Could you tell the person that's listening right now what they might experience in terms of a change in their life if they really take to heart everything you're about to teach us today?

So I think the biggest thing that they're going to learn is how to stop letting technology shape you. So technology is shaping all of us, whether we like it or not. If you're using technology, it is shaping the way that you think. It is shaping the way that you perceive the world. It is shaping your sense of identity. It is shaping what you want, and all without your knowledge or consent. And so in order to turn yourself into the person that you want to be, you have to be aware of how technology is shaping you and counteract that influence. And then if you want it, if you want to be that way, then go for it. But all this is happening without our knowledge or awareness. And so that's what we really need to change.

Oh, my. Now I'm really in.

It's crazy. I mean, there are research studies on something called the attention marketplace, which is people have started to realize that your thoughts in your mind are a commodity to be bought and sold. So there's research on something called neuroeconomic economics, which is shaping things like purchasing behavior, what you want to buy. It's not even advertising. It's gone deeper than that because we're doing brain scans and stuff like that. And so people are literally studying and competing for your attention attention. So all the big platforms are fighting for your attention because the more of your attention they get, the more money they make. The problem is it doesn't matter which platform wins. The one person who always loses is you because you don't have control of your attention.

Holy cow. I want to try to just extrapolate this for somebody who maybe has never thought about the way that technology is controlling your life and shaping you and your brain and grabbing your attention. I think a lot of us are aware that there was a lot of science around the way a retail store is laid out. When you walk in, a lot of stores use fragrance. There's a lot of ways that things are displayed, all in order to get you to stay in the store longer and to get you to feel enticed to buy something. You're going to show us today how technology, and particularly a lot of the big social media platforms, are being actively designed to shape to shape and control the way that you think, to shape and control how much time you're spending on it, and to grab your attention because they can sell you something and make money off of the amount of time that you are mindlessly giving to these platforms.

Absolutely. And the stories are wild. One thing just pops into my head, so people don't realize. So there are allegations that there's one stock trading app. See, it used to be that if you wanted to buy a buy or sell a stock, you had to sell it or buy it during trading hours. But now you can buy or sell a stock 24 hours a day. And what we know about the human brain is the human brain gets fatigued the later on in the day that you go. This is why people have trouble with midnight snacking because you run out of willpower at 11:00 PM, midnight, 1:00 AM. And so now what happens is that you can buy stock at one in the morning when you're not thinking clearly. This is the wild thing. So there was allegations that one trading house Basically, he had a strategy of anyone who buys a stock at 1:00 AM, we're going to take the opposite side of the bet because people are not thinking clearly. And so they made so much money by just taking the opposite side of the bet of anyone who is mentally fatigued and chooses to buy stock.

So there's all kinds of stuff going on that people are just not even remotely aware of about technology and how it's shaping us. And it's scary.

Dr. K, you've already mentioned this big word neuroeconomics. One of the One of the reasons why I was so excited that you were willing to fly here and spend some time with me today is because your work is this amazing just overlap of neuroscience and psychiatry. You also lecture at Harvard Medical School. You have a big practice. You are also looking at the effect of technology on the brain, and you have an incredible story for how you became fascinated with this in helping us take control back. Can you tell us a little bit about your story? Yeah.

I was born here in the United States. And growing up, I used to play a lot of video games. So I didn't realize this until later. But I was one year ahead, so I skipped a grade. And in my school and in many schools, your social status is based on your athletic ability. Yes. But I was like a five-year-old competing against six-year-olds or seven-year-olds, so I was just getting crushed. And so So the only way that I could compete with my peers was through video games. So I started playing a lot of video games, really became a problem in high school. And then I basically failed out of college. So I was on academic probation after my freshman year for having less than a 2.0 GPA. So basically, the best grade I got all semester was a C, and I got a couple of Ds and Fs. And so my parents tried everything. They tried tough love, they tried supportive love. But they're both doctors. But even back then, today we know more. But back then, games were not nearly as addictive, and I was still so addicted, and they had no idea what to do.

And most parents don't know what to do. It's incredibly frustrating for them. They just don't know how to get the kid there to stop. How to get their kid to stop. And then my dad finally was like, You got to go to India. And I was like, For what? And he's like, You just have to go. So I went to an ashram or monetary where I spent three months studying yoga and meditation, decided at the end of that summer when I to become a monk. That ultimately, I tried to take my vows. My teachers wouldn't have me right away. Why? It's really fascinating. But one of them said, I was like, I'm ready to give up my life. And he's like, What are you giving up? You have nothing worth giving up. So he said, he actually turned me down and he said, You can come back when you're 30, but you need to go back, finish your education, get a doctoral degree. And then if you still want to take your vows, you can take your vows when you're 30 years old. In the meantime, they were kind enough. So I basically visited every summer, stayed there every summer, learned more advanced meditation techniques and things like that for about seven years.

And then after about seven years, decided to give that up. My teachers were super wise. Met my wife. So the whole celibacy thing wasn't going to work out. Was a struggle for a little while. But then ultimately decided to become a doctor, a medical doctor. And the big irony there was that I was pre-med, but I really didn't care about it. And then now I had decided that, okay, I going to become a doctor. And that was actually part of my spiritual practice. So my teacher had also told me that anything that you do in the material world will be easier than what you have to do in the spiritual realm. So set a high target and unless you can meet it, you're going to fail spiritually. So I was like, okay, fine. So I really took that to heart. Ended up going to medical school, became a psychiatrist, and I trained at Mass General, where I was faculty for a little while, and then started focusing on technology addiction. So when I was in residency, I went to some of my mentors, and these are brilliant people, just leaders in the field of psychiatry.

I asked them, Hey, what do you all think about tech addiction? Like video game addiction. This was back in 2015. I had my first conversation. And that's when I realized they were like, Oh, it seems like it's a problem, but we don't really know too much about it. That's changed a lot in the last 10 years. And that's when it hit me that most of the leaders of fields, if you look at medicine, the chief of psychiatry is going to be in their 50s, 60s, or 70s. And so it's no shortcoming on their part. They're amazing humans and have studied a lot, but they just don't know what it's like to play a video game. And so I had struggled with this, started to get interested in it clinically, and then really started working with gamers, and then expanded social media and all these other challenges that people face and really focused on combining. I had some great training, and people really taught me how to understand neuroscience, a lot of clinical experience and addiction, and then combining that with spirituality. Now what I try to do is help people develop healthy relationships with technology.

Well, I think that's a really interesting way to look at it because, first of all, we don't understand how much technology is taking control of our brains and our lives, and we need to understand that. Then the second piece is, nobody's going to get rid of it completely. We got to understand how to have a healthy relationship with it. I Absolutely. I'm going to dive deeper into more of the nuances around what to do when somebody is addicted to gaming or social media, how to talk to somebody who is, all of those specific things. But I want to stay a little bit more broad because I think it's fascinating that back in 2015, you had the insight to say tech addiction is a thing. I'd be curious, Dr. K, what exactly What exactly is technology, modern technology, doing to our brains?

The short answer is a lot. So here's the first thing that we have to understand. So when we look at most addictions, we tend to think about substance use disorders. Yes. So these are things like alcohol or opiates or marijuana. So this is a discrete biological chemical which travels to various parts of the brain and activates usually one receptor. So we have the GABA receptor for alcohol, we have opioid receptors. And So it's a very targeted effect. The thing with technology is if we look at the evolution of technology, technology used to activate just one part of our brain. So originally with video games, you would activate the dopaminergic circuitry, which is what gives us pleasure. But then over time, people are adding more features to technology. Facebook used to be a way to stay in touch with people, but then with the like button, you could get some social validation. It's not just about an advanced form of a contact list. Now it's my identity is becoming virtual, my profession is becoming virtual. My relationships are becoming virtual. So like so many other parts of the brain are now being affected. It's basically like a whole brain effect at this point.

It affects our sense of identity. It affects our sense of pleasure. It regulates our emotions. It altars our attention span. It does everything. And what people are basically discovering, what developers are discovering, is that the more of the brain that I can affect, the more people will engage with me. Because now I'm not just activating this one circuit. Now you can use technology for everything, and your whole brain can get into it. And that may sound confusing, but see, people who play video games, their relationships are online. I had a friend that I started playing video games with when I was 15. I had never met them before, but I invited them to my wedding, and they showed up. So this is someone who is my friend for 13 years, and they're a real friend.

Well, I think one takeaway so far, Dr. K, that's already super helpful is that even just the reference to Facebook. When it first launched on the scene, it was a way to stay in touch with people. It was like, clearly, the Facebook from college. It was a way to share pictures with people, a way to stay connected to your high school friends, to your first cousins, to your family members. When you started to tick off all the ways that these platforms are now in our life, the like button makes it part of your identity. Do people like me? Do they not like me? The number of followers says something about you. It is a huge part of your professional life, like being on LinkedIn or on Zoom, or if you are an entrepreneur or you're trying to launch some business, it becomes a marketing platform. Everybody's on these dating apps, which are basically social media networks as well. And so our lives have slowly started to become wildly intertwined with the technology. And this is why our knee-jerk response is, Just delete the app. Oh, just do this. Just stop playing the thing. And I think the genie is already out of the bottle on this.

I think so. That's the challenge. I think it realized it dawned on me that technology is like introducing an invasive species in a new environment where there's no natural checks and balances, and then the species just explodes. And technology is like an invasive species for our brain. So it starts to colonize different parts of our brain. And you'll see this if If you've struggled with technology or you know someone who's struggling with technology, that's just always literally where their mind goes. It's what they think about when they wake up in the morning. The first thing that we do is we pull out our phone, we browse Reddit or Instagram or whatever. It's the last thing that we do before we go to bed. We're thinking about it. If we're in the elevator, we're doing it. If we're sitting in a cab, we're doing it. If we're on the toilet, we're doing it. So it's really invaded every corner of our life. It's really scary.

I think that is a very interesting point, because if you're ever standing in line at any store, look around. Everybody is filling that time by looking at their phone. And so you've focused a lot of your earlier career as a psychiatrist on gaming addiction, but this is really about how it has invaded our brains and our lives in every single way. When I look at somebody who is spending hours just filing through videos and surfing online, they look like they're numbing. Is that a thing?

It's literally what's happening, and it's happening in both cases. Basically, a lot of studies show that one of the major effects on the brain is the suppression of our amygdala and our limbic system. So these are the negative emotional circuits of the brain. So if you're going to think about, everyone's hung up on dopamine, and dopamine's there. But I think a lot of the addictive qualities are about pushing the negativity away. So when you're scrolling on your short form platform of choice, it doesn't matter, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. What happens is if you're having a bad day and you start scrolling, what happens? You feel relaxed. I wouldn't even say- I do. Yeah. So sometimes it can be relaxing. That, I would say, is actually good. But oftentimes what it does is distract us from the negativity. So what happens is it is a relief from your anxiety, but I would not quite call it relaxing. It can be. Sometimes there is a... Because I think about relaxation as a positive emotional thing. That's true. So what we really see is a lot of emotional numbing. And then what What happens is we get stuck in this cycle because when we use technology to suppress our emotions, our brain does not process emotions.

So if you really look at it, some of this is supported in science. Some of it is just my conjecture. But human beings used to have a lot of idle time in our brains. So if you look at for the majority of evolution, we did rote tasks. We do things like churn butter or make rope. And if you think about that, the mind is relatively free. So as I'm going throughout the day, something, I get worried about something. I go hunting with a buddy of mine. I miss my arrow. He hits his arrow. I feel inferior. We walk two hours back to camp. Over the course of that walking, my brain has time to process. Now, what's happened is if you look at what goes on with our attention, we have zero idle time in the brain. And the problem is that chances are our brain has evolved to use that idle time. So we know, for example, even like with dreams, that the emotion emotional content of dreams has to do with the emotional content of your life. And as we interfere with dreaming, as we have these different medications that will affect our sleep stages, the restfulness that we get changes.

So our brain is actually, even when you're not thinking about something, your brain is doing a ton of work. But now what we've stopped doing is giving our brains time to process information, process emotions, because we're constantly externalizing our attention. And so the more that we externalize our attention, we reduce emotional processing in the brain. As we reduce emotional processing in the brain, what do we see? A rise in just about every mental illness characteristic.

What exactly is modern technology doing to our brains?

The short answer is a lot. Technology used to activate just one part of our brain. But then over time, people are adding more features to technology.