Thank you. My pleasure.

This was a study done around 2010, as you said, and I think 80 percent of the experts were very optimistic about the internet and had a sense that fundamentally, it was all going to be good. I think it reflected the times. Certainly, there was enormous excitement about the internet for two reasons. One is that the internet provides us with a lot more information. And the second is the internet providers provided us with a lot more connections, a lot more communication between people. And in general, you certainly have to applaud those things. We all want more information. We all want more communication and more connections. Our naivete is that how we get information and how we communicate and receive communications from others is at least as important as the volume of information in the volume of communications that are going on. And what I argue is that if you look at how the internet provides us with information and how it provides us with communication, both the ability to speak and the ability to be spoken to, you start to see that there are significant problems. And so, once you look under the hood at how these very powerful technologies are designed, you begin to see that maybe the good is offset by some of the bad things that we've seen happening.

And that was my sense, too. I mean, I have to say, in the early days of the web and as a writer who does a lot of research, a nonfiction writer, suddenly I could research that would have taken days and even weeks in libraries. I could go out and interview people online. I could locate them and find them and have email conversations and so forth. So there was something very thrilling about the arrival of first the personal computer and then the internet. We felt this new world opening up for us. And I began to question that enthusiasm and that excitement based on my own experience. I was spending a lot of time online. I realized that I was having trouble concentrating and paying attention. And what I diagnosed is that the internet, the technology, because it's so rapid-fire, that I was in effect, training my mind to be distracted, crave interruption, and crave stimulation of whatever sort and the more, the better. And as a result, I seemed to be losing the ability to control my mind and focus and pay attention to one thing for an extended period. And so it was that experience that pushed me to begin doing some research into the psychology of media, the neuroscience of how we interact with technology in the history of media and technology, and that ultimately led to the book.

This is one of the fundamental ideas of media studies and media theory in general. You mentioned I received the award named after Neil Postman. Neil Postman was a great mind thinking about media, TV in particular. Earlier, Marshall McLuhan came up with the famous phrase: 'The medium is the message,' which encapsulates this idea that when we have an information system, a media medium that we use to gather information. We naturally focus on the content, the radio program on the radio, the television program on the TV, the conversation we have through our phone, all the information coming from the internet. But McLuhan and other media theorists explain that the technology itself shapes the way we gather information, make sense of information, and how we perceive the world. And so, the technology itself, in many ways invisibly to us, shapes our mind, shapes our perceptions at a very deep level. In my case, this helped explain why my mind seemed to have changed.

The more time I spent online, the more that influence continued, even when I wasn't sitting on a computer or using a laptop or whatever. And I think if you look through history, you see examples of this over and over again. You can go back, for instance, to the invention of the printed book some five hundred years ago with Gutenberg. And what you see with the printed book, I think, for the first time, people could kind of not only exchange information through the printed page, but they could sit there with a book and kind of be in close interaction with the words on the page and the thoughts of the author to the extent of closing off the other distractions that have always been around in the world. And so it had this kind of intimate quality of getting lost, as we say in a book or the text. You can go deeper than that and say that the printed page, particularly the book, helped train us to pay attention because I think human beings are naturally distractible. We want to know everything that's going on around us. And I think this goes way back for evolutionary reasons. The more you knew about your environment at every moment, the better the chances you'd stay alive. So the book, the technology and the medium of the book helped train us to control our mind, not to allow the distractions in the environment, to keep grabbing our attention. And so that's one example I think of how even though as people read books, they were interested in the story or the arguments, it was shaping the way they think, making them more attentive, more able to concentrate. And I think from there you can go on throughout history and see other examples, whether it's radio or telephone or television, of how as we adapt ourselves to new media, we change our thinking or at least change the balance of our thinking. We begin to think in certain ways, which helps explain why the internet, social media, smartphones, and so forth have such a profound effect on us. This is a set of media that we're more involved with. People pick up their phones the moment they wake up, and that's the last thing they look at before they go to bed.

We've never seen a medium that is so constantly interrupting us, pulling our minds toward it, mediating the way we express ourselves. And so, if you said that this new technology within this long understanding of how media shapes the way we perceive things and the way we think about things, you see that we've created a technology that has an unparalleled influence over the way we think.

No, I think that's a great example. That's exactly what I meant by this idea that we need to pay attention to how information is presented to us and the quantity of information that is accessible to us. One of my theories is that media technology, information technology changes the way we think and how we think about thinking. And so what I think is that because we're constantly inundated with information in all sorts of forms overlapping coming at us from all different sources, we've begun to define the intellectual life as being a matter of gathering information as quickly as possible. And I think gathering information is very important. But what we've lost sight of is that that's only the first step to deep thinking, the gathering of information.

The second step and I think the more important step ultimately, is stepping back from the flow of new information to think deeply and attentively about the information we've already gathered and to put it into context, to connect it with other things we know and think about. And just as the example you showed illustrates, if we get better at both of these stages of our intellectual lives, the information gathering part, which is very important, but also the time that you screen out new information and screen out distractions and think deeply and perhaps meditatively. That's where we get our deepest, most creative, most interesting thoughts. And I fear that because we become so focused on always gathering information, we're not giving ourselves the opportunity or the encouragement to get more into that reflective, contemplative mode of thinking that I think is so important for living up to our full intellectual potential.

Sure. There are a number of them. But why don't we start with the topic you've already brought up, that of neuroplasticity? Until about 40 years ago or so, it was believed by the general public and neuroscientists that our brains were plastic, in other words, malleable, adaptable only for about the first 20 years of our life. After that, it was believed that you're stuck with the circuits you develop for over the first 20 years of your life for the rest of your life. And nothing changed other than neurons beginning to die off. What we've discovered is that that's not true. Our brains are plastic throughout the entirety of our lives. We can constantly adapt to new changes in our environment and think in different ways. And by that, I mean adaptable at a physical level, on an anatomical level, as we learn to think or exercise our brain in a particular way. It's kind of like our other muscles. We optimize our brains for that way of thinking. We dedicate more neurons. We dedicate more neural circuits to that way of thinking. And we prune away the circuits that we don't use so much. And I think, in general, that's a great, powerful benefit of the way our minds work because we can adapt.

We're not stuck with the brain we had when we were 20 years old. But there is a potentially negative side to that. And that is that our brain doesn't make value judgments about how it adapts. It simply adapts to what we use it for the most. And I think when you begin to look at how technology influences us, you begin to see that we can easily train our minds to want to be distracted, to want to be interrupted, to want to be amused and stimulated all the time. And if we do that, if we spend all our time taking in information in an overlapping fashion, we're not practicing being more attentive, and I think deeper ways of thinking. The ways of thinking that require us to make connections between different information pieces only come when we pay deep attention.

Unfortunately, from what we know about neuroplasticity, our brains begin to optimize for that very distracted, fast-paced form of thinking. And we begin to lose not only that habit but the capability to think in more contemplative, reflective, introspective ways. In some ways, the biggest risk we face is not only that our habits change because of technology, but the very way our minds work begins to change as we adapt to the new medium and the way it presents information to us. So I think that other parts of brain science are important here. But I think that's the overarching one to keep in mind, folks.

I'm fascinated by how memory works and how technology influences memory. And again, it's as all of these things tend to be. It's kind of both good news and a bad news situation. We've become so enamored of the ability to have pretty much all information and all of our experiences readily available to us through technology that we've kind of come to underestimate the importance of our biological memory. And you often hear people say, oh, it's great. I don't have to remember anything anymore because I can just google it or find it online. And that's a problem.

On the one hand, it's great that we have this supplementary artificial memory outside our minds that we can tap into. And that's been the case since people first started writing things on rocks. Suddenly, we had a way to access information that wasn't contained in our heads. So that's one of the great stories of civilization through books and television and onto the internet. But there's a problem here. By remembering things, what in brain science is called memory consolidation, we connect new information to the other information that we have in our minds. Deep thinking isn't about the individual bits of information stuff. It's about the personal connections we make in our mind, the associations, the connections between far-flung bits of information that we've learned through connecting to our experiences, our emotions, other people we know, it's that web of connections inside our mind, inside our memory that gives richness to our thought and allows us to think conceptually. So we're not just taking in a bit of information to answer a particular question. We're taking in a bit of information, but we're also putting it into a broader context that allows us to think critically about that memory consolidation.

This transfer of information from our very short-term memory, which is called working memory, to our long-term memory. That process of consolidation requires attention. It requires us to think deeply about a piece of information or an experience or anything. And it's only by paying attention to it that we form those connections in associations with other pieces of information that give richness to our thought. So if we're in an environment as I think we are today, where new pieces of information constantly bombard us, we're so distracted and so constantly interrupted that we never pay enough attention to, to information, to connect it, to consolidate it, connect and incorporate it deeply into our personal store of knowledge. And as a result, I think that that again shows the problems with how information is present and presented to us. We end up with an enormous wealth of information, but we're only thinking superficially about it.

Let me preface it by saying, I think the research into empathy, technology, and technology's emotional influence is at an earlier stage, so I don't want to be too definitive about the effects, and I want to make that clear. In these various studies looking at empathy and other emotions from different angles, we have seen the beginnings of what I think is concerning. It seems to be a concerning trend that the more we're immersed in the world of digital media, the harder it becomes for us to feel empathy or to feel other kinds of deep emotional connections with other people. And we've seen this in some psychological studies, particularly dealing with young people who have grown up with technology. We've also seen it in studies that indicate that just as deep thinking requires attention, so does deep emotional connection, such as empathy. So you have to kind of spend time thinking about a person or looking into their eyes or conversing with them to develop the capacity for feeling empathy.

So just as our thoughts might be compromised by being constantly distracted, so might the richness of our emotional connections be compromised if we're constantly distracted. There have been a few interesting, very interesting studies that show that people who have conversations with their phones when their phones are with them have fewer feelings of empathy with the other person, have fewer feelings of trust, and express lesser levels of satisfaction with the conversation than do people who have conversations when their phones are in different rooms. I think other studies show that we've deeply trained our minds to expect new and interesting information from our phones.

We're thinking about our phones subconsciously and monitoring our phones, and waiting to use our phones all the time. And one of the theories is that if your phone is around you, it represents all the other people you could be talking with virtually through social media, through email, through texting, whatever. That competes with your conversation with someone else, even if that person is your spouse or your child or a close friend. And as a result, because your attention is divided and you're not giving your full attention to the other person.

I think that's true. And I think, for instance, Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist at MIT, has shown that one of the reasons young people in particular, but I think all people in general, often come to prefer conversing through media, through social media or texting or email, they come to prefer it over time to face to face interaction. And one of the reasons is because they're more in control. Their social status is not at risk. When you're speaking in real-time with a person who's right across from you, you can say something stupid, or you can misspeak, or you're nervous about how you present yourself, and you can't correct yourself, except after the fact. Whereas when you're speaking through a medium, you feel like you're insulated from that kind of social risk, and you can edit yourself. There's this delay in the conversation. And I think that explains why.

This shows up in service, particularly among very young kids. And this, to me, is kind of mind-blowing. Most of them now would rather interact with their friends through technology than face to face. So it's understandable. But I think what you lose is the kind of richness that only comes when you're physically present with a person. So you're not just exchanging words. You're reading their gestures or reading their eyes. It's very concerning to me that by downplaying the importance of that kind of close physical connection interaction with other people, we're kind of substituting a rich form of communication for a much lesser form of communication.

I don't know if there are studies in particular, but studies show that we seem to be becoming much more impatient. This interesting study looked at the relationship between a person's internet speed at home and patience several years ago. And what they use as a proxy for patience is how long people would wait for a YouTube video to start before clicking on a link and going somewhere else. And what they found is the same as your internet connection speeds up your patience, your willingness to wait for a video you wanted to watch at one point gets lesser and lesser. And so it went from, people would wait five seconds when they had slow internet connections for a video to start, and if it were delayed, they'd click somewhere else. It was down to a fraction of a second that people would wait. So that seems to indicate that as we adapt ourselves to this constant stimulation, this constant ability to control what we see at a microsecond level, our patients are willing to wait for something to endure. Any kind of delay diminishes and diminishes pretty dramatically.

I certainly think it's having an impact. At least one of the factors behind some of the troubling things we're seeing is not just the circulation of misinformation, fake news, and so forth, but the willingness of people to accept it as fact. I think it's an important reason that if our brains have adapted to this state of this environment, of constant distraction, constant interruption, we're not processing the information as deeply. We're not developing a broad context in which to think critically about new pieces of information. You can see how you begin to take in information so quickly, and if you don't judge it critically, you can become very gullible. You can start to believe things that are not true. And also, you can start to tend to believe things are true simply because you see them more and more often. And that's another thing that happens because of the design of a lot of particular social media: people feel their biases are validated. And when that happens, and we know from plenty of psychological research, those biases become stronger. People become more extreme in their views, less willing to listen to alternative views.

Technology is a factor in increasing gullibility and in believing falsehoods as facts. People begin to form very strong groups, and others believe only what the group thinks and demonize anybody that's not in the group. So these are big social problems we face right now. And I think there are certainly lots of factors behind them. But I do think one of them is the information environment we've created for ourselves.

I do think in some ways this ties back to what I mentioned earlier about kids beginning to like to converse online rather than in person. That seems to indicate that as we adapt to technology, we feel so in control. When we're online, we feel everything's very convenient. Everything's designed to respond to our needs or interests. This makes it very tough to engage with reality and its issues since people can easily escape to the virtual world. Because the virtual world is so perfectly designed to respond to a person's every whim and give them new stimulation all the time. And I think you can argue that this is a long-term trend with media in general, and you heard similar things about radio and TV. But social media is a different beast altogether.

I mean, first of all, let me say that I struggle with this too. Just as it was my loss of attentiveness that clued me into something deep that might be going on here, the online world is extraordinarily compelling, and I do find myself fighting against it sometimes. I would say that this is no longer just a matter of personal discipline. The internet and the online world have been so integrated into our social lives and other aspects of life that this compulsion to be online is no longer a personal compulsion. It's also a social compulsion. You have to do your job. You have to be online if you're in school. To be a student, you have to be online. To be a sociable person, you have to be online. So I think if we're going to deal with this, we have to deal with it at a social and personal level. At the personal level, I think that the biggest piece of advice is to resist temptation. For some reason, when cell phones and smartphones came along, we assumed that they had to be with us all the time. And I think as the phone has come to influence our thoughts more and more. Just the simple fact that it's with us and tempting us in notifying us in getting in the way of our thoughts in our social lives has become a problem. People should spend some part of their day, some substantial part of the day without their phone on them, whether it's taking a walk or having lunch or dinner with somebody or having a conversation with somebody or going out.

Doing this is essential. I think you begin to break the kind of deep connection that's come to define our minds' relationship with our phones. And I think as soon as you do that, you begin to open up old ways of thinking that are more attentive. As with all tools, I think our phones and our computers, social media, they're good, they're very good at some things, but they're not good at all things. And we make a mistake when we feel we have to use them for everything. I think being more critical and self-conscious about how we use technology is the first thing to do. Then there are other things. I think I mentioned the distractions that come with notifications. Social media companies, other tech companies, and internet companies have realized that notifications are a great way to constantly be on people's minds. I would suggest turning off all notifications because then you choose when to check on things rather than the technology choosing for you. And then finally, as a practical matter, I would be very wary of social media because social media, for all the benefits it brings in, I'm not saying you have to get rid of it altogether. Still, it's designed to keep you distracted. It's designed to plug into not only our inherent desire to gather as much information as possible but to be kind of socially active all the time and socially conscious all the time. So it's kind of this perfect distraction technology. Being more disciplined in the way we use technology in general and how we use social media, in particular, is the first step toward taking more control over our minds.

Right? You can't have it on your bedside table when you're sleeping.

I mean, since way before the internet came along, I realized how a good walk could unlock creative thoughts that you could have never had otherwise. But I do think it brings to it another point. It used to be that there was a rhythm in your life, that there were times when you were with people, and you were socializing. You're conversing, exchanging ideas. But then there were times when you worked with people, and you threw yourself back on yourself, and you had to explore things that were interesting to you.

Today, if you have your phone with you all the time, then you can socialize all the time. So, suddenly, that rhythm that we used to have in life becomes a straight line. We're always having the stimulation of socializing, even if it's virtual.

The question of simplicity is very interesting to me. There's a paradox in some ways: you have to have a complex store of information in your mind and kind of the time to process information to simplify things. In many ways, when information is just coming at you all the time, you're in a constant state of confusion, and everything seems very complicated because you don't have this big context to put things in. So in some ways, it's having a rich, complex reservoir of personal knowledge in your mind and then time to fit new information into that knowledge to think deeply about it. That allows you to synthesize lots of complexity and see some of the simpler principles, the essential principles underlying it. I haven't until just this moment. I haven't thought about it in those terms. I think that's interesting. The sense that we were losing the ability to simplify things, which means getting to their essence.

That's a good question. I wish I had a perfect answer because I'm kind of searching for a thing that stirs my curiosity. I have a new article coming out that looks at how, as a society, we might think about regulating social media, and it draws on the experience that society had a hundred years ago when we were suddenly confronted with the arrival of broadcasting, first in the form of radio and then enforced in the form of TV. And there was all sorts of chaos and tumult. But through our democratic institutions to our democratic processes, we were able to figure out how to regulate the new media in the public interest. So we had this sense of the common good, and I think we can get back to that. It'll be hard. But that's one of the things I'm thinking about. And then there's one of the buzzwords today in the technology industry is the metaverse. It's very vague at this point, but it's a kind of virtual reality, and it is also a richer form of the internet. And so I'm trying to make sense of that. If we're going to be virtual all the time, even if we are still physical beings, what's that going to mean to us? And that's something I want to try to make sense of.

Well, you brought up the business world, and when I was an editor at Harvard Business Review, my first few books were about management and strategy. I've heard from many folks from the business world that these problems that I've been talking about are also a problem in companies that need people to think deeply and attentively. And this can be software companies, can be engineering companies, they can be all sorts of companies. You want people to screen out distractions and screen out interruptions, and focus on hard problems. And I think companies are struggling with this loss of workers' abilities to pay attention. And I would put some of the onus back on business executives and business managers because I think they've been sending out the message to all their employees, whether it's tacitly or explicitly. The message is: you need to be connected all the time, even if it's 10 p.m. and you're with your family. You have to start sending the message that being connected and following information is essential. Still, we also need to encourage and reward deep, attentive thinking, and that might mean that somebody is not connected for a couple of days because they're focused. That's okay. So I do think that there is a role here for businesses and business executors to play. Encouraging deeper, more attentive thinking and saying it's okay.

Thank you.