Dr. Ashley Hass

With all of the short form content around us, our brains aren't developing more until we're 30, 35.

And when our prefrontal cortex is taxed, so that's the front of our brain, it helps us do impulse control.

It helps us regulate our emotions.

It helps us make decisions and strong social bonds.

Yeah, our brain pretty much is kind of melting.

And the short answer is yes, they are designed

To have this kind of almost gambling-like capability where you have the loop that is never ending, the content never happens, and then you're getting that variable dopamine hit.

So when you're on the platforms, you want more because you want more likes, you want more comments, saves, shares, whatever your metric is that you're looking at.

And then the notifications are like coaxing you like, please come back, come back more.

I'm totally like young, vulnerable populations.

This is impacting.

There's not a lot of research done on people who are like my age and 30s, 40s, 50s, but it's coming.

And I don't know if you have parents, grandparents, they might be addicted to Facebook or like some sort of specific app where they just spend hours and hours scrolling or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's exactly what people like me and others who are working in this space help to do.

It's about empowering consumers, people, children, insert grandparents above any of them, right, to have control over their own life.

So I started getting obsessed with this when I hid my dissertation.

In my dissertation, I hid my Instagram from myself and I realized I was like, oh my God, I just went on that and it's not there anymore.

I didn't even think about it.