Your brain wasn't built to hold this much information | Richard Cytowic

- Everyone agrees that our attention spans have gone to hell. I call it a tyranny of attention because there's so many demands on our attention coming from so many different directions that we are simply overwhelmed and we don't have the mental bandwidth to cope with it. I'm Richard Cytowic, professor of neurology at George Washington University and an author of “Your

Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with the Digital Distractions and Sensory Overload." - [Narrator] Your Stone Age brain in the age of screens. - Washing machines and appliances change every 5 or 10 years. The brain doesn't do that. Evolution

doesn't say, it's time for another memory module, a time for another language module. The modern brain is no different than that of our distant Stone Age ancestor. Evolution precedes by accretion. That is, once the brain arrives on a solution that's good enough, it keeps it and then adds on new features, like a New England add on house,

where you add one room after another and it looks funky, but it works. Working memory is like the mental scratchpad where we hold whatever we're focused on at the moment, whether it's remembering a short grocery list or trying to remember, an access code,

for an app and, it, it's limited in what it can do. How much you can hold everything that we do, costs us in terms of energy expenditure. And ATP is the fuel that fuels every cell in the body.

ATP stands for adenine triphosphate. Creatures all over the animal kingdom all rely on ATP. It's like the bedrock of energy transformation. So, for example, if you have to go take a test, you're not doing anything. You're just thinking. But at the end of 3 or 4 of our tests section,

you're really beat. You're tired because you have expended a lot of mental energy. So we have to be, you want to be careful not to waste your attention or spend too much. It's like a bank account that can go into the into the read very easily. The brain operates within a fixed energy limit,

bandwidth, and there's no amount of diet, exercise, or Sudoku puzzles that can increase that. So we have to learn to live with the amount that we have. Listening to one person speak takes up about half my bandwidth, and trying to listen to two people at once is impossible, because then we've exceeded it. Now, you might think that as you're scrolling or swiping that you're not

really doing much, but because that bandwidth is so small, and narrow, there's not much left over, and most of the energy goes towards maintaining the physical structure by pumping sodium and potassium ions across membranes. And that leaves very, very little left over for thought.

A great example is the Oscar fiasco, in which they named the wrong best picture. - [Youtube Clip Speaker 1] For Best Picture... - [Youtube Clip Speaker 2] You're, come on. La land. - Just as Emma Stone was walking off the stage. Cullinan took a picture and tweeted,

and that's the exact moment that he should have been discarding the envelope and lining up the next one., he flooded his working memory, and that's what led to them announcing the wrong best picture. The brain and the peripheral nervous system is really one big changed detector. That is a response to any change in current, in the current environment. And so it responds

to novelty. Now, back on the savanna, things didn't change very much except the constellations overhead and the seasons. Now, of course, we're we've got change everywhere. Bidding for our attention. Now, take in terms of attention and distraction, I often say that the screens are

like second hand smoke. And so in the fact that who's ever in the line of sight is affected by it. And we've all experienced this in waiting rooms and airport lounges, those huge monitors with their moving images. They demand to be looked at and trying not to look costs energy as much. So

either way we lose. I think the only way around that would be to put in earplugs and put on a blindfold so you're not distracted by this stuff. This what I call forced viewing. Is it ironic that good looking at me on a screen? And the answer is not if you're just focused on my talk right now,

but if you're trying to do three things or five things at once, then your focus is really shot. I think the term, dopamine reward is being thrown around too loosely. It's shorthand for anything that feels good., a good meal will give us a dopamine hit. So,

it's we're getting we're getting these squirts, all day long. But there are two pleasure circuits that exist in the brain. One related to wanting and reward and the other to pleasure and liking. The two systems differ in how easy they are to trigger. Now, the wanting and reward system

is very easy to trigger. It's network is diffused widely throughout the brain and in every crevice. But it's impossible to satiate. And this is the basis of the hedonistic treadmill. As soon as we get something that we want, we want something else. Pleasure is very short