Dr. Richard Davidson

And

And it leads to the kind of inference that you're talking about which is that people feel that they may not exist unless they're online.

And I read some survey study that was done within the last year that reported that the average American opens their phone 152 times a day.

I think most people would agree they don't need to open their phone 152 times a day.

but we do it for those kinds of reasons.

And I often say we are all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent.

And I think it's serious and I think that we don't know what the long-term consequences are going to be but we do know that the short-term consequences

at least in certain cases, are not very good.

And I'm someone who is also like you, Andrew, a great believer in the potential value of technology.

And I believe that technology is basically neutral and we can use it for the good and we can also, it can be used for harm.

But the previous Surgeon General of the United States, who I miss, Vivek Murthy, issued a health advisory in 2023 on social media.

The title was Social Media and Youth Mental Health.

And he has scary data that was reported in that report.

Some of the data show that the psychiatric problems in adolescents scale linearly with the

hours of social media consumption per day.

And so it is really eroding the mental health of our youth, not to say of our adults too.

Yeah, so these are really complicated issues.

I think that I certainly don't in any way pretend to have the answer but I do think that we need to take digital hygiene seriously and we need to figure out ways as part of standard school curricula

of educating our youth in how to change their relationship or how to be, to say it a different way, how to be in healthy relationship with their digital devices and the products and features that are available on those devices.

I have the conviction that it's a trainable skill.