The Price of Not Thinking | Why Civilizations Fail

History is filled with moments that make no sense. Entire groups of seemingly intelligent people making decisions that, at least in hindsight, just seem totally stupid, disasters that could have been avoided. And there are atrocities that should have been unthinkable. And when we look back, we always ask the same question. Well, what were they thinking? But what if that question is inherently the wrong one to ask? What if they weren't thinking at all? Or at least they weren't thinking critically? Because the uncomfortable truth is that critical thinking isn't something that we permanently have. It's something we can lose. And right now, our society seems to be collectively losing it faster than ever before. We are outsourcing our thinking to AI. Our opinions are being outsourced to social media influencers and our desires to algorithms. And the more we do it, the less we notice it happening until one day we'll look up from our phones and realize that we're no longer making decisions for our own lives. We're just accepting them. But it's not too late. We can change course right now and build a better future. But for that to happen, we must first understand what's causing it. This is the death of critical thinking and how to save your mind. Group think is a psychological phenomenon where our desires for harmony within a group overrides our ability to think clearly under pressure to fit in. We stop questioning things. We stop thinking for ourselves and simply do as we're told. To make matters worse, in an effort to maintain the status quo, we might even join together to silence those we don't agree with. This is how individually intelligent people can end up making irrational choices and how entire groups can convince themselves they're right, even when it's clear to any outsider that they're not. Group think is often cited as an explanation for why so many Germans embrace the Nazi party. Propaganda, grievance, and conformity lead to a deadly monolithic mindset. If you believe in the steady intellectual progress of humanity, you might assume that group think is something we should have outgrown by now. Over time, we've become more rational, independent thinkers. And honestly, not that long ago, that belief felt reasonable. But today, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of fading away, lost in the books of history, group think seems to be accelerating. And with it, the slow erosion of our ability to think critically at all. All of this has been made even worse by technological advancements that have made it easier than ever to offload all of our cognitive tasks. For thousands of years, humans have had used tools to reduce our cognitive load to amazing results. When we started writing things down, we didn't need to put as much effort into remembering information. Calculators helped us avoid tedious math. GPS systems allowed pretty much anyone to navigate anywhere in the world without needing to study maps or remember directions. We store less information than we used to because we know that we can always Google the answer that we need. Offloading can free up mental capacity for other more important tasks, but when taken too far, it can impair our critical thinking and our memory. None of the tools that I've mentioned so far hold a candle to what we're currently dealing with at work, in the classrooms, and at home. You've probably already guessed what I'm talking about. It's AI. It's by far the most significant source of cognitive offloading that we've ever had to reckon with. And so far, the consequences are already deeply troubling. In a recent interview, Sam Alman suggested that one day soon, intelligence would be a resource you would need to pay for, just like water, gas, and electricity. The key word here is need. The idea that critical thinking will become an essential tool that exists outside of your brain is something that we've never had to contend with. But that future could very well be staring us right in the face. One of the clearest examples of this is in our current education system. It's safe to say that LLMs like ChatGpt have pretty much rendered the current school system obsolete. If chat GPT can write all the essays, do all the research papers, correctly, answer all the math homework, all in a way that's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from human written work, what exactly will be left for the kids to learn? When we learn to write, well, we're feeling our way through an argument. We're thinking in a sophisticated way, which is only possible on paper. The student who gets an LLM to write their paper is missing out on this cognitive development. They're outsourcing their thinking altogether. And let's face it, they're probably not doing a robust editing job. In a study conducted by MIT, researchers compared three groups of students. One used their brain to write an essay, while another group used an LLM. Over the course of four months, the LLM users underperformed significantly at neural, linguistic, and scoring tests. They also remembered much less information from the papers that they wrote compared to the people who did it on their own. Ultimately, when we offload the writing process to AI, we lose what we used to gain from it, critical thinking skills and the information that came from the writing process itself. In an educational environment, that doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense. Some have argued that the students are learning how to prompt. But to me, that's like saying you're learning how to use a smartphone. It's a tool designed for everyone to use without thinking. Let's not act like you need a degree to get chat GPT to do whatever you want it to. Please. The amount of thinking you have to do when writing your prompts is limited. and theoretically should be reduced over time by the advancement of AI. The challenges in prompting that supposedly have to be overcome will likely be eased or eliminated in a future update. These students will eventually take this absence of critical thinking into the workplace. That is if AI has left any room for entry-level jobs by then. In the workplace, there's a greater emphasis on outcomes over process, which is a big reason AI works perfectly for most white collar roles. But I think we run into many problems when we think of work in this limited way. Just as the student doesn't absorb the information from their essays, neither do workers intake the work they put into an AI to do for them. Now, you might be asking, why is that a problem? It effectively makes one useless at communicating their work to others. If what they produce requires explanation, well, that is a problem. That same worker also has a worse understanding of the industry that they work in. They won't internalize the needs of their clients, sending emails written by AI. The less you engage with your work, the less it becomes a part of you. Now, this all assumes that work is good to begin with, which brings us to an unfortunate new trend plaguing employees everywhere. Work slop. If you work in an office, you may have already experienced this. A co-orker gives you something to review. Let's say it's a public-f facing email. You start reading it, and the writing is pretty good. But slowly, you start to get a strange feeling. So, the individual sentences make sense, but the whole thing put together feels strange, like something is missing. The writing feels absent-mindedly put together. It's as if you weren't receiving human communication, just something imitating it. Uh, so you wonder if you're the problem. Maybe maybe stress is lowering your ability to comprehend it. So, you go to the writer to ask some questions about it, but they're unable to answer. Eventually, they finally admit that they used AI to write it. They're oddly not even ashamed of that fact. You then have to rewrite the email almost completely, wasting hours that you didn't plan to spend doing this. This is a typical work slop scenario. What should strike you right away is the lack of critical thinking on display. workers across the country are assuming it's okay to trust an LLM to do their work and not even bothering reviewing it afterwards. Editing the AI output requires a lot of time, even more than simply writing it yourself in some cases. Therefore, the editing process quickly gets cut if workers are looking to save time or if there's pressure for time. And this behavior is reinforced by upper management who typically love AI and want their employees to use it so they can justify cutting human labor or possibly increasing productivity overall. You may be wondering how so many people in higher positions can lower their standards for acceptable work. Quality work has historically been a virtue in the workplace, especially when it's for the public. Well, that brings us back to group think. The working world has almost universally embraced AI regardless of its perceived shortcomings. Countless companies are pivoting to AI. Even Allird's Shoes that was almost bankrupt, is apparently now an AI company, and their stock shot up 600% simply because they changed their name to Bird AI or something stupid like that. They have no product, no service, nothing of value. They just changed their name. Your superiors will expect you to find ways to make your work more efficient with AI, even if there is no obvious way or you have already demonstrated that it's not helpful. To say anything negative about AI in the workplace is a big faux paw, or at least it's a sensitive subject when you have to tiptoe around it. Otherwise, you may be categorized by your peers as a lite who's holding the company back. The eyes of your peers will all turn white as they stare at you in unison. And okay, you get it. But the reality is you will likely face consequences for demonstrating critical thinking about AI. The pressures of group think push for conformity on the issue. That's why even when people bring up criticisms, they usually couch it by opening with, "Look, I'm not against AI, but and that's even in light of strong evidence that AI isn't really providing much value." Another report from MIT suggests that 95% of organizations are not finding any measurable return on their investments in AI. Meanwhile, companies like Amazon are laying people off under the assumption that AI will improve productivity. Its employees, however, aren't finding good results with the new tools. Many suggest it's actually adding to their workload when they have to clean up code slop, for example. Then there's the fact that workers feel like they're training AI to replace them, which is obviously hugely demoralizing. The whole AI project just seems shortsighted at every turn. If the tools improve and are legitimately able to replace enormous amounts of workers, then who will companies try to sell to? What impact would that have on the overall economy? If we have mass unemployment without some form of universal basic income, what kind of world will that be? And as less and less of work is actually being done by humans, why would a business need anyone, why would we then need specific businesses? Would it not eventually whittle down to one master AI? Is is that the ultimate goal? Just the end of Monopoly with your weird uncle finally having enough and flipping the table over? There's a lot of existential questions AI raises that the thought leaders in the space only really give a passing thought to. And when they do consider them, it's possible they're just trying to excite investors by flouting the enormous potential AI has, even if that potential is in fact horrifying. In a few different ways, I think we've been perfectly conditioned for this moment. AI wasn't our first mass foray into group think in recent history. We've all been undergoing a large social experiment for well over a decade now. If you were around for the early days of social media, it was a pretty fun time. You connected with strangers or old friends and shared your thoughts, your pictures, and the occasional funny video. And it seems like from there things have just gone terribly, terribly wrong. Algorithms that powered social media feeds developed with more complexity and they changed what we see. We went from reading random status updates from friends to seeing mostly updates that generated a strong reaction. likes, uh, reposts, and user data determine the content you are shown, all for the purpose of keeping you on the platform longer so that you can see more ads. The more time we spend on social media, the more addicted we are to the instant gratification that we get from it. Notifications and likes pour in, constantly distracting us from the kind of sustained thought that is necessary for critical thinking. We crave the dopamine responses we get from the distractions, often running away from our own thoughts. When we doomscroll, we're taking in a constant feed of bad news that we never fully reckon with. We become perpetually attracted to content that alarms us. In the throws of all this distress, we experience a cognitive overload that hinders our brain's ability to process and assimilate information effectively. A lot of this content is also not fact checked very well. According to a survey by UNESCO, 62% of content creators say they don't confirm the accuracy of the content they're sharing with their audience. 40% of influencers base their sources reliability based on whether it's popular or not. So, I guess keep that in mind the next time you're alarmed by something that you read online. From our doom scrolling, we're left emotionally exhausted with a shorter attention span and a reduction in our ability to sustain thought. A big reason social media impacts our critical thinking skills is that we're unable to just let ourselves be bored. When we have a quiet moment, most of us will reach for our phone before even a minute has passed. Social media is having a direct impact on your cognitive abilities, but it's also introducing a unique form of group think that has shaped the world significantly in the past 15 years. When algorithms try to tailor content to our pre-existing beliefs, they create echo chambers. We are fed content that reinforces our biases, usually because we're interacting with similar content. Our beliefs become more entrenched because we keep seeing more and more similar content to reinforce that bias. The algorithms are playing off of our confirmation bias, which is our inclination to prefer information that confirms our existing beliefs. This effectively makes us less open-minded and less capable of exploring our intellectual curiosity. We oversimplify events to fit the bias and actively tried to exclude opinions that exist outside of that. Society has by and large become more polarized. As a result, factions have formed, creating what is commonly referred to as the culture war. Each side attacks the other online but also finds reinforcement for their opinions from others in their own group. They share memes that mock their cultural adversary, often tailoring their content to please their group first and foremost. These echo chambers don't just stay online, however. They make their way into the real world. Politicians use culture war talking points in their campaign promises, leading to bizarre policies that do little to help people, but a lot to excite some potential voters. There's also the fear of punishment that leads to heightened group think among social media users. If you belong to one side of the culture war, there's a lot of pressure to keep all of your opinions in line with the consensus of the group. You risk being shamed or in worst case scenarios getting cancelled if you dare to have a different opinion. And of course, I'm not talking about opinions on matters like human rights or the safety of civilians. Those are always going to be or always should be non-negotiable. Running alongside this ideological culture war is another trend that is undermining our critical thinking in a unique way. Therapy speak. If you exist online, then you definitely know someone who frequently uses terms like narcissist, gaslighting, toxic, and trauma. This is all therapy speak. Terms like that were originally supposed to be used by professionals in a proper health care setting and now they've proliferated social media and have had their meanings watered down for mass consumption. They're used by just about everyone to diagnose the people in their lives and typically in an unflattering way. In other words, the language of therapy has been weaponized against other people. A therapy speak is often used to antagonize others. When people use the word narcissist, for example, they're typically not trying to invoke sympathy for that person. They want you to think of that person as bad, even though the supposed narcissist probably didn't choose to be the way they are. These words also tend to over pathize behavior. Normal human flaws like impatience, insecurity, selfishness all are reframed as clinical disorders. Ordinary conflict becomes trauma. Disagreement becomes abuse. Suddenly, every negative interaction turns into a medical diagnosis. When therapy speak gets evoked, it's rarely receiving a critical response. We have a habit of taking the utterance at face value given the authority that the words carry. Complaints about someone's behavior are given a scientific label and then we accept these labels as true. We forego critical thinking in the presence of language with epistemic authority. This is a common component of group think. In the presence of authority, we are more likely to suppress critical opinions. So, we have several ways in which our ability to think critically is under attack and they are all working in concert. Our social media feeds are filled with mindless AI slop. We're also getting AI to write our posts for us, especially on LinkedIn. Our posts are also stuffed with therapy speak, which is often used to disparage someone in a very public way. For the critical thinkers out there, this all starts to feel like we're living inside of a hive mind, always on the lookout for transgressors who won't tow the party line, always targeting the enemy of their belief system. The recent TV series from Vince Gilligan, Pluribus, captures this feeling very well. In the show, almost the entire human population has become unified as a hive mind while several humans remain individuated. The main character, Carol, is one of those individuals. She's immediately distraught and frustrated by the hive mind working in unison, expressing a strict moral code that governs their behavior. They do have one imperative that most of us would consider immoral that everyone should be absorbed into the hive mind. In a way, Carol is a champion of critical thought as she attempts to resist joining her mind with the group. While many of you watching probably consider yourselves disconnected from the many forms of group think out there, I think we're all probably struggling to some extent with technology impacting our cognitive capacity. Our attention spans and our willingness to explore one subject are probably greatly diminished. I also wanted to point out that some of the most intelligent people in the world have struggled with deploying critical thinking at important moments. Robert McNamera, the architect of the Vietnam War, was considered a highly intelligent person. But even after the war was demonstratively a disaster, he continued to advocate for it. He was compromised by the sunk cost fallacy. Rather than properly evaluating the war as it was going on, he was more persuaded by the investment that had already been made. So how can we restore our critical thinking abilities and free ourselves from group think? Let's start the restoration by understanding what critical thinking is to begin with. Critical thinking is widely considered to be one of the central goals of education. But defining it precisely isn't so simple. At its core, critical thinking refers to careful, deliberate thought directed towards some goal. The kind of thinking where you actively evaluate information. You question assumptions and you consider alternatives. Exactly what counts as careful thinking or even what the goal should be is still under debate. Philosophers, educators, and psychologists all approach it slightly differently, but they do agree on one thing. It requires effort and it does not happen automatically. The American philosopher John Dwey who first defined critical thinking believed that it would be greatly valuable to the individual and to society. It would increase individual happiness and reduce societal waste. To foster critical thinking, he thought teachers should respect students by honoring their demand for reasons and explanations. Education should encourage their self-sufficiency and initiate children in rational traditions like history, science, and math. It should ultimately prepare students to become democratic citizens with critical thinking skills. As we've already discussed, these skills that people like Dwey wanted to foster are under assault by technology. Even basic skills such as the ability to read are at risk. There's a recent trend of teachers on Tik Tok suggesting that their students are in alarming numbers not able to read. Getting your mind back is an imperative. Let's face it, the more harm we are doing to our critical thinking skills, the more vulnerable we are to feeling terrible and allowing harm to proliferate. We're nearly defenseless against a barrage of negative content. Luckily, it sounds like people are starting to take this issue very seriously. Gen Zed, for example, is starting to return to the cinema. Many had predicted that movie theaters would die with younger viewers sticking to shorter form content, but that may not be the case. According to a recent survey, Gen Zed is going to see seven films a year on average, ranking above all of the older generations. There's also a wider trend of people sharing the longer form content they're consuming. They're watching films, they're reading books, they're listening to podcasts, and they're reading lengthy articles. The fact that we've gradually made our videos longer also shows this. People are intentionally choosing to spend more time with educational content rather than watching scrolling slop. I know that trends come and go, but this also could be a promising sign of things to come. Imagine instead of just scrolling through slop on your phone, you go to a movie with friends and discuss the film afterwards. That's a much more worthwhile experience than doomcrolling a stream of bad news in bed. Perhaps the dissatisfying reality of consuming feeds is finally settling in and turning into action. And to help encourage this move, I want to discuss ways in which you can change your habits to give you more time alone with your thoughts. This advice comes from Dr. Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Mark suggests that we acknowledge that scrolling has no real value for us and that all we have the option to replace it with is something valuable. Immersing yourself in a book, for example, is a powerful and memorable experience. Compare that to scrolling, where after a half an hour of ingesting short form content, we can barely remember what we've experienced. We're often just left with a vague, uncomfortable feeling to sit with. Instead of clamoring for the phone when a notification excites you, Dr. Mark suggests we raise awareness of our actions. Probe yourself. Ask why you're going to check the news. Is now a good time for it? Or am I just checking the news out of boredom? Instead of allowing yourself to compulsively check the internet, give yourself permission in the form of breaks. Your mind does need to relax after focused work. You're fatigued and you'll be more likely to do compulsive things in this state. Taking a break is not a bad thing. We all have peaks and valleys of when our focus is strongest. Track these moments and prioritize your work in the times of day when you are at your peak. I think you'll find that you're much more productive when you work within your body's rhythms. The last thing I want to say on this subject is that you need to take action. There's a great parable in the Buddhist text, the Suta Pitaka, that works nicely here. A monk questions the Buddha about metaphysical matters such as what happens after you die. In response, the Buddha suggests thinking of the immediate problem here and now, that of suffering. You have a poison tipped arrow inside of you, and you should be focused on getting that out first. Treat your disastrous screen use like a poison tipped arrow inside of you. You need to focus on getting it out rather than expecting happiness from all the toxins. By taking this discipline seriously, you will not only improve your cognitive capacity, but you will also help with that pesky group think problem that I described earlier. So much of our creepy hive mind behavior comes from the algorithms that fill our feeds. But beyond the screens, the unfortunate thing is that group think can still find you. It is lurking around every corner, asking for obedience to a belief system, whether it's coming from others or from within your own biases. And you know what? In some ways, group think is not always a bad thing. It may inspire you to drop the phone and go read along with all of your cohorts. And we're more often than not better off believing in authorities on a subject matter than doing research without standards of research. But we do want our critical thinking to be accessible at the ready. There are key moments where we will need it and we need the capacity to be careful and considerate. Digging deeper, however, there's still a remaining threat to our critical thinking abilities. And I this is the last one. I I promise. One of the greatest threats to our ability to reflect deeply is also one of the things that makes life worth living. Love. Our attachment to people and ideas can severely limit our ability to make thoughtful choices. When algorithms feed off our cognitive biases, they're feeding off our pre-existing love of ideas, we then find belonging among other like-minded people and drift further away from critical thought. With love and attachment often comes hate. We vehemently reject ideas that contradict those that we hold dear. We spew hateful comments at the people who hold opposite opinions. But of course, this is not a recent phenomenon. Our attachment has been compromising our rational decision-making since the dawn of humanity. But we've found ways to help with this problem along the way. The Buddha most famously suggested we rid ourselves of craving and attachment to avoid suffering. His method of mindfulness meditation prepares the mind for deep thoughts on the subject, allowing our critical thinking to go on less impeded. But whatever way you go about improving your critical thinking skills, just remember that you have in you the capacity to pull out that poison arrow, and you will be thankful that you did. If you want to learn more about how to think for yourself, we made this video talking about the highest levels of thinking and how you can rise to the very top. Society is getting dumber chimpanzi. Sorry to be so shalong. It's just you've got a level 10. No glaze. IQ and critical thinking skills are in freef fall. Young people don't want to go to school anymore and Hollywood is actually making a movie about Skippy toilet. I fear that we as a generation might be cooked and what we're witnessing could be the slow death of human intelligence. What happens when an entire generation of humans don't develop critical thinking skills? And how will our society cope in a world where dumb people make all the decisions? To figure it out, I spoke to the researcher who literally invented the idea of measuring our attention spans, the professor who led the charge against chat GP cheating and the MIT expert who's trying to understand what AI is doing to our brain. And what I discovered was that the problem is not as simple as you might think. And the solution is even more difficult. You know, tornadoes don't care if you believe in them or not. They're going to level your house anyway, right? Pathogens don't care if you believe in them or not. You're going to get sick. So, first things first, are we really getting stupider? It's so easy to be cynical and say the world is devolving into a real life idiocracy. But actually, it turns out there is evidence. You might even say proof, and it's pretty dramatic. Starting in the 1930s, for half a century, America's IQ rose steadily yearover-year. This phenomenon became known as the Flynn effect. Well, why? Greater access to education, but also improved access to healthy foods and reduced exposure to environmental elements harmful to our brains like lead. But since the turn of the century, the tide has shifted drastically, resulting in what is now known as the reverse Flynn effect. IQ is in freef fall, not only in the US, but across Europe as well. US high school math and reading skills have plummeted to all-time lows, and college students have been found to be less verbally skilled than their peers from 50 years ago. It's not unusual for a student to have not read a book prior to coming to college. There's also plenty of cultural evidence that our intelligence is falling. No one reads books anymore. The lyrics of the pop songs that top the charts have gotten increasingly simplistic and childlike. And our standards of entertainment in general have changed from this to well literal brain rot. And I I promise this isn't just some old man yells at Sky moment. It would be easy to point out things like screen time and the internet for why we're getting dumber, but we've had pretty much the exact same reaction to every technological innovation from excessive reading to the radio, the Walkman. In fact, for a moment, there were even fears that riding in cars could dangerously stretch your brain. Every smart device devised by man has been accused of robbing the youth of their native intelligence. But something today really does feel different, more transformative, more destructive. And that's not just a feeling. There's hard data to back it up. Critical thinking skills are in decline, and that decline is accelerating. All of this in spite of the fact that people worldwide are far more educated than their grandparents and great-grandparents were. In 1900, the global literacy rate was barely above 20%. Today, nearly 9 out of 10 people worldwide can read and write. The average number of years a human being spends in school has ballooned over the last century. The world is indisputably more knowledgeable than it used to be. So, shouldn't there be some relationship between the amount of knowledge we possess and the amount of importance that we attach to said knowledge? Because sadly, it seems to be the opposite. The value of education is falling drastically among young people. In fact, in just six short years, from 2018 to 2024, the percentage of American teens who considered going to college a priority dropped by almost 40%. And it's not hard to see why. When you look at previous generations saddled with student loans and unable to find jobs even with their degrees, while at the same time an endless array of seemingly self-made online entrepreneurs flaunt lifestyles and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of the average college grad, well, you can see why education starts to look like the worst bet. But even if traditional education has lost its allure, it doesn't explain why simple intellectual curiosity seems to have gone out the door as well. Well, now you are actually going to have to listen to my old man yells at Sky rant because truly your mom was right. It's that damn phone. Well, part of it. My name is Gloria Mark. I am Chancellor's Professor Ammerita at University of California Irvine. I am the author of the book called Attention Span and I write a Substack on the same topic called the future of attention. Dr. Mark's interest in this subject originated from her personal experience back in the early 2000s. I was trained as a psychologist. So I had this very deep interest in how the mind works. And I became especially interested in it from my own experience. Noticing how my own attention started to be diminishing when I was using tech, how I was multitasking. And I asked colleagues, is it just me? Does anyone else have this experience? and others said yes, they've noticed the same thing. So I figured I have the tools to be able to study this empirically, right, as a scientist. And so that's how I uh began to study it. What's crazy to realize nowadays is that at the time this was pioneering work. Yeah. So unfortunately, no one had ever studied attention spans before 2004. And so we really had nothing to compare it against. And the initial results were shocking. So what we found at the time was that people switched any activity on average every 3 minutes. But if we just looked at their attention on screens, they switched on average every 2 and 1/2 minutes. Now, at the time, this astonished me because I didn't expect and I thought, well, maybe people might spend 15 minutes, maybe at worst 7, 8 minutes, but I really didn't expect to see this kind of switching of attention on screens every 2 and 1/2 minutes on average. And it's only gotten worse. So in 2012, the average attention span was 75 seconds on screens. And then starting from around 2016 through 2020, right before the pandemic, the average comes to 47 seconds average on a screen before switching. This has been replicated by others as well. And this isn't just something that happens with young people like the news or your grandparents would have you believe. In our research, we have not seen a difference. I've looked at college students and people in the workplace roughly between the ages of 25 and 65 and we've looked for age differences and we've not seen them. For everyone across all ages, depending on digital products as a crutch does affect your brain physically. I'll give you one concrete example and that's with the use of GPS. You know, a lot of people complain that they've lost their ability to navigate because they're reliant on GPS, but studies of brain imaging show that the hippocampus size has actually shrunk for people who are heavy GPS users. There's more than one study that shows this. There's actually a very interesting study that shows the converse. It shows that London taxi drivers who have to memorize a map of the convoluted streets of London in their mind they have very large hippocampus sizes larger than people who don't have to do it. So we are seeing an effect of this uh in terms of hippocampus size. Okay then, but how do these changes affect our lives? It certainly is affecting us. Um, certainly we're seeing a correlation of stress with shorter attention spans. And in fact, the the World Health Organization had designated stress to be an epidemic of the 21st century because when you're switching your attention so rapidly, you're not thinking deeply. you're not reflecting, you're not deliberating over the material. There's a psychological concept called depth of processing, which means that the more people are actively engaged with information, the better they are able to comprehend it and to retain it. That doesn't happen when we're, you know, looking at short snippets of content. From uh educators in K through 12 who I've been speaking with, they tell me that students are having a much harder time paying attention than earlier years. And so what they're doing is they're adjusting content to match shorter attention spans. I worry about a gradual shift in society to not only reinforce our short attention spans, but to accept them, that we're reaching a a new level of normal where it's fine to have short attention spans. It's fine to not do the cognitive work to be able to learn something. And I I really worry about the effects that this is going to have. No rational adult believes tick tock style content is an acceptable substitute for real learning. But when generations of kids raised on YouTube shorts make it to the classroom, what if that's the only thing their brains are capable of digesting? Is this the future of history class or biology 101? Smartphones and social media have been consciously engineered to demand our ongoing attention. Not for long sustained periods of time, but in endless small bites. Endless scroll layouts create feeds that are easy to start but never actually end. Multiple apps, tabs, and devices encourage stopart peacemeal multitasking. These constant external and internal reminders create a world in which sustained focus and sustained thought becomes increasingly challenged. So much so that simply being in the same room as your phone has been demonstrated to lower mental aptitude. How far has our collective brain power devolved? What happens to a society when too few of its citizens possess the intellectual curiosity and the mental stamina to seek out facts and evaluate objective truth? For Renee Desta, the doorway to a scary new world cracked open back in 2013. In researching preschools, Renee noticed that childhood vaccinations for deadly diseases like measles, which she had given her own child without a second thought, were in her California Bay Area community, seemingly seen as optional at best. I actually um went to the California public health databases and there were some schools in the neighborhood that had measles rate uptake in like 33%. And I said, "My god, this is this is insane actually." Um, so I started writing about it. Despite a measel outbreak in California linked to Disneyland, local law at the time allowed for voluntary opt out of vaccinations for any reason. Leading the charge against that law was a state senator who also happened to be a pediatrician. When I got involved in that legislative fight, me and a couple of other moms who I didn't even know uh started a organization called Vaccinate California. we met on the internet. At that point, Renee quickly became acquainted with a passionate group of whose existence she was previously unaware. The antivaccine movement had been very wellworked online for a very long time and they had also been very accustomed to using techniques like harassment to push people out of the conversation for a very long time because unfortunately it works. Uh you can use intimidation. Renee was shocked to see that for antivax zealots, few tactics were actually off the table. I had a Facebook profile where which I hadn't locked down in a million different ways yet. I didn't know better at the time. Um, and they went and they took pictures from my profile of me with my baby. We were at Disneyland for Halloween. I was dressed as Maleficent. He was dressed as the little crow. and they said that uh you know they took those photos and they started sharing them into harassment hashtags saying that we were Satanists. Other moms in Vaccinate California endured the same. They would send instant messages to people's older kids to kind of like high school age kids you know saying like do you know what your mom is doing? So it was these these sort of tactics that were gross really but the intent was to make it feel like it was a liability to participate. This isn't unique to the antivaccine movement. Of course, these and other eyeopening experiences led Dr. Desta, now a research professor at Georgetown, to write a book called Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. We reached out to Renee to help us first understand why junk science and other mistruths wield so much power in online dialogue, increasingly nowadays, spilling over into the real world. Notice the use of the word lies in her book's title. A term we would commonly apply to antiax content is misinformation. But Renee finds that label misleading. Misinformation implies that there is a fact that is wrong and that if you just correct the fact, people are going to say, "Whoops, I got it wrong." And, you know, they're going to maybe change their mind. And so it it's not necessarily misinformation where the problem is the fact where you can say no no here are 10 studies that show that this is safe. Here are 10 studies that show that this doesn't cause that. Here are 10 studies because the study the fact that is not the point. The point is the fear. She therefore lays the blame not with the army of angry online commentators and trolls, but with the malicious few who have carefully cultivated their warped views. I had my my first baby in 2013. I have three kids. Um, but when I had my first, my Facebook feed fundamentally changed. All of a sudden, I started getting recommended mom content. And a lot of the mom content that I got recommended was antivaccine content. Uh, and it's because that's where a lot of the high engagement stuff was. And oftentimes if you would click through and go to their websites, they would be very, very heavily monetized because what they would want to do is they would want to sell you alternative products. So, get my oils, get my supplements, get my books, get my kits, get my 10-part web series. Right? So I have a great deal of empathy for the people who are fearful, who are uncertain, who are hesitant, who don't know who to trust, who don't know what messages to believe. And I think that that is very distinctly different from the prophetering grifters who do what I just described. Like queen bees, thought leaders in community like these, driven by attention and profit, enjoy the outreach and intimidation efforts of their many volunteer worker drones. What drives that passion and that fear? In the case of the antivax crowd, why are so many so willing to disregard the advice of the medical establishment and trusted family doctors in favor of online charlatans that they've never even met? It's easy to just point and laugh, but the reality is much more nuanced. Overall faith in traditional institutions is failing fast. Government, church, media, our collective belief that these one-time pillars will tell us the truth and have our best interests at heart has fallen in half over the last 50 years. In the past, they were experts and by and large people listen to them. But then for a wide variety of reasons, cracks in that armor began to appear. For many, experts is now synonymous with elites, and elites, of course, are the enemy. What follows from here is a kind of asymmetric online warfare. The institutions we have been taught to trust operate at a natural disadvantage. So, there is still somewhere inside an expectation that this group of institutional media is going to tell you the truth. Actually, that experts do in fact know what they're talking about. But that that gotcha model drives a lot of engagement. Two things can both be true. Institutions screw up sometimes. They should be more transparent. They should reckon with things when they do. Also, at the same time, that effort to undermine them constantly is happening because of an incentive where the influencer themselves is maximizing economically and in terms of attention from undermining that institution. And the thing about a lot of social media is that it targets and elicits very basic emotional responses from us. So basic responses like excitement or fear or disgust. These kinds of basic emotional responses keep us glued to the site because we want to experience these, you know, especially happiness or excitement or shock. Those kinds of responses are intriguing for us and want us keep going for more. Every time you open an app, it is using all the tools at its disposal to figure out ways to keep you scrolling. Tech giants know we don't just respond to the things we like. We respond to novelty, to intricate conspiracy theories and exciting gossip, no matter how far-fetched. It's easy to judge, but have you ever seen a social media story so tantalizing you foolishly shared first and fact checked it later? At the end of the day, none of us are immune. Unlike the vast majority of online content, real life is nuanced and complicated. The health of a society and a democracy depends on the voting public valuing and being able to employ logic. Logic means structured thinking. It is the very antithesis of going with your gut. The gold standard of logical and productive human thought is the Greek philosophy of epistemology. The idea is separate fact from belief. Fact is determined on the basis of establishing truth based on credible evidence and the use of reason. In 1858, a series of famed debates between Senator Steven Douglas and former President Abraham Lincoln involved whole towns full of ordinary citizens, many of them illiterate and uneducated, evaluating carefully constructed arguments and counterarguments in events lasting 3 hours. Contrast the world in which Lincoln Douglas debates were conducted with the 2024 US presidential election, the front lines of which were largely inflammatory Tik Toks and non-stop political memes. And that's not just politics when all eyeballs are on short form content. How is anyone supposed to convey more than the simplest thoughts and ideas? Scientists who hope to communicate their research and findings outside of their own specialized community have to settle for thoroughly dumbed down YouTube videos. But it's not just that we like our viral content short and sweet. It's also that comparing and contrasting competing information is mentally taxing. Many people, although they claim to be interested in the news and truth, are really just looking for something that hits them in the fields. In the online world, which increasingly seems like the only world that matters, bold and unambiguous sensationalist messaging is the ultimate recipe for reaching the widest possible audience. You'll sometimes hear it said that we live in a post-truth society. Well, the irony is that a world of verifiable truth to separate fact from fiction is rarely more than a Google away. Unless you indulge in the most extreme conspiratorial thinking and believe little readily available online information can be trusted, the truth is out there and it's usually not hard to find. This then is the real question. Why do people who care about spicy subjects rush to flood your feed with dodgy content, but are never interested in taking a quick second just to see if any of it is actually true? Well, largely because deep down they're not looking for the truth. They're looking for arguments and evidence to confirm what they already believe. There's a sort of power that comes from embracing ignorance or maybe just your own set of facts. Much of the irrationality infecting our cultural dialogue can be attributed to people who don't like getting their answers from authority figures, but who also lack the critical thinking skills to evaluate information for themselves. Now, of course, as a YouTube channel that enjoys pondering and exploring all of life's great mysteries, we love the idea of people doing their own research. But isn't it funny how whenever they do, it always seems to end up confirming the biases they went in with at the start. Perhaps there is an even deeper reason so many people are embracing and even celebrating ignorance. There's a sense that our so-called cultural superiors have taken advantage of us little people and they're looking down on us and they've been looking down on us for too long. And now the mob is finally getting their revenge. In the dopamine driven online arena, boring old facts get shouted down and replaced with sexier fake news and conspiracy theories. Opportunistic political figures have observed this phenomenon of anti-intellectualism and embraced it. I love the poorly educated. We're the smartest people. We're the most loyal people. Mistrust in public institutions like the government and academia stoked by unconventional outsider political figures makes people even more doubtful of scientific information. And now the lunatics are running the asylum. Over the course of the last decade, Renee Desta has been a firstirhand witness as the anti-science movement has gone mainstream. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed up to California to kind of fight with the antivaxers to support in defense of measles was kind of how I put it. But now he runs the CDC and and health and human services. Right. As if we didn't already have it bad enough in the last 2 years that problem has gotten much much worse. What would you say happened to our collective ability to do mental math when calculators came along? I think we'd all agree everyone got worse at arithmetic. What happened to our ability to remember basic facts post Google? We all got more forgetful, right? So, what then happens when a new kind of tool comes along? but one that allows us to outsource not just mental arithmetic or trivia but all of our curiosity about everything both mental and emotional providing endless answers with only a few mouse clicks. I started getting these emails saying, "Hey, I started using this tool called CH GPT and I I think my memory became worse. I can be like, hey, can we can we measure that enough?" This new tool, right? It's barely 3 years old barely. And it's been right now introduced in all of the aspects of our lives everywhere, right? And so, of course, the question was naturally, okay, so do we actually know what's happening in the brain? No. No one really ran a study. So we decided to design one. My name is Natalik Smina and I'm a research scientist at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and I work on what is known as brain computer interfaces or BCIs for the past 16 years. And today we're going to be talking about one of the recent studies we released called your brain on charge. Given that her lab is on a college campus, the basic outline of the study was easy enough to drum up. Gather a bunch of students, ask them to write essays. Some can use chat GPT while others use search engines, and then others still have to rely on the power of their own mind. In the most basic terms, Dr. Cosmina and her team found that the more robust the technology a given test subject was allowed to use the less information they retained. The details as we know tiny tiny things do matter. We actually saw this also with our paper and reaction to our paper. By not doing this cognitive work and reading through the scenes you would not be as knowledgeable. You would not be able to respond as fast. You would not be as comfortable and fluent in some of those responses. But how is this any different from things like calculators that came before? You know, you do not talk to your calculator about your feelings, about your worries, about your stresses at work. You do not go to bed with your calculator. Literally, don't wake up and check your calculator first thing in the morning. In her well-informed opinion, AI is a transformative technology, a quantum leap forward even from old school Googling. So in case of Google, right, this definitely calls to attention that was found back in 2008, 2011, changes in our working memory, short-term, long-term memory and recall. But googling still requires active mental participation. It's an aid to thought and not a replacement for it. The idea there is that you'd still need to work your brain to search for that information. So you like, hey, what is this? Oh, this is about that. Okay. So, you kind of need to incorporate what you are looking for, process it, analyze it, kind of pull it together in some coherent story for yourself. So, you kind of need to work your brain, if I may say so. Full disclosure, Dr. Cosmina recently joined Google as a visiting researcher, although this relationship began after the project was completed. In contrast, LLMs like ChatGpt or even Google's Gemini do not allow you to interact with the concepts in the same way. There is no analysis, so you retain a lot less information. The more you actively engage with material, the better able you are to understand and to retain it. What do we do with large language models? We issue a command and it produces output. That's very different than doing that directly yourself. So, we're not doing depth of processing when we're using LLMs. Predictably, much of the mainstream reaction to the MIT study played up the potentially negative implications of a world in which many of our day-to-day mental tasks are outsourced to AI. Natalia largely considers this a classic case of confirmation bias. people seeing what they or what their audience want to see. So I'm personally very very excited for AI. The paper we released literally two weeks after this one actually does connect child GPT and brain activity of a person literally to actually improve and change some of the outputs. So here you go. so much for and like it or not, it's already here and it's here to stay having insinuated itself into every corner of the online world. We all use it. We already all use it. You hate it. You still use it. You still use it. Still, her eyes are wide open to the unprecedented dangers that it might represent. Social media is a great example of what we have already lost. like the train that already left the platform. Social media is an excellent uh awful excellent example in this way of things that we didn't regulate well. We missed so so much. In a perfect world, the powers that be would have been ready for the challenges presented by LLMs. Government oversight needs to happen in a more proactive and not reactive way. Right? This social media like why haven't we learned anything from that example? LLMs are ultimately you would say on the scale are tenfold 100fold ultimately more powerful. So why that is not being taken into consideration? They were not just released randomly in December of 2022. That product was in the making and we knew about it. So why it's only researchers that are monitoring that governments weren't the only ones that were caught flatfooted. For all we know, the entire higher education system could very well be on the brink of collapse. I want to say the 12th of December, 2022, and I was grading exams and it's the end of the semester. Look, a plagiarized essay normally screams its nature, right? It's it's a piece of crap. It's a a cobbled together document that shows they have no idea what they're supposed to be writing about. This was not that, right? This was not a piece of crap. It was well written enough. Uh, it showed an excellent understanding of something I expected them to understand and then just absolutely got him wrong on something else. That's odd. That's just not a set of red flags I'd ever seen before. And I had heard people talking about this chat GPT thing on the internet, but I I would say broadly and in general, we had no idea what it was capable of. So I turned to this AI thing, right? what is this? And I played with it and eventually I came out with something that was producing verbal quirks that looked very much like what this essay looked like. Dr. Hick had just encountered his first example of what we now know as chat GPT hallucination. I'm Darren Hick. I am associate professor of philosophy at Ferman University. And in addition to contacting his school's administrators, Darren then went online and made a post, one that would ultimately be shared 17,000 times. My first move after doing that was to then explain all this to the internet. I thought, I've got a lot of friends on Facebook right now who are also crunching their way through essays. There's a solid chance they're going to encounter this thing, which at that point was two weeks old. And so I thought I'll just put this out there on the internet and uh you know it sort of pull a Paul Rivere and and say the AI is coming. It was immediately obvious that academia was in for a massive challenge. So I looked at all my assignments including the assignments I had coming up that next semester and it was like I had specifically written these things to be answered by chat GPT. it screamed at me and said, "You are you are in for it." I've thought more about teaching in the last 2 and a half years than I've taught about it in the last 20. Even before AI came to college campuses, many were already panicked about the contemporary state of academia. I think that our students today have had a healthy dose of skepticism uh drilled into them. I would say my students now are more skeptical about claims that are made to them. I don't know if they have been given the same skills for actually going and doing the research and finding out whether it was true, but I I think their skepticism is a good place to start. And he believes many of them possess a genuine desire to learn. I would say they're stunted. However, I think that this is balanced out by a greatly increased curiosity and willingness to at least do a first stage of research on things that they are personally interested in without there being a project associated with that. So, I think we're seeing a new set of uh skills that they've self-developed, but in far too many cases, the world that they were born into has simply let them down. students who were elementary school students and high school students during the pandemic. There uh has been a definite drop off in their preparedness for college. We are just starting to work our way out of that thing, but there's some weird effects we're seeing. It's not unusual for a student to have college. It's becoming more obvious. I'll put it that way. As helpful a tool as chat GPT is, it might be the worst thing that could happen to students. Young people should be building up their reasoning powers by pouring mental energy into researching and writing schoolwork. And now they can just get their own personal Jarvis to do much of it for them, skipping the reps their developing brains so desperately need. If you think chat GBT has ruined your critical thinking skills, consider future generations who might not ever even have the chance to develop them in the first place. We have entered truly uncharted territory, a brave new world here. It potentially could be a danger for the whole development of critical thinking. in the very beginning, right? Think about it. You know, you and me were born when LLMs were not a thing, right? So, we developed the skill and ultimate skill to ask a question and also obviously have the answer, understanding the answer, having the argument, disagreeing, right? Having it hopefully polite as a discourse, the conversation in the society. Now, think about a child, right? We don't have right now results on any of these uses of LLMs on children. However, that is the real risk we are running here, right? If you have been, you know, taught with an LLM and there were no way of supervising it, right? We do not have actually data that would show that you would be able to develop these critical, you know, thinking skills, skills of being in a society, in a human society and more importantly actually developing any human relationships. We don't have this data. I'm not talking specifically of adults who already developed them. That's ex exactly you know already the case. You have already developed it. Most likely you will also lose some of it. But I'm talking about the base right the base skills the base understanding. You don't have base it will be very hard for you to do any maths. If you don't have a base it's going to be very hard for you to build a conversation. So the idea that you would not be able to pull two words together literally and more importantly you would not be able to build real human conversations and more importantly relationships. Right? So all of this can actually be really really devolving for our society and that can actually happen within one generation. So very very fast and I'm pretty sure no one wants this you know this devolution. This dark vision of the future does not seem all that far-fetched or even that far off. When Open AI released chat GPT5, many people complained, not because AI was stealing their jobs, but because they felt that OpenAI was taking away their friend. The GPT5 model was designed to be less friendly, and the outrage was so much that Open AI had to reopen access to the older models because people were already too emotionally attached to it. It was so bad that Sam Alman had to make a statement that the parasocial bonds people were forming with Chad GBT was a pretty bad idea and was moved to make an online statement detailing his discomfort with these parasocial bonds. The statement seemingly alluded to some deeply disturbing incidents that have recently been making headlines. Removing companion mode for the time being was a well-advised precaution, but it was only a band-aid. With a few tweaks, it might well be back for version 6.0. And even if it's not, as we all know, where there's demand, supply will inevitably present itself. If open AI won't provide virtual companions, then their competitors will. As we reckon with a world in which humankind struggles to find the common ground of a agreed upon truth, are we already moving into a new one in which humans no longer seek to connect with each other at all. So that's where we are. collapsing IQ's, compromised critical thinking skills, insufficient attention spans, the embrace of ignorance coupled with opportunistic leaders stoking the flames of stupidity. All of which is supercharged by information distributing systems that discourage deep thought and further alienate us from one another. It all sounds pretty dark. In the city of Trent, Italy in 1475, uh, a 2-year-old child has gone missing and without evidence, a Franciscan preacher named Bernardo Develtra seized the opportunity to spread anti-semitic hate, accusing the local Jewish population of unaliving the child and drinking its blood. Moving swiftly and decisively, the Pope denounces the story, but he's completely ignored. A local politician orders a roundup of the entire city's Jewish population. Dozens are tortured. 15 of them are burned at the stake. And all the while, the Pope, traditionally held up as the messenger of God's will on earth and an authority on the level of kings, is helpless to stop the madness. Why? 40 years earlier in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg had invented the printing press. Almost overnight, sensational hand bills became ubiquitous throughout Europe. Propagandists competed to see who could spread the most effective gossip, hearsay, and slander. Local populations were intoxicated by the steady stream of inflammatory content. Distrust of powerful figures like the Pope, who had previously controlled the flow of information from the top down and abused their power at the expense of the peasantry, made common people all too eager to believe alternative facts that fed into their worst prejudices. Too few were able to truly comprehend that just because something was printed on a piece of paper did not mean it necessarily contained the truth. Now, after I've said all of that, does it sound familiar at all? Political influencers are the modern analog of the authors of these inflammatory hand bills. No one really knows what happened to that abducted child. The only certainty is that Father Feltra's hateful accusations weren't true. And yet the child named Simonino was canonized as a martyr of the Christian faith at the hand of bloodthirsty infidels. He remains a saint to this day over 500 years later. Proof that fake news can sometimes have real staying power. But here's the silver lining. This whole episode was arguably the darkness before the dawn. While Gutenberg's printing press supercharged the dissemination of dodgy info, it also helped spread new religious and philosophical ideas previously unavailable to the common man. No medium of communicating information is inherently good or bad. It's just what we make of it. And ultimately, Gutenberg's printing press is mostly associated with the good it did and the movement that it enabled. That's the kind of movement we could use right now. A new enlightenment. Considering that this is a video about stupidity, it's pretty dumb that we've made it this far without establishing what stupidity actually is. You see, the thing with stupidity is that it's very easy to spot, but it's actually pretty hard to define. For one thing, stupidity is not the same thing as ignorance. Ignorance means you don't know things, or at least not yet. Stupidity means you aren't able to learn or you simply don't want to. French philosopher Christian God puts several fine points on what stupidity is and is not. He notes that stupidity avoids and distrusts complexity. As soon as an explanation becomes complicated or counterintuitive, you can see the stupid person become frustrated and shut off. It's why phrases like sa bow, shut your ass up, just put the fries in the bag, bro. Or, it's not that deep, are now more popular than ever. No one wants to engage in critical thinking or any sort of complex discussion. Stupidity dislikes change in the unfamiliar. It puts faith in stability and what it knows and views the unknown with suspicion, derision, and fear. When confronted with disagreement, stupidity resorts to mockery. Stupidity finds comfort in blindly following rules and sticking with herd mentality. God also notes that very few people think they're stupid and indeed that being blind to one's shortcomings is an easy tell that someone lacks true intelligence. Swedish professor Sarah Spultchra agrees pointing out that paradoxically feeling stupid can often be a sign of intelligence. Uh many stupid people assume that they have everything figured out. Smart people are aware of the holes in their knowledge and rather than feeling insecure and threatened because of them are motivated to fix them and overcome them. Uh no one knows everything and and no one holds the correct opinion on every issue large or small. One of the smartest things you can do is to maintain the humility to accept that everyone, including, yes, ourselves, is stupid in some way. A 2015 study of everyday instances of stupidity assigned the highest order of stupidity to what you might call confident ignorance. Believing that you are the smartest person in the room, and acting on that belief, revealing yourself to be the dumbest. Here's an example. A thief who cleverly hatched a plot to steal a bunch of GPS devices. This link between high confidence and being blissfully unaware of one's own ignorance leads to what is known as the Dunning Kruger effect, which explains the dumbest voice in the room is often the loudest. It also calls to mind the political philosopher Makaveli who preached that a strong and charismatic leader who speaks in grandiose and simple statements is likely to outmaneuver a more intelligent and likely more qualified rival for the simple reason that intelligence often leads to caution and self-doubt even when well warranted and less bold action. In looking at our current geopolitical landscape, do those words remind you of anyone? Perhaps in some small ways, the tide against ignorance and unfettered distraction is already turning. The first step in fixing a problem is always simply recognizing and acknowledging that it exists. If it sometimes feels less like you own a phone and more that your phone owns you, Dr. Mark encourages you to fight the good fight. People, we're not just mere pawns, you know. I believe that people can take agency to take back their attention. Uh it takes work. There's a real cost to the time that we spend and honestly waste online. So the time that you're spending on social media, right? And maybe it depends on the person, but a lot of people don't feel very fulfilled when they go on social media, but after they're off, they say, "Wait, what did I just look at for the last 30 minutes?" But there's an opportunity cost because we could instead spend that time reading something that's a lot more powerful and inspiring. Getting immersed in a book. immersion is is such a powerful mechanism and you know when you think back to when you've read a book that just captured your attention so much and after reading it it wasn't lost on you right it stays with you because it affected you in some way so I think we should be thinking about replacing time spent with something that doesn't provide value with some other activity that does. Luckily, as our society's leading expert on the subject, Dr. Mark has some practical advice for how to reclaim and restore your ability to focus and cut your personal attention deficit. All right. So, what what can people do? So, a notification on your screen that's creates an automatic response to look at that blinking notification. I might click on it automatically. So what can we do about that? Well, one thing we can do is to raise these automatic actions to a more conscious awareness. I call this meta awareness, which means probing yourself to become more aware of the things you're doing. So every time I have an urge to go to read the news, I'll stop myself and I'll probe myself. Do I have to read it right now? Why do I have to read it? Usually, it's cuz I'm procrastinating or I'm curious or I'm bored. But that question causes me to reflect. It makes me more conscious of my actions. When you're more conscious, you can be more intentional. When you're more intentional, you can form a plan. And so, my plan might be, okay, I'm going to work 20 more minutes and then I'm going to take a break. Next, stop setting unrealistic expectations for yourself. Pace yourself and realize that breaks aren't a bad thing. Another thing we can do is to take more breaks. When our minds are fatigued, executive function becomes fatigued and we become even more susceptible to distractions. So by taking breaks, it can help us replenish our cognitive resources, helps our executive function, you know, kind of get back up to speed. And finally, another thing we can do is to be aware of our attentional rhythms. What what do I mean by that? So we've studied people throughout the day and we find that there are peaks and valleys of when people are focused. It's very easy to figure out when your attentional peaks are. Are you an early type, a late type? Uh you can also just keep a a simple journal. And what you can do is to plan your day in terms of putting the hardest work that has to be done to do it at those times when your attention will be at its peak. And don't waste that time doing uh doing email or going on social media. Reserve that time. By this point, society is aware that change is needed. Most Americans support at least some limits on the use of smartphones in school. And almost half of us believe much of the information we encounter online is likely false. Even more admit to difficulty in distinguishing online fact from fiction. Furthermore, four out of five people agree that we urgently need a more effective way of managing and filtering online information to differentiate between fact and fantasy. In the face of vast and powerful irrational forces, what we believe or choose to believe matters. It's not just about likes and followers. There are real life implications. You know, tornadoes don't care if you You do need consensus reality. You do need that ability to come together and say, "We all agree that this data is accurate. We all agree that that these experts are processing it accurately and correctly." And we don't have that now. And that is what I think is dangerous. Hopefully, as we collectively realize that the internet information ecosystem is not serving us, either it will evolve or we will evolve and look elsewhere. There is some evidence that traditional institutions of information and expertise are belatedly wising up and realizing that they need to combat bad information and bad actors on their own terms and on the modern battlefield. the idea that you're going to continue to communicate the way you did in the era of top- down broadcast era press conferences like no it's not going to work. This is the era that we're in now. Adapt to the era that we're in now and move forward. You would see the institutions and um public health officials put out, you know, these very boring fact sheets and they wouldn't speak in stories, they wouldn't use memes. They wouldn't really do very much that was designed to go viral. Uh they wouldn't engage with influencers. Now you're starting to see a rise of a whole lot of physicians who are speaking as influencers themselves who have now, you know, a million followers who are out there saying, "We're going to put out content." When a government speaker who's not giving accurate information says something, we're going to counter it. We're going to put out good information and we're going to do it in a way that goes viral so that other people can share it. It can be easy to be intimidated by the prospect of ever more powerful artificial intelligence. Dr. Cosmina reminds us that the AI revolution is still in its infancy. But there are new tools like LLMs are a sin of the past so to say. I know it's crazy when I'm saying that, but you have new ones that are coming like you have robotics, but then you will have neural computing. You will have BCIs. Are we ready for robotics? Are we ready for BCI? We are not. So what why is it so? Is it because oh this is this is the thing in in in 30? No, it's not in 30 years and it's not even in 10 years. It's in 2, 3, and five. For all the talk of chat GPT brain rot and machine learning eliminating human careers, AI has undoubtedly already changed many of our lives for the better, handling the menial and mundane mental chores from which we derive no satisfaction. But what else will it become? Many fear AI will someday surpass and render unnecessary mankind's more elevated pursuits. Perhaps it will make human created art look primitive and uninspired. But if history is any guide, it will just as likely provide us with tools to take our own creative expression to new heights. Just as cameras, digital musical instruments, and so many other innovations, each derided as the death of human art on their arrival did in the past. We hold the keys. We are the drivers. Each of us votes for the kind of world that we want to live in with every click and keystroke. Far-fetched dystopian fantasies aside, artificial intelligence will likely only become as helpful or destructive as we human beings allow it to be through the choices about when and how we use it and allow our children to use it. Likewise, we hold the keys to the intellectual future of our species. The phrase doing your own research has come to function as shorthand for the worldview of people who are hostile to actual facts. I think a lot of the times that phrase has come to mean I googled for the things that I already wanted to believe. That's where you get into trouble. Right? When that turns into a reflexive contrarian distrust for every institution out there, that's where I think you start to have some problems. But ironically, a big part of the solution to the problems that we collectively face lies in our collective willingness and ability to do our own research, only to do it the right way. And we have the tools at our disposal to help us in that pursuit that would have seemed like sci-fi futurism to our forefathers, the very same ones that so many of us fear. And I think that having that humility and saying there are people who know a lot more than me on this topic and I can do my own research meaning I can go I can go and I can pull down papers. I can upload them to chat GPT if I want to now and I can ask it to you know in thinking mode like help process a paper. I can ask it in deep research mode for more recommendations. You know there's different ways that you can use certain types of tools to go deeper into research. Now, it's time to collectively prioritize, seeking actual information over sensationalized sound bites. Rather than seeking out evidence to confirm our existing convictions, to go get out of our own bubbles, question received wisdom and group think, and to remain humble and brave enough that we are prepared to revise our own beliefs and opinions when confronted with compelling evidence to the contrary. The time has come to make our devices work for us again, rather than giving them an endless amount of our time and attention and making slaves of ourselves. The time has come for us to pick and choose what screens are good for and when to shut them down, to do some mental heavy lifting, and to earn the deep soul satisfaction that can never come from outsourcing a task to a chatbot. The time has come now for all of us to get smart.