0:04 Is over stimulation ruining your life?
0:06 Last spring on my podcast, I looked at
0:08 some data that implied this might be
0:10 happening. So, today I want to show you
0:13 a clip from that popular episode where I
0:14 I make the argument that over
0:17 stimulation is a problem, that it's
0:20 making humans dumber, but that there's a
0:22 way that you as an individual can avoid
0:25 this fate, that you can stop over
0:27 stimulation from making your own life
0:29 worse. I think you're going to enjoy
0:31 this clip. Check it out. So, several
0:32 people recently sent me the same
0:34 article. It was from the Financial
0:35 Times. It was written by John Burn
0:37 Murdoch and it had a provocative
0:41 headline. Have humans passed peak brain
0:43 power? So, I'm going to take a closer
0:45 look at this claim. I have two goals in
0:47 mind. First, I want to develop a better
0:50 understanding of why the data seems to
0:51 show that we are getting dumber. But
0:53 two, I want to use that understanding is
0:55 my second goal. use that understanding
0:57 to help find practical ways that you as
0:59 an individual can push back on that
1:02 trend and not only not get dumber but
1:04 make sure that you continue to get smarter.
1:05 smarter.
1:08 So this article that I was just citing
1:10 was inspired by some recent analysis
1:11 that was released by the organization
1:13 for economic cooperation development.
1:15 They do this regular test called the PISA
1:16 PISA
1:19 which benchmarks teenagers around the
1:21 world and their knowledge of math,
1:23 reading and science. So we have sort of
1:24 trends over time. It's a useful test to
1:27 kind of understand what's going on. Um
1:28 so they looked at there's a recent
1:30 analysis of this. The article looked at
1:32 that recent analysis plus some other
1:33 tests that have been given worldwide
1:36 recently. And the the author of the
1:37 article made the following conclusion.
1:40 I'm quoting here. Across a range of
1:42 tests, the average person's ability to
1:44 reason and solve novel problems appears
1:47 to have peaked in the early 2010s and
1:51 have been declining ever since. So I I
1:53 have a graph to show here. Uh Jesse,
1:54 bring up this graph for those who are
1:56 watching instead of just listening. So
1:58 here's one of the key graphs that
2:00 indicates this point. Uh it shows
2:01 performance and reasoning and problem
2:04 solving test over time. On the left hand
2:06 graph, what you see is a line for
2:09 science, reading, and maths. And you can
2:12 attest, Jesse, that right around 2012,
2:15 all those lines go downward. Uh that's
2:17 from the Pisa test. We have a test from
2:20 an adult on the right. literacy uh takes
2:23 a big spill right around 2012 and goes
2:25 down dramatically ever since. All right,
2:27 so we can bring that graph down. So that
2:29 indicates the thesis of the article that
2:32 hey starting the early 2010s at least
2:34 according to test we're doing worse
2:37 worse us being humans.
2:39 So why
2:40 why are we doing worse? Well, the
2:42 article points to an obvious culprit
2:44 based just on the forensic evidence of
2:46 the timing. These trends seem to occur
2:50 right around that 2012 to 2014 period is
2:53 where we see these downward shifts. That
2:55 date should sound familiar. There have
2:57 been other things that worry us that got
2:58 more prominently worrisome starting
3:01 around that time. For example, teenage
3:02 mental health deterioration is another
3:05 one. What happened around that 2012
3:08 period? Smartphones became ubiquitous.
3:10 This is when we got worldwide ubiquity
3:13 of smartphones became a reality.
3:16 So the article points out correctly we
3:18 seem to be seeing a negative turn on
3:19 these tests of various reasoning and
3:21 intelligence abilities around the time
3:22 smartphones come and it's been getting
3:24 worse ever since.
3:26 But I don't think it's useful to just
3:29 leave it there. So if we just say yes,
3:31 smartphones seem to have led to us
3:34 getting dumber, it's unclear how we
3:36 should respond.
3:37 We're probably not going to get rid of
3:40 phones. Most people need various aspects
3:42 of the phone and app ecosystem to
3:43 operate. So, it sort of leaves us
3:45 without much to do except for to shrug
3:46 our shoulders and say, "Well, I guess
3:48 phones made us dumber, but what are we
3:49 going to do?" It's sort of like cars
3:51 came along and traffic deaths, you know,
3:53 got higher. Here's another here's a
3:54 source of 20,000 new deaths a year that
3:56 didn't exist before cars, but you know,
3:58 we kind of need cars and it was like
3:59 this just something we're going to have
4:00 to live with. It feels that way
4:02 sometimes when we're dealing with these
4:05 cognitive impacts of smartphones,
4:07 but I think we can do better and I want
4:09 to do better today. So, I'm going to
4:11 look closer and I'm going to try to
4:13 develop a hypothesis that explains at
4:15 least partially specifically why what
4:17 mechanisms of smartphones are making us
4:19 perform worse on these tests, making us
4:20 dumber. Because if we know more specifically
4:22 specifically
4:24 what about these things is making us
4:25 dumber, then maybe we have a chance
4:27 reversing that even without having to
4:29 get rid of our phones.
4:31 So to look closer, what I'm going to do
4:32 is pull up another graph. Jesse, bring
4:34 this up on the screen here. Here's
4:36 another graph from this article that
4:39 gets at what specifically is changing in
4:42 the smartphone era. So we see here on
4:44 the left a graph over time measuring
4:46 percentage of respondents that are
4:49 saying they have difficulty thinking or
4:50 concentrating. This comes from another
4:52 survey called monitoring the future
4:53 which John Burn Murdoch sort of pulled
4:56 up. What you notice here is it's
4:59 relatively stable, difficulty thinking
5:00 or concentrating until that same
5:03 inflection point of around 2012 and then
5:06 it shoots up and we see a a aggressive
5:08 upward trend. On the right we have
5:10 another graph percentage of people
5:11 saying they have trouble learning new
5:13 things. It's relatively flat starting in
5:17 1990 again right around 2012 shoots up
5:19 same time that difficulty thinking or
5:21 concentrating shoots up. So, of course,
5:23 right at the smartphone inflection
5:26 point, we see mechanistically that
5:27 people suddenly reported at much higher
5:29 rates having difficulty thinking or
5:31 concentrating and having trouble
5:32 learning new things. All right, we can
5:34 bring this down, Jesse.
5:36 That is where I think we're seeing the
5:40 effect of smartphones. And if we look at
5:42 a little bit closer, why is smartphones
5:44 now causing us to have difficulty
5:45 thinking or concentrating or trouble
5:48 learning new things? Keep zooming in. I
5:49 believe we can identify what I think of
5:52 as a cognitive death spiral here. And
5:54 here's how I think this works.
5:56 So you now have a smartphone. The phone
5:58 itself is not the problem. Of course,
6:00 it's the the ecosystem of attention
6:01 economy that arose around the
6:04 smartphone. Pre smartphone, if you were
6:06 building a sort of information platform,
6:08 your Facebook pre smartphone, you were
6:10 building a product that was trying to be
6:13 maximally useful to users. I want to
6:16 make Facebook so useful that people will
6:17 think to log in and want to be a member
6:20 of it. So like all your friends are on
6:22 here. That's a marker of this being
6:23 useful. You can find out what your
6:25 friends are up to. That is a really
6:28 useful thing. Post smartphone we had a
6:29 shift towards an attention paradigm
6:31 where the idea now is not being useful
6:33 but capturing as much attention as
6:35 possible. They realized users were you
6:37 wanted a large user count if you were
6:39 trying to raise money but once you had a
6:42 company running you wanted to monetize
6:43 those users and that's a different uh
6:45 game and this is when the goal of
6:47 platforms change to not being as useful
6:48 as possible but being as addictive as
6:50 possible. So we get ubiquitous
6:52 smartphone use pick up around this time.
6:54 Why does that cause a cognitive death
6:56 spiral? Well, think about what happens.
6:57 You have this rhythm in your life of
7:00 constantly being distracted because the
7:03 apps on your phone are designed to grab
7:05 your attention. It has faster, more
7:06 desirable stimuli than other things in
7:09 your life. So now you're rewiring these
7:11 circuits in your brain so that the
7:13 reward circuits are very much tuned
7:16 towards if a phone is nearby, let's
7:19 focus on that. Let's have our dopamine
7:21 cascade focus on the action of looking
7:23 at that phone because that we have
7:24 learned these circuits have ingrained.
7:26 that's going to give us a quicker hit to
7:28 whatever else we are doing. And because
7:30 the phone is ubiquitous, we constantly
7:32 have those reward circuits firing
7:34 because the phone is always there. The
7:37 reward is always there. Look, if you put
7:38 a donut in front of me, I'm going to
7:40 build up a reward, you know, every day
7:42 at 4. You put out donuts at the office,
7:43 I will build up a reward circuit where
7:44 like I'm really looking forward to that
7:47 donut. If you now follow me everywhere I
7:48 go with a card of donuts, there's going
7:50 to be a problem, right? So that's what
7:51 started happening with the phone. So now
7:54 our mind gets rewired to craving this
7:57 more faster pace of stimuli
8:02 that can directly impact our ability to
8:03 concentrate because that's distracting
8:04 us. We're trying to take a PIA test.
8:06 We're going to do worse on it. It's
8:08 harder to sort of apply our existing
8:10 intelligence. But the reason why I think
8:12 it creates a cognitive death spiral is
8:15 that it also means we spend less time on
8:17 the type of activities that could make
8:19 us smarter.
8:20 So we have two things going on at the
8:23 same time as our mind gets rewired for
8:25 faster stimuli. We have a harder time
8:27 applying our existing intelligence
8:30 but we also have a harder time engaging
8:32 in activities that would make us
8:35 smarter. Now this is also captured in
8:36 this article. Jesse bring up one more
8:38 chart here. What we have on the screen
8:41 here is a chart showing the decline of
8:44 reading. There's two plots on here. So
8:47 this is a percentage of US teenagers who
8:50 uh read in their leisure time. One one
8:52 of these plots on here shows who says
8:54 they hardly ever read and the other plot
8:58 shows uh who reads almost every day. So
9:00 we see the almost every day. It's like
9:03 moving mildly down
9:05 through the 80s and 90s right around
9:08 2012. That goes down real sharply and
9:10 the people reporting that they hardly
9:12 ever read goes up real sharply. All
9:13 right. All right, so we can bring that
9:15 graph down. Um, so what's this is
9:16 saying? This is an example of an
9:17 activity. Reading is an example of an
9:20 activity that makes you smarter. The
9:23 brain circuits involved in reading makes
9:25 you smarter. You can better understand
9:26 other people. You can better sustain
9:28 your attention on abstract targets. You
9:29 can better manipulate information and
9:32 build and construct worlds in your mind.
9:33 Reading is calisthenics for your mind.
9:35 It is just straight up exercise for your
9:36 mind. It's why it's been at the core of
9:38 sort of every academic curriculum since
9:41 the invention of the codeex.
9:42 So, it's one among other activities that
9:44 we do less of because it requires
9:46 sustained attention. And when we rewire
9:48 our mind for faster stimuli, we're less
9:50 likely to actually, as we see in that
9:51 graph, we're less likely to actually
9:52 spend time doing that. So, we get this
9:54 double whammy. We have a hard time
9:56 applying whatever intelligence we have
9:59 and we slow down or completely stop the
10:00 increase of our intelligence that should
10:02 be happening over time as we do
10:03 activities that would naturally get us
10:06 there. The result, we're dumber and we
10:08 see it. Our performance on those tests
10:10 plummet. We're not getting smarter.
10:12 We're having a hard time applying the
10:14 intelligence we have.
10:16 Okay. So really now what we're talking
10:19 about the our our issue
10:21 is not with smartphones so much as it is
10:24 with the specific effect of having our
10:27 brain rewired for faster stimuli and
10:29 because of this spending less time with
10:33 activities that foster intelligence.
10:35 So, if we're looking for a response here,
10:36 here,
10:38 we can actually come up with actions
10:40 that don't involve us having to go back
10:42 in time. Now, before I talk about what
10:43 that could particularly be, here's the
10:46 analogy that came to my mind from 60
10:47 years ago, right? We we had this issue
10:50 60 70 years ago where in the US for
10:53 example, the economy shifted from being
10:55 primarily industrial agricultural to
10:56 having this very strong sort of office
10:58 centric knowledge work sector. And we
11:00 noticed in the 1950s and in particular
11:04 the 1960s this issue of we are having
11:06 health problems at a higher rate than
11:08 they existed before because before you
11:11 were probably working on a farm and you
11:12 were exercising all day long. You were
11:14 on your feet. You were moving. You were
11:15 lifting things. It's very physical. And
11:16 now suddenly you're sedentary because
11:18 you're in an office. You're not getting
11:21 that exercise. This caught us off guard
11:23 like oh that was important and we're not
11:25 getting that anymore. You know, in the
11:28 era before bypass surgery, people just
11:29 drop dead in their 60s. That's just how
11:30 it worked. You just have a heart attack
11:32 and die in your 60s. Like, whoa, what's
11:34 going on here? How do we respond to
11:38 that? Well, we didn't say we need to
11:39 shut down the offices and go back to the
11:42 farms. We said, what was the thing we're
11:44 missing now from the farms now that we
11:45 have this new knowledge sector? Oh, it's
11:47 the exercise. Okay, I guess people need
11:49 to exercise. You didn't have to think
11:51 about that before. In 1920, you didn't
11:52 have to think about exercising. You just
11:55 got it. But in 1975, I got to go
11:58 jogging. You know, I gotta go move some
12:00 weights around because that is out of my
12:01 life now. And it is actually pretty
12:03 important. That is a good analogy for
12:05 thinking about this smartphone induced
12:08 dumbness issue. We don't necessarily
12:11 have to go back to uh pre20 technology
12:14 era. But we do now have to think explicitly
12:16 explicitly
12:17 about increasing our intelligence and
12:18 maintaining our ability to hold
12:20 attention in a way that we didn't have
12:23 to in 2009. We just did this naturally.
12:25 Now we have to think about it. That's
12:27 the mindset shift. We have to exercise
12:29 our minds in the same way we learned we
12:32 have to exercise our bodies. So what
12:34 might that mean? Well, we talk about
12:36 this a lot on this show, but just to
12:38 give you four ideas, you know, that that
12:40 gets your mind going about how one might
12:43 have a cognitive exercise routine and to
12:45 push back on this dumbness trend. You
12:47 could one force yourself to read.
12:49 Reading is pull-ups and push-ups for
12:52 your brain. Read every week. Read a
12:55 book. Uh start with things you love,
12:57 easy to read, you're excited to read,
12:59 but force yourself to sit there and
13:02 read. The best way to do this is to be
13:04 outside of arms reach of a phone. In
13:06 fact, be in a completely different room
13:08 from a phone. Even better, go for a walk
13:10 and read on a bench without your phone
13:11 so that you don't have to fight against
13:13 a reward circuit that sees the phone and
13:15 says, "It is right there. We could pick
13:16 that up. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine."
13:18 So, make your life easier. But reading
13:20 is calisthenics for your brain.
13:22 more generally in the constant companion
13:23 model of your phone. When you're at
13:26 home, plug it in in the kitchen. Go
13:27 there if you need to look something up.
13:28 Go there if you need to check your text
13:29 messages. Go there if you need to make a
13:31 call, but don't have it with you when
13:33 you're doing other things. Again, you
13:34 want to sort of break out of this
13:37 pattern of I can at any moment get
13:39 faster stimuli.
13:41 You certainly want to avoid, and I just
13:42 learned this term. I don't know if you
13:43 know this term, Jesse, but I just
13:45 learned this term stimuli stacking.
13:46 >> Have you heard?
13:46 >> I don't. No.
13:48 >> I heard this from a younger person.
13:50 Shout out to Nate. Uh, stimuli stacking
13:53 is where you're consuming multiple
13:55 streams of stimulus at the same time.
13:57 So, you're watching something while
13:59 checking something on your phone. And
14:00 maybe you even have like a different
14:02 device on which you're like following
14:05 something else. And supposedly some of
14:07 the streamers like Netflix are actually
14:09 redesigning their shows to be more
14:11 compatible with stimuli stacking. So if
14:13 it requires you to have to if I missed
14:15 what was said here, I don't know what's
14:16 going on. That's a bad show because you
14:17 can't actually look at your phone in the
14:19 same time and watch that show. So don't
14:21 stimulate stack.
14:23 We want your mind to be used to like
14:24 doing one thing for a long piece of
14:26 time. Reflection walks is another great
14:28 one. Go for a walk with a particular
14:29 problem you want to solve. It could be
14:31 just a problem in your life. I want to
14:32 work this through. And your mind is
14:34 going to be everywhere. It's going to be
14:36 squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. But you
14:38 keep pulling it back. Be in the
14:40 sunshine. Be in the woods. Get used to
14:42 just being alone with your own thoughts
14:43 and manipulating your thoughts. You will
14:45 get better at this. This also pushes
14:47 back on the the negative trends that
14:49 smartphones are inducing and have
14:52 hobbies that require concentration.
14:53 Playing the guitar requires a lot of
14:56 concentration to get better. Woodworking
14:57 requires a lot of concentration, you
15:00 know, to get better. Particular sport
15:02 requires a lot of work and focus to
15:04 actually get better at it. So have, you
15:05 know, things that require sustained
15:07 concentration and give you obvious
15:09 rewards as you get better. sort of
15:10 notable reward. So, you feel that
15:12 appreciation. All right. So, anyways, I
15:14 thought that was a cool article. That's
15:16 what I think is going on.
15:20 It's uh not just the phone itself makes
15:22 us dumber. It's particularly the way
15:24 that it's rewired our brain, which
15:26 creates that death spiral if we have a
15:27 harder time applying our intelligence
15:28 and we don't increase it. So, we just
15:30 push back. Look, man, when you're in the
15:33 office building madman in the 1960s, you
15:35 got to start exercising. You didn't have
15:36 to exercise when you're on the farm in
15:39 the 1940s. you got to exercise now in
15:40 the office bill in the 1960s. Well, same
15:43 thing when I was in college in the early
15:45 2000s. I didn't have to worry about how
15:48 do I keep my brain sharp? How do I keep
15:50 getting smarter? Because we were just
15:52 doing this all the time. We had to read
15:53 books and we didn't have like constant
15:55 distractions and we were often bored and
15:57 walking long distances in the
15:59 interminable snow of Hanover, New
16:02 Hampshire. Going through the snow like
16:03 trying to find our car but we couldn't
16:05 because it was buried in snow and there
16:06 was nothing in our ear and there was
16:07 nothing to look at. You would just have
16:08 to think. You were just thinking
16:11 thoughts and mainly just I'm cold and
16:14 why didn't I go to school at Pepperdine,
16:15 but you were thinking and then you would
16:17 go and you would trudge through this to
16:18 a library and you're just stuck there
16:19 with your book and you would sit there
16:20 and have to like read your books for a
16:22 while. We didn't have to think about it.
16:23 We're like the farmers in the 40s. Now
16:26 2025, you got to exercise. So you got to
16:27 like force yourself to read books. You
16:30 got to go for reflection walks. So cool
16:33 article, scary trend, but at least on
16:34 the individual level, I think it's reversible.
16:36 reversible.
16:40 When you read articles on a desktop or
16:42 like a laptop, do you what do you do if
16:44 you get distracted? Just put stuff in
16:45 the working memory.
16:47 >> So, put like what are you talking about?
16:49 Like if a thought comes up that's
16:50 unrelated to the article. Yeah. Just
16:51 trying to distract me. >> Um
16:52 >> Um
16:53 >> so you're not on your phone but you're
16:55 on a laptop or a desktop.
16:56 >> I guess I would put it in working
16:57 memory. I don't know. I'm pretty used to
16:59 now when I'm doing something I lock it
17:00 on that thing
17:01 >> and then when I'm done like now what do
17:03 I want to think about? But do you ever
17:06 just read articles on a desktop or or laptop?
17:06 laptop?
17:08 >> Yeah, sometimes. Like so I'm trying to
17:10 think. It's a good question. Like this
17:12 morning I read articles from both the
17:14 New York Times and the New Yorker and in
17:16 both cases I use the app.
17:17 >> On what type of device?
17:18 >> On my phone.
17:19 >> On your phone.
17:22 >> Yeah. I'll also read articles on the
17:24 browser and I'll print articles. It's
17:26 like another thing I like to do. Um but
17:29 I'm not very distracted by the web, you
17:30 know, like I don't really have places to
17:31 go to distract me.
17:34 >> Yeah. like maybe MLB trade rumors, but
17:35 that's only relevant for like a
17:36 three-month period each year.
17:38 >> So, it's easier for me to just read an
17:39 article and then I'm done reading that article,
17:40 article, >> right?
17:40 >> right?
17:42 >> Yeah. Hey, if you like this video, I
17:44 think you'll really like this one as
