- Technology allows a scale and speed of opinion creation
that is extremely seductive to our brain.
Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin,
socially speaking, existentially speaking.
- We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody
Even if they're on the other side of the planet,
even if they have a lot more money than we do,
We can still compete with them on engagement.
We're pulled in so many directions between the texts alerts
and the constantly scrolling feeds.
And if we're distracted, we can't pay attention.
If I can't pay attention, I can't make new memories.
Every time you go online, you are in a funhouse of mirrors.
Have you ever seen a news story about a data breach for a website you use?
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In some cases, you could get locked out of your social media accounts.
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Now let's get back to the discussion of the impacts of social media.
I'm Luke Burgis, founder of Fourth Wall Ventures,
professor of business,
and author of the book
"Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life."
- We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody
or engage with somebody,
could even be the President of the United States.
And they might react to us back.
Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin,
socially speaking, existentially speaking.
Even if they're on the other side of the planet,
even if they have a lot more money than we do,
we can still interact with them.
We can still compete with them on engagement.
They're inside of our world.
We have a mimetic machine in our pocket
where all of these people exist.
So, what is mimetic desire?
Mimetic desire means that we're adopting
another person's desire as our own,
usually without even realizing that we're doing it.
So, social media has given us millions of mimetic models
that we now have to contend with.
Some people have went from having 10 mimetic models
to now having a million,
and we haven't quite come to grips as a culture
with what that means for our mental and emotional health.
There are two kinds of mimetic models.
The first kind is called an external mediator of desire.
These are models that are outside of our world;
whether because they exist in a different social sphere
than we do,
there's no possibility of us coming into contact with them
and certainly not becoming rivals with them.
They're in some sense, outside of our world of desire,
outside of our world of competition.
Now, these external models of desire
can be real, or they can be fictional.
The other kind of model is inside of our world
called internal mediators of desire.
These are people that we do come into contact with,
and there is a possibility of conflict
or rivalry with these people.
These are people that are in our family;
these are people in our workplace;
these are people that could even be our friends.
It's easier to compare ourselves to them.
These are the kinds of people that we look to as benchmarks,
and we're far more likely to be envious
of somebody that we went to high school with
who now has a great job and a beautiful spouse,
than we are to be envious
of the richest person in the world.
The danger with external mediators of desire,
with keeping up with people that are very successful,
with people that have modeled a certain kind of lifestyle,
is that there's no end to that process.
All desire is a form of transcendence.
We desire to go beyond the boundaries,
to go just over the mountain,
to be the kind of person
that we don't feel that we currently are.
Having positive models of desire to emulate
is a very good thing.
It's important to have people that model virtues
and goodness that we would like,
but we have to understand the limitations of any model.
And understanding how the dynamic
between us and our models changes in that scenario
is really, really important.
It's also important to understand
when somebody is an internal model of desire to us
because, in that case, we have to have boundaries.
All desire comes from us feeling like we lack something,
and that can bring us into a dangerous, vicious cycle
because there will always be another model to find.
We have to choose our models wisely.
We also have to know when the model
is inflaming us with the desire
for something that's gonna bring real fulfillment
or whether it's going to bring a dopamine hit
or allow us to fantasize about a life
that we'll probably never have.
And even if we did have,
it would probably make us miserable.
All you need to do is go on Instagram
and spend five minutes,
and you see lifestyle's model,
you see vacation destination's model, fashions,
manners of speech, ways of engagement,
ways of speaking, political preferences.
All of these desires are modeled for us 24 hours a day,
billions of them, and we need to understand
the mimetic landscape of social media
or else we'll become totally controlled by it.
The greatest strength of social media
is its 'democratizing tendency.'
We don't have to just look to elites
and a few news outlets to tell us about us.
We can actually communicate with each other.
But when we engage online, we tend to think
that we're interacting with a reasonable sample
of the actual population, but it's not true.
Close to 80% of all content on social media
is generated by about 10% of the users.
That 10% tends to be extreme on most social issues.
They are the vocal fringe.
When you have a vocal minority
that is perceived as the majority,
critical mass of us will actually either self-silence,
or we will actually go along to get along,
and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is how collective illusions form.
It's not terribly surprising that some of the first people
to start to use these tools to manipulate
were leaders who need consensus to conserve power.
- Venezuela. (speaks Spanish)
- An example of this is Nicolás Maduro,
the leader of Venezuela.
For a long time, it looked like, on social media,
that he had a pretty good beat
on the consensus of the people that he led.
So, almost everything that he would say,
stories that were written about him that were positive,
would be retweeted and shared,
and it looked like this represented some kind of consensus,
but it turned out a significant percentage
of his so-called "followers"
were actually what we call 'social bots.'
These are fake accounts that only exist
to retweet anything positive about him or that he said,
and, importantly, to attack the opposition.
When Twitter banned them,
the real consensus was with the opposition,
and that started to emerge and be retweeted
as more and more people recognized
that it was okay to say what they actually thought.
Social media is a free-for-all
in terms of who can shout the loudest,
and who can silence other people
in the name of masquerading as a majority
and manufacturing collective illusions.
Your willingness to conform
and your unwillingness to challenge
what you think the group believes
will actually contribute to leading the group astray.
The solution to our online life
is to get offline once in a while.
The most important thing you can do
is continue to have conversations with your family,
with your neighbors, with your community.
Don't carry that distortion over
into the way you treat people in real life.
My name is Amishi Jha. I'm a neuroscientist and professor
at the University of Miami,
and the author of the book "Peak Mind:
Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention,
Invest 12 Minutes a Day."
- Where is your attention right now?
The human brain's attention system
is actually the success story
of what makes us unique as human beings.
Because attention fuels our ability to think,
to feel, and connect,
what we pay attention to is our life.
For a long time, through our evolutionary history,
the brain started to suffer from a very big problem
which is that there's far more information
out in the environment than could be fully processed.
Attention ended up becoming a very useful solution
because it allows us to prioritize information,
but there are qualities of the human experience
that disable attention.
Given how powerful attention is, we need to really respect
where we place this precious brain resource.
The mind is no different than the body.
The mind needs to be exercised daily
to optimize our psychological well-being.
Knowing this, I became very interested in understanding
if we might be able to train attention.
The brain's attention system is incredibly powerful.
There's three big ways we use attention as a fuel
for having success in our daily activities.
We use our attention to actually 'Think'-
during thinking there's an idea that comes to mind,
and then we hyperlink it to other ideas.
That's what thought actually is,
and the glue between those hyperlinks is attention.
But it's not only used for the purposes
of what we might call cognitive functioning,
we also use our attention to 'Feel.'
Think about the last time you actually had a joyful moment
in your lives.
If you weren't paying attention to it,
chances are you missed it.
You didn't get the benefit
of the positive emotional response.
Finally, the third area
is 'Connecting'-
our social interactions with other people.
Without devoting attention, we don't experience care
and we can't extend care.
In fact, you might say that paying attention
to another person is our highest form of love.
But while attention is so incredibly powerful,
it's fragile and vulnerable.
The three biggies that we've learned about in my labs are:
Stress
Threat
or Negative Mood.
Maybe you could even say they're like kryptonite
for attention.
But we all know you can't live a life
without experiencing stress, threat, or negative mood.
A lot of our work with high-performing groups describe
this feeling of not having full access to their attention
when they need it most.
So what are those circumstances?
There's a shorthand that we can use to think about this.
The term is VUCA:
Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous.
The world today feels like it's a constant VUCA environment,
but there's another challenge that our attention faces,
and why many of us feel like we're in an attentional crisis.
Frankly, the brain was designed to be lured by,
for our evolutionary success and survival,
certain kinds of information; threatening information
novel information, self-related information,
and even things that are fun and enticing.
I'm talking about the 'Attention Economy.'
Everything is being done by teams of engineers
to actually capture your attention and keep it there;
your attention is the product.
Finally, the mind can be hijacked away by something
called 'Mental Time Travel.'
That means that our attention is not in the present moment,
so when we're thinking about the past,
our attention is fully in the past,
same thing with the future.
About 50% of our waking moments,
we aren't in the present moment.
Now, that may seem very disempowering,
like, 'How are we ever gonna fight that fight?'
But, the good news is that decades of research in my own lab
and many others has now given us a solution-
mindfulness training, something that's been around
for millennia.
We can train our brain so that we do not need to fight.
What we know
is that when people practice mindfulness meditation,
which is attending to the present moment,
their attention is stronger.
12 minutes or more a day can cultivate
something called 'Meta-Awareness.'
What is Meta-Awareness?
It's the ability to be aware of the contents and processes
of what's going on in our mind moment by moment.
We're paying attention to our attention.
Now, why would that awareness be beneficial?
Because every time we are aware, we have more control.
We can own our attention, and we have it available to us
to not only enjoy the moments of our lives
and feel fulfillment,
but to meet the challenges and demands
that we certainly will all face.
Minds wander; it's a natural thing that the brain does.
When our mind moves away, gently return it back-
simply begin again.
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