Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload
Richard C. Cytowic
MIT Press (October 2024)
The story of how and why we became “helplessly distracted” began long ago.
Richard Cytowic is convinced that the human brain — what he characterizes as a “Stone Age brain” — hasn’t changed very much over the last three million years but the world within which humans live certainly has.
In the Preface, he notes that various basic survival mechanisms now serve as “a door into modern brains that tech companies exploit for profit and competitive advantage. They back our biology and hook us on their products [e.g. smartphones] because the brain hasn’t changed since the Stone Age, let alone during the mere thirty-three years that the internet has been around. The story of why we are helplessly distractible began long ago, which is why the screen age feels like it has been with us forever. It certainly feels as though the digital devices that surround us day and night are part of an embedded iSelf, so much a part of us as to essentially constitute a planetwide hive mind like that of the Borg in Star Trek.
“This is the predicament of the Stone Age brain in the screen age.”
Later, he adds, “The cognitive load imposed by screen devices degrades attention, memory, and thinking, along with sleep, mood, and concentration. The screens we habitually gaze into compete with and substitute themselves for our otherwise natural drive to socialize. They confront us with highly unnatural gambits for attention that we are nearly helpless to resist.”
These are among the subjects and issues on which Cytowic focuses;
o Why so many humans are addicted to digital devices
o What humans can do to avoid or overcome these forces
o Why doing that is so difficult
o The defining characteristics of a “Stone Age” brain
o The significance of the fact that a human brain accounts for a mere two percent of a human’s body’s mass but consumes 20 percent of the daily calories that humans ingest
o The nature and significance of “virtual’ Autism
o Why selfies kill more humans than do sharks
o Calculating the cost of energy caused by screen distractions
o Calculating the cost of energy caused by multitasking
o Why silence is “an essential nutrient”
o How ambivalence keeps humans hooked on screens
o Social learning involves relationships with “hardcourts and dexterity”
o The consequences of forced viewing
o The Screen Age’s “winners” and “losers”
o The most important lessons to be learned from the “Lockdown Years”
I commend Richard Cytowic on his brilliant, substantial contributions to thought leadership throughout the global marketplace and highly recommend this material to all C-level executives and middle managers as well as those who aspire to become one and those who are now preparing for a business career or have only recently embarked upon one.
Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!
* * *
Here are two suggestions while you are reading this book. First, highlight key passages. Also, perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the Tables and Figures strategically inserts throughout the narrative. Also, to the material in the Appendix (“Keeping a Dream Diary”) in which Cytowic explains how and why dreams “come from the dreamer’s head and nowhere else, so no one else can possibly opine on the meaning of a particular dream. It may take patience and digging, but eventually insight will strike.”
These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.