated and modern and all that we are still a slave to our biological restraints.
Nick Jikomes 19:15
And so what is? People single out blue light a lot, and they compare it to other forms of light, red light, infrared light, All That Is there something, what is? What is particularly problematic about blue light in
Richard Cytowic 19:27
the blue light has more blue light has more energy than other wavelengths, and this is one reason why it induces myopia and young children, because they're instead of going outside and playing, they're they're playing on their devices and games and all that. And so young children, there's an there's an incident, there's a great epidemic of of myopia or nearsightedness in young children, because they're being exposed to this instead of going outside. And playing. But in the rest of us, you know, if you know, if it would be great if we just had dinner and just chilled out, and if we wanted to relax, go ahead and watch TV. And in my book, I have a chapter that tells you how to set your TV to reduce the amount of light that you're looking at, because you don't need a whole lot of light coming from your TV, particularly if, particularly, particularly if you're sitting in a darkened room. So but a lot of people are just, you know, are just blasting themselves with photons, that is light, and in blue light in particular,
Nick Jikomes 20:49
is that, are you just referring to, like the total luminance of a television, just turning it
Richard Cytowic 20:54
yes, the total Yes, the total luminance and and they're very they're very simple measures that you can take that can reduce the amount of light coming to you by 40% and the picture that you're seeing is just as good as as if you had it cranked up all the way. So even if
Nick Jikomes 21:12
you just turn down the luminance somewhat, that can make a big difference.
Richard Cytowic 21:16
It became a huge difference. I mean, because, listen, we all like to have dinner, and we like to chill out. We think, Okay, I'm going to watch Netflix. That's just human nature. So we have to deal with what we have. And so what I'm suggesting is that there are adjustments that you can make that are very easy to make, in terms of the backlight, the luminance, the brightness, etc, that will reduce the excess light blasting on you before you go to bed.
Nick Jikomes 21:50
So, so one, you know, so one aspect of this is, if I want to think about how like patterns of sensory stimulation affect the brain compared to other patterns. So like, if I'm looking at my phone all day, obviously I'm getting, you know, the wavelengths of light, especially in the blue part of the spectrum that are coming from the phone. That's going to be different than if I spent the same amount of time outside exposed to natural sunlight. So you've got a difference in the the spectral quality of the light entering your retina, but there's also going to be a difference in sort of the pattern and frequency of change and how my attention is being captured moment to moment. But so if I imagine two people, let's just say one doesn't have a cell phone at all. They're outside, they're doing stuff, they're looking around. Another person has something like a smartphone. In both cases, their eyes are open. Photons are constantly going into their eyes in both cases. But beyond the difference in the spectral qualities of the outdoor natural light versus the blue light coming from the phone, is there something about the sort of the pattern of visual stimulation that's important the person
Richard Cytowic 22:50
just looking at the natural landscape is far ahead in terms of the benefit that he or she gains from it? You know, the the natural world doesn't have a lot of color variation in it. Unlike a Disney Side landscape does. We also don't see a lot of stripes in the natural world, one of the biggest, one of the biggest strike in stripes, seeing striped patterns. So you think of a department store. We've got the lights overhead and a grid pattern and hard boiled things between things buildings that have a reticulated surface. When when you're not looking at stripes, your visual cortex is much more relaxed when you're looking at stripes.
Nick Jikomes 23:49
Looking at stripes, it's, it's generally
Richard Cytowic 23:51
different. So one of the, one of the most common patterns of stripe is, is text. And so if you're looking at text all the time, this is, this is very distracting. And we see, we see this in young children, you know, young children, when they learn how to read, you know, see spot, see spot, run there the the text is very big, and there's not much in between the lines. And then eventually we learn how to read very dense text, but when you do that for a long period of time, it's exhausting to your visual cortex. So one of the things for your your person who's outside in, in the field or even on, even on the street without their phone and they're looking at the trees, the plants, the sky. They are. They are giving themselves a visual rest. And this is something that I read I recommend all the time for people who are stressed out, is go outside for a walk. Take your do not bring your phone. With you. If you must keep it in your pocket, if you have a brilliant thought, then you can dictate a voice memo to yourself, but, and actually, I do this to myself, but you go out there and just look up. Look at the clouds. Look at the sky. Look at the buildings. Look at the tree. Look at look at the other people, the dogs, this that the other this is the natural world in which you evolved in you didn't evolve in a world of screens that's highly artificial, and it's detrimental to you.
Nick Jikomes 25:37
How did I feel? Like a lot of people experience a big impact in terms of their screen time and the way they socialized, and the amount of time they spent outdoors in the since the COVID era began. So when, you know, when COVID happened and we were in the lockdown phase, you know, people were stuck inside. They didn't see people as often. They probably, you know, they probably just started using their phones more because they had fewer options available to them. Do you think that had a lasting impact on people? And I
Richard Cytowic 26:06
think the whole COVID lockdown was horrible and had very, very negative effects. Yes, when you're looking when you're when you're looking at your phone and texting and all that, you're not socializing. You're just looking at a screen. Socializing means talking to somebody else, one on one, and so my advice is to put the phone down, call somebody up, even if you're on your phone. Talking on the phone is much better than texting. And I think the problem with young people today is that they're terrified to engage in person. If the doorbell rings, they freak out. They don't know what to do. They expect somebody to text, I'm here now outside. So yeah, you need to, you need to engage with one another in person, without these devices. These devices are like, a really bad crunch.
Nick Jikomes 27:10
How is so if people are staring at their phones and they're reading stuff, how is that different from like, Have you ever seen those pictures where you know, it's like back in the 1800s or whatever, and it'll be like a train card. Everyone on the train is staring at the newspaper, and everyone's looking at the newspaper. They're not talking to each other. You know when Newton, you know when, when text was developed? I imagine, you know, it was also a big shift for people, because it was this new way, this new modality of obtaining information and occupying your time. Are there ways you know, so if I'm like reading the news or I'm reading text on my phone versus someone who's reading a magazine or a newspaper or something physical like that, are those things comparable, or are they still very different
Richard Cytowic 27:53
from No, not at all. When people were reading the newspaper on the train, they were there for a set period of time, okay, 3040, 60 minutes, okay. They weren't reading the newspaper all day long and ignoring everybody else. They didn't have their face buried in the newspaper. So it was a temporary kind of thing during a time when, you know, they were packed in together in this in a train carriage. So I think, I think the analogy is really quite poor.
Nick Jikomes 28:27
And like, what do you think? So you mentioned, like, just with a television or a big screen that you're watching a movie on, you can just turn down the luminance at night. So on the one hand, like, it's not realistic to expect everyone to just stop looking at any screens, you know, after dinner or whatever, but you can do things like turn on the luminance on a television set. Do you recommend doing that on your phone, like keeping the luminance low? Does it work black and white mode and things like that? Again,
Richard Cytowic 28:52
again, I have, well, you know, you can put it black and white mode. I don't think you need to do that. But again, I in the in the book, I have recommendations for how to set certain filters and reduce your luminance. One of the biggest things you can do is to turn on the tritanopia filter, the blue yellow filter, and reduce the luminance that you're looking at. So I guess this is a question of, you know, do do the least amount of harm?
Nick Jikomes 29:27
Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like it's not just total luminance that does matter, but also specifically, like
Richard Cytowic 29:33
the total luminance does matter, but also the waves and composition,
Nick Jikomes 29:38
yeah, yeah. And what about, um, so people are starting to use more often and talk more often about these, like nighttime glasses you can wear. Basically, it's a pair of glasses, but instead of correcting a visual deficit, it's just filtering out more of that blue light. Do you think those things are a good idea? Oh, you
Richard Cytowic 29:56
mean, you mean the blue blocking glasses? Yeah. Yeah. There you. Useless.
Nick Jikomes 30:00
They're useless.
Richard Cytowic 30:01
They're useless in order to, in order to block out blue wave lanes to any significant amount you need to have dark orange glasses, and they're so dark that you can barely see anything. So all these, you know, you can all these things that say, Oh, we're going to block out blue beta waves. They're they're just focused. You, they can't do it.
Nick Jikomes 30:26
So you're saying they don't block out enough to be substantial. In order to block out enough a significant amount of blue light, they don't so dark, you couldn't really see much
Richard Cytowic 30:36
at all. Yes, they don't block out anything to block out enough to be significant, you'd they'd be, have to be so dense and orange that you could hardly see anything. I know it's fascinating, isn't it? But, but when you but so when you actually look at the actual optics, you know, people make all these claims, and you think, Okay, let's see, what do you what are you claiming? And you look at, well, what's possible? And you think, no, no, no, no, that's not possible.
Nick Jikomes 31:08
Um, do you think so? What do you think in terms of, well, I mean, obviously every, everyone's different, but like, in terms of, if you're thinking about this as a neurologist and from the perspective of the development of the brain, like, if you if you have kids, or you had kids like what you know, balancing realism with your biological and medical knowledge, when would you introduce things like cell phones and smartphones and iPads?
Richard Cytowic 31:37
Well, the American Academy of Pediatrics has said, no, no screens before the age of six. And so if you're going to if you're going to introduce screens, then you should do it together. So if you're going to FaceTime with Grandma, you and the baby should do it together. I often have said that the iPad is the worst babysitter in the world. When you put an iPad over a bassinet or an ipoddy trainer or a car seat, that I think is a form of child abuse, because you're blocking their developing central vision, a young child needs to crawl on the floor, explore, put everything in its mouth. They're having a visual apprenticeship with with the world in which they're learning what corners and edges and people and things are like. And so when you substitute that for some artificial image, you're really interfering with that. And so, you know, we're going to see what these kids visual vision is like in the future. I don't think it's going to be very good.
Nick Jikomes 32:53
So you think just, just the raw amount of exposure we have to these blue light emitting devices will cause things like near sightedness at much higher rates, exactly.
Richard Cytowic 33:01
Well, that's been, that's been proven beyond a doubt. Yeah, we've now seen the higher attendance of myopia and young kids because they've been, they've been gaming and staring at screens for years.
Nick Jikomes 33:15
And is there like, how much can you undo this stuff. So so if a child or teenagers developing certain tendencies, certain deficits in their visual abilities, in their attentional abilities, and so forth, and then become adults, I would imagine it's kind of hard to wind that back. Well,
Richard Cytowic 33:35
now you're talking about what I call virtual autism, which is autistic like symptoms induced by every heavy screen exposure. And this phenomenon was first shown by pediatricians at an Romanian orphanage, and kids that had heavy heavy screen exposure started developing symptoms of autism, which is reduced eye contact, reduce verb verbal interaction, reduce socialization. And I think every every parent who's got a kid that they've wanted a Yank if screen away from they see this that the game. You talk to them, you call out their name, you don't get a response. You ask him a question, you get a grunt, if you're lucky, you try to take the device away, and they have a meltdown and a tantrum. And what happens is that if you do take these devices away, is that within a few weeks, this the the symptoms revert, which never happens in develop, in genuine developmental autism. So this is why I call it virtual autism. And there are places like Hillary Cash's restart, which is a a camp where kids are sent away to just be. With themselves and their counselors, no screens, no TVs, no nothing. And they're forced, guess what? They're forced to talk to one another and with the counselors and the staff. And after just a few days, all the symptoms start to revert. I mean, it's like, you know, like wax melting, everything goes away.
Nick Jikomes 35:24
Okay, so literally, just taking a break from these devices can lead to substantial change in pretty short order, except,
Richard Cytowic 35:31
except the kids don't want to take a break. They refuse to take a break, and parents don't know how to make them take a break. And so it really becomes then how do you force them to to throw that circuit breaker and make them stop with this, this non stop screen absorption?
Nick Jikomes 35:54
Yeah. I mean, I'm a little out of my element here, because I don't have kids, but certainly I was a child, and I had siblings and everything. But when you say things like, parents don't know how to force them to, the first thing that comes to my mind is, well, can't you literally force them to, like my mom used to lock us out of the house and make us go
Richard Cytowic 36:12
outside. Good for her. Good for her. Well, she, she was doing something very useful. No, but I've seen, I've seen very educated parents who just, you know, look on as if they're helpless. They can't their kids got this game unit he's addicted to. He didn't get a battery pack because that shows you how, how strongly he's using this thing. And she can't stop them. And if she tries to, and she would say, you know, Ricky, say how to touch his toe. I did. I did. Well, he and without looking me in the eye, I did. I said, Oh, I that's what you get. You get grunts and lack of communication.
Nick Jikomes 36:54
Well, so So the behavior, okay?
Richard Cytowic 36:58
I think parents really need to take charge and say, forget, you know, and parents say, Oh, the iPad, it's the only thing that works. Well, yes, maybe for a while, but it's causing more problems in the long term than it's ever solving in the short term. So maybe find some way around the iPad in the bassinet, the car seat and the the potty trainer. I mean, there's this, have you seen this thing called the eye potty? It's a toilet trainer that's got an iPad there, as if a kid can't decide when the hell they got a poop. I mean, this is like, this is something that we that, that humans have dealt with for millions of years, and now we have to have an iPad to help us do that. I mean, it's, it's become, that's how insane it has become. Yeah.
Nick Jikomes 37:57
And what is it like when we think about the human mind from an evolutionary perspective. Why is it that we are so easily captured by this kind of technology?
Richard Cytowic 38:07
Oh, well, one other thing is the the oriented rate. Well, we're we are we have evolved to notice any change in in circumstances, so any novel situation snags our attention, it's what we call the Orient and orienting reflex. And so something new happens, and we go, we zoom right to it, and that's just how we're built. And people, evolutionary psychologists, say, Well, the reason that is, is that if you have if you heard a twig snap, are you? Are you? You smelled a smoke or something different happened in your environment, and all of a sudden, you were thrown on high alert, because that could mean a predator was about to come and eat you, or battle with you, or whatever. So it's a survival instinct, and that that that kind of instinct has never, never gone away. It's why we jumped at a stick that we thought was a snake. It's because our fast pathway thinks, oh my god, danger. And we don't have time to think, oh, wait, no, that was just a stick in the pathway. So that's that. What's that's what makes us react so quickly.
Nick Jikomes 39:31
And you know, one of the things that I think is important here is, you know, you can be outside without a device, and you can be inside with a device. In both cases, you're experiencing what's in front of you. You're taking an information through your eyes, your ears, etc. But sort of, the pattern of stimulation and the amount of crosstalk between the senses is probably going to be very different. So the phones aren't just visual. We also hold them in our hands in a particular way. We use our thumbs and we feel we. Can hear sounds coming from them, you know, especially if we're listening to music or, you know, watching a movie on the phone or what, what, whatever. So it's, it's the sort of multi modal experience. It's not just a visual experience. And I wonder if the sort of pattern of multi modal stimulation that things like the smartphones are giving people is that actually, like, sort of changing, you know, especially if they're using them while they're young and they're still developing, is that changing their the way that they actually perceive the world, the way that they see colors, the way that they perceive sounds and so forth. What
Richard Cytowic 40:30
you're talking about is what's called the audio visual model of virtual autism, is that instead of just living in the natural world, playing games, etc. These kids are exposed to high intensity visual audio stimuli, cross cuts, fast edits, etc. And what this does is stimulate sensory pathways at the expense of more emotional ones. So, yes, so, so that's what, that's what this, this, that's what this heavy screen exposure. Does it? It? It? What's the word I want? It stimulates. It adapts people to it predisposes people to be sensitive to sensory stimuli that are coming at them at the expense of everything else.
Nick Jikomes 41:36
Yeah, I guess that's that's where sort of the virtual autism analogy comes in, because right with bona fide autism, it's often, you know, scientists will often talk about that as being, you know, there's an abnormality in the brain, whatever exactly that may be, and it's basically leading to sensory overload. A lot of autistic patients are essentially hypersensitive to they
Richard Cytowic 41:57
can't, they can't handle sensory overload, right? And so yes, and there mean. Multiple research has shown that there are difficulties, there are problems in the brain, particularly among the white matter tracks, and so in people who have developmental autism are hypersensitive to stimuli.
Nick Jikomes 42:22
And you know, when we were talking about, like, sort of the the mixing of all the senses and stuff, my understanding is also you spent, you know, you've written books, and you spent a lot of time in your career studying synesthesia, which is a really interesting thing. And I think so, yeah, what? So, just for people who don't know what is full blown synesthesia, everybody
Richard Cytowic 42:43
knows the word anesthesia, which means no sensation. So synesthesia means joined or coupled sensation. So there are children who are born with two, three, or all five of their senses hooked together, so that my voice, for example, is not only something that they hear, but something that they might also see or taste or feel as a physical touch. Now they are shocked to discover that not everybody else is like them, because they assume everybody is this way. So one seven year old told her best friend that, oh my a is the most beautiful pink I've ever seen. What does your a look like? And the friend said You're weird and never talked to her again. So you have this, this dichotomy of synesthete saying, well, everybody does this to thinking, Oh no, I'm the only one in the world. And so there's this really intense sense of isolation, until they realize that, in fact, there are many other people like them.
Nick Jikomes 43:55
And so what are the most common ways that manifest what are the most common senses that get coupled together.
Richard Cytowic 44:01
Well, sight and sound are very common. But for example, the most common kind of synesthesia is seeing the days of the week is colored. And then there are colored graphemes. Graphemes being the written elements of language, so letters, numerals, punctuation marks, etc. And then after that are colored phonemes or the sound units of of language, the syllables, etc.
Nick Jikomes 44:28
Does Senate? Does that actually cause people any problems? Do they have any memory deficits or Oh
Richard Cytowic 44:33
no, almost, oh no, almost, almost never. The syncs love having their their their experiences and their sensations, and to lose it would be an odious state, and they sort of pity us who don't have the rest of us who don't have synesthesia at all. Now, the only time that it is a problem is when it's bi directional. And so I have to say that synesthesia. Is a one way street, so you go from you go from sound to sight, but not sight to sound. So you have colored music, for example. But there are people who go in both directions, and for them, it can be quite disorienting. There's a woman she appeared in our BBC documentary. She has a music teacher outside of London who has, he's she's been studied extensively, and she's got synesthesia in most both ways, and she leads a relatively restricted life because of this. And so for the BBC documentary. She was, she bravely gamed. She bravely agreed to come into picketedly Square at night, where all the lights are flashing and the traffic's going, and you can see her there, and she's saying, Well, I see this. I see that. Oh, my God. And then eventually I've got to get out of here. I it's, it's too, I I'm going, I'm gonna, I'm gonna faint. It's too much so. So there are those, and there, and there are other ones who have one, one guy who's profoundly hard of hearing calls videos. He goes photonic hearing. So it's like looking at the at the red lights flashing on on a tower that's warning at airport, lightens, and he drives toward and he can hear almost like a Doppler effect as it's happening. But it doesn't affect what he's seeing or anything else. It's just, it's just a phenomenon that he experiences. And
Nick Jikomes 46:36
so even though we don't all have full blown synesthesia, like, like, some of these more dramatic cases, when we experience the world, our senses are, in some sense, always coupled. To some extent, they're always correlated in very systematic ways. So you know, for example, even just talking to you or someone in front of me, you know, I'm hearing your voice through my ears, but it's also sort of matched up in particular ways with the mouth movements you're making. So there's an audio visual correlation there that, yes,
Richard Cytowic 47:01
we're all synesthetic in some sense. For example, you know, sight and sound are already so tightly bound that even bad frills convince us that the dummy is talking. Likewise at the cinema, where we believe that this dialog is coming from the mouths on the screen, not from the speakers that are surrounding us. Dance is another synesthetic coupling in which we're in body movements, imitate or mimic the or parallel the musical rhythm that we're listening to. I should say that synesthesia is quite common. We I used to think it was very, very rare, but it occurs in 4% of the population, so that's an awful lot of people, and that means that one in 23 people inherit the gene for synesthesia, but because it doesn't express itself with 100% of fidelity, a smaller number, one in 96 have some kind of overt synesthesia. Are you saying
Nick Jikomes 48:09
there's a single gene that's sort of responsible for the phenomenon?
Richard Cytowic 48:12
I use the word gene, but actually it's probably multiple genes. And one of the things that's been going on for the past several years is that researchers around the world have been trying to map genetic markers for synesthesia, and they've gotten quite good at it. But you know, David Eagleman, my colleague who wrote Wednesday, is indigo blue with me, I always tease him because he said, years ago, he said, Oh, he was going to just sort of nail down the genetic marker in within a year and be done with it. Well, that was, I don't know, 10 years ago, and he still hasn't done it. Nobody's done it. And I don't know when somebody will, but somebody will, will nail down the genetic markers for synesthesia. And the wonderful thing is that, you know, when I started doing this in the late 1970s everybody said, Oh, this is bogus. This is can't be possibly real. These people are making it up. How could this possibly be a real brain phenomenon? You better. You better stay away from this is too weird. A new age is going to ruin your career. Well, now we have young scientists all over the world. I forget how many continents we've counted. Now they're doing incredible research, not just in the in the Neuropsychology of it, but in the in the genetics of it as well. So I'm very, I'm very, I'm very pleased that I've caused this, this shift in thinking about how the brain is organized,
Nick Jikomes 49:53
yeah, and I'm wondering how much we understand about the developmental origins of synesthesia and sort of to connect the dots between. That part of your career in the new book, do we know at all, like whether smartphones, digital technology, all the new technologies we're creating, is that changing the frequency of synesthesia, or the types of synesthesia that are more or less common?
Richard Cytowic 50:12
Oh no, I don't think it is at all, because synesthesia is basically, it's a it's an autosomal dominant trait, and so the environment is going to is going to affect that at all.
Nick Jikomes 50:27
So overt synesthesia has got a pretty strong genetic component. So
Richard Cytowic 50:31
thank God it's got a huge I mean, it runs strongly in families. I mean, one of the first families I was aware of was Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist, and his mother had it. He had it, and his son Dimitri had it. His son Dmitri wrote an afterward to Wednesday, I go blue. I've had other families. I've got four generations. David Eagleman, when he was doing his started his genetic research, he and his graduate students crashed a wedding party, and they did saliva swabs of all the relatives there to see who was, who had the gene related to the bride, who was synesthetic. I mean, it's, it's quite, it's quite wonderful, and how clever people can be about looking at this stuff.
Nick Jikomes 51:21
Wow. And so, so, so it's got the strong genetic component, but we're also esthetic to some extent, to like the sort of background extent,
Richard Cytowic 51:30
well, we all are, except that we're not consciously aware of all of the of the cross connections among our senses. The question isn't, do send us these have cross talk among their senses? Yes, of course they do. It's just how much they have compared to the rest of us. And I already mentioned, you know, you know the sight and sound and ventriloquist so you know, when we when we talk to somebody, we're also looking at their mouths, so that's sight and sound and when, when we're at a noisy cocktail party, well, then the noisier it gets, the more we have to look at somebody to understand what they're saying. So yeah, there's all there's all sorts of sensory cross couplings that are going on all the time, most of which we are not aware of because they're so normal and taken for granted that we never even think about them. There's also, there's also wonderful experience about sensory substitution, for example, for example, how we can get the tongue to see. So if you put an electrode grid on the tongue that's connected to a camera, all of a sudden, blind person, blind people, can all of a sudden navigate in three dimensional space. And there's a famous blind individual, Erica Weimaraner, who climbed Mount Everest using this device. It's now called the brain port. It's commercially available. So that's sensory substitution, substituting one sense for another. And the point being that, you know, the brain doesn't care where, where this where the sensation has come to grow. It's either from your eye or from your big toe kicking against a rock. You just put in the input, and the brain will figure it out. So
Nick Jikomes 53:27
you're saying with that device, you have a totally blind person. So their eyes don't work. They have a device that's taking in visual information, patterns of photons, but instead of going into their eyes and into their visual cortex, it's going into a stimulator that stimulates their tongue, and it goes in through
Richard Cytowic 53:44
the electrical, electrical grid that tingles on their tongue. The tongue turns out to be an extraordinarily good brain machine interface. And that's the whole point. Is that the brain doesn't care what the input is. You just give it the input and we will figure it out. And it's quite it's quite remarkable to watch people do this, and within just minute, it doesn't take much training, within minutes to able to, you know, catch a ball, navigate an obstacle course, you name it. Wow.
Nick Jikomes 54:18
So totally blind, and you just give them this pattern of tongues, stimulation on their tongues, yeah, and they're they're behaving as if they could see through their eyes.
Richard Cytowic 54:26
And in speaking of blind people, you know, synesthesia is much more common in blind individuals than is in other other other individuals, because you've got all this real estate in their brain that's being unused so there's no input coming to their v1 their visual primary visual cortex, and so that's available for other other senses to input a signal.
Nick Jikomes 54:54
And so, okay, so like, what kinds of synesthesia are common? Blind people? Are there particular versions? No.
Richard Cytowic 54:59
The usual kinds, is that, you know, is that colored hearing, colored music, colored time, musical units, etc. And I would imagine
Nick Jikomes 55:09
so that's probably especially common. If you're like, congenitally blind, you're born blind.
Richard Cytowic 55:15
It's not particularly common, but it is. It synesthesia. I mean, not everybody who's born blind is going to be synesthetic, I'll say that. But if you are born blind and you happen to be synesthetic, well then that's, that's, you're, you're, you're in good company.
Nick Jikomes 55:33
What do you think so, when you think about getting back to the effect of technology on the developing brain. You know, you talked about how young people today have certain potential deficits. They have certain social deficits much more frequently than people used to have. When you think forward, like 1020, years, you think for like a generation, are you concerned about what things are going to look like when you know the kids that are just growing up or about to start growing up, become adults and have to start running things
Richard Cytowic 56:06
well, I don't know what things are going to look like in 10 or 20 years from now. I couldn't have predicted in 1980 but things are going to look like in 1990 so I think it's really hard to predict about the future, what I can say is that I am concerned about short sighting kids in the natural world is that mothers are always right. You need to your mother was right. You need to go outdoors and play. You need to ride your bike. You need to do this, that and the other. You need to get off your gaming console and get out there. You need to talk to your friends in person. These are important skills. I mean, this is one of the things that the that the pandemic really affected me by because I'm in Crestwood, the area of DC. I live right we back up on the on the Rock Creek Park, a national park, and then we have a beautiful alley. And you know, we would see, we would be out there in the morning, and kids and parents would be walking their dogs and riding their bikes and all that jazz. And the pandemic came by, and there they were with their masks on, and I said, you know, I'm really worried that they're not going to school. They're being deprived of the socialization that takes place in second, third and fourth grade with their peers. How are they going to learn how to do that? And the answer is, is that they never learned how to do that, and that's why these kids are so stunted socially. They don't know how to make small talk. They know how to they don't how to engage with other people. They retreat to their devices, because that's like their security blanket. So,
Nick Jikomes 58:13
so the virtual learning, the non in person learning, you think that's basically had a very negative impact. I
Richard Cytowic 58:19
think it's been awful. Yeah, and parents saw this. When parents were at home and they saw what their kids were being taught at school, they became furious, like, What the hell is this shit that's going on? That's why this whole anti woke stuff began. It's like, what are you teaching our children? Forget it. So, you know, so
Nick Jikomes 58:41
you're saying a side effect of the virtual learning was, you know, parents couldn't go into the physical school all day long and see what was happening, but now that was happening at home, on the computer, they could see like what was happening.
Richard Cytowic 58:52
They could see exactly what was happening. And they became very alarmed by that.
Nick Jikomes 58:59
Interesting Do you think so? Is that something that can be recovered from, or those kids just sort of permanently knows there
Richard Cytowic 59:07
are critical windows in which one learns certain skills, and once those windows close, you can never regain them. So I think, I think a lot of social skills are lost on those kids, and no amount of tutoring or whatever is ever going to get it back. So I blame the politicians who foisted this on us. It was a very ill conceived social experiment, and it's had devastating effects.
Nick Jikomes 59:44
And you think those could be lasting effects for some kids?
Richard Cytowic 59:48
Oh yes, yes, absolutely,
Nick Jikomes 59:51
what? I'm sorry to
Richard Cytowic 59:53
say that, but yes, I do. I
Nick Jikomes 59:55
mean, no, it's, I mean, it's worth saying because, I mean, because it's, you know, it's, if that's. True, then we have to know about it. And there's no question that virtual learning is not the same as in person learning like that's that's preposterous to think
Richard Cytowic 1:00:09
you know you're, you're, you're referring to, um, or you're alluding to the famous hellenhein experiment of the gondola kitten. I don't know that. What is that? Well, it's famous. And so there's, there's two, two litter mate, two kitten litter mates, and one is suspended in a gondola contraption that follows all the movements of the free moving kitten. And at the end of it, the suspended Kitten has learned nothing and is as blind as it was when it was born. It hasn't developed any vision whatsoever, despite having seen everything that the free ranging Kitten has. Now fast forward to a modern version of that, in which a Chinese speaking nanny was filmed. So that's another kid would see everything that her charge saw. Well, the nanny's kid learned to picked up quite a lot of Chinese, whereas the other one didn't learn anything whatsoever. Wow,
Nick Jikomes 1:01:18
Wait, so you're saying so I just want to make sure I'm following so with the kitten experiment, you're saying. So like when a kittens born, just like when a baby human's born, their vision is probably very blurry. It takes time they're quite blinded birth, yeah, so you have a regular kitten walking around and explores the world, and its visual acuity develops, and it seems like a normal cat, but if you have another cat, and it's sort of suspended, and it's moving. It's moving around like the other cat, seeing all the same stuff, but it's suspended, so it's not actually moving its own body. Its vision doesn't actually develop, not at all, even though its eyes are open and it sees the same, not at all. Yeah, so in a human and in the human experiment, you're saying basically, you have a Chinese nanny physically interacting with the child speaking Chinese. The child learns how to speak Chinese. But if a child simply sees the audio video of the same nanny, the same amount of time, same amount of language, language exposure, but not in person, they simply just don't learn
Richard Cytowic 1:02:11
it exactly. So the second child that just watching a video of the nanny and the child, so passive, passive learning is no learning whatsoever. Yeah, it's
Nick Jikomes 1:02:22
like, if I watch basketball all day long, but I never pick up a bag.
Richard Cytowic 1:02:25
You'll never learn, yeah? You never learn how to, you know, shoot up, shoot, shoot those hoops, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:02:32
yeah, wow. What um, I mean, I'm sure, like, most of the book contains lots of stuff like this, but if you had to distill things down into like a couple simple tips you would give people for how to regulate their screen time. You know, knowing that you know, on the one hand, we've got to balance the reality that you know, no one's going to completely get up, give up their phone and their computer and move to a cabin in the woods. What are the simplest ways that people can realistically regulate themselves when it comes to things like
Richard Cytowic 1:03:03
smartphones, first is to acknowledge that the brain operates within a fixed bandwidth of available energy, and no amount of diet, exercise, Sudoku puzzles and supplements is ever going to be able to change that. So to try to push through with a pot of coffee or willpower is a losing proposition, so we're playing a rigged game, and we're losing because the tech company's ability to distract us is far more is far stronger than our ability to resist distractions. So what can we do? Well, we can turn the phone off if you're willing to do it, but most people aren't. You can put it face down for a few minutes, but most people aren't willing to do that.
Nick Jikomes 1:04:02
I do that. I do that all the time. That's why. Well, then
Richard Cytowic 1:04:04
Bravo. It works.
Nick Jikomes 1:04:06
It works pretty well, because you
Richard Cytowic 1:04:08
see in the other is to set time. So for example, I look at my email at 4am and 4pm and after that you can't reach me, you know, it's, I'm just, I'm just off, off the net, so and then, so, you know, what do I what do I want to use my my screens for? Well, I like to read the newspapers in the morning and maybe in the evening when I have a cocktail. And so, you know, I read the I read the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the New York Times, The Atlantic. I mean, that's pleasurable, but I'm not, I'm not following the latest hoopla on Instagram and Facebook. And and the news, most of the news, is, is not worth following. So I think, I think just really, I guess, ask yourself, what do I want out of life? Do I want to be distracted all the time? Or do I want to be in charge? And so there are ways that you can be in charge, starting with as you do, putting your phone down, turning it off, assigning certain hours where you're going to look at it or not look at it, and spend your time doing something else that's more productive, whether it's going outside, cooking, knitting, exercising, lifting weights, you name it the. What are the things that really make you feel good about yourself and productive about your day? I would be I would venture that looking at your phone is not one of them.
Nick Jikomes 1:06:01
Are there any like Final thoughts you want to leave people with, or anything you want to reiterate from what we talked about
Richard Cytowic 1:06:12
today, I think you need to be vigilant. You need to be in charge. These companies are so strong and powerful that you have to find ways to say no to them, or at least to minimize their influence in your life. I mean, these devices are fantastic, there's no question about it, but they can't be at us every moment of the day. There's got to be some, some balance, all right. Well,
Nick Jikomes 1:06:49
this is, I mean, this has been fascinating. Do you want to take a second just to remind everyone about the new book and, like, when it comes out and all that stuff.
Richard Cytowic 1:06:57
It's called your stone age brain in the screen age, it came out on October 1. It's available on Amazon and everywhere that books have sold. And I hope that you will read it. There's lots of information. There are 400 pages of stuff that you never knew you needed to know.
Nick Jikomes 1:07:16
All right. Well, thank you very much. I'll put, I'll put a link and stuff in the episode description for people, but again, yeah, thank you. Thank you for taking the
Richard Cytowic 1:07:24
time. Thanks so much. I appreciate it been fun.
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