Dr. Cal Newport

My optimistic hypothesis is, again, this non-clinical difficulty with maintaining attention, like in your work or if you're a college student or whatever.

It's not necessarily representing sort of knock on wood like a wholesale neural rewiring.

Like I basically rewired my circuits on my brain to be a sort of distributed switching processor.

I think most of this is persisting in that much more malleable area that gets affected by moderate behavioral addictions, right?

So we have parts of the brain that are part of these like feedback reward loops that's meant to be rewired.

Malleable, right?

I mean, this is supposed to be so we can have really rapid learning about what's happening in our environment and how we're supposed to respond to it.

And this is what gets hijacked when you build up these behavioral addictions.

And so it's very quick to change.

But that malleability means you can change it back, right?

So I think this drive to I have to keep checking my email or my phone is, again, you build up a moderate behavioral addiction because of like standard reward cues.

And that's a part of the brain that you can't – it's difficult but it's not your whole brain is now a social media brain.

And that's just the brain you have because you're exposed to this.

It's a matter of getting the stimuli out of your life, doing the same type of training you would do, boredom exposure, like get used to the idea of feeling that drive and not actually doing it.

You can work with blocking apps.

Like there's stuff you can do.

This is sort of like standard.

It's painful.

It takes two months and then like you're doing better on it.

So I do think we have a large stratum of subclinical attention issues that are not representing wholesale neural rewirings but are like absolutely sort of expected outcomes of working with malleable reward queue circuits in the brain.