Hamish Macdonald

Oh, it turns out you're a transphobe or you're a genocide supporter or, you know, you can see this happening everywhere and it's largely driven by emotion.

There are often layers of facts.

There are bits of facts built into these arguments, but often it's fact laid with emotion and opinion.

And that becomes very difficult and overwhelming for people, I think.

Well.

Classic saying.

I don't, I genuinely don't know the answer to that.

But I think certainly the algorithms are feeding off basic functions in our brain, you know, what we react to, what we have the emotional response to.

They're being trained in a certain way.

You know, we all know the business model is to keep us engaged, keep us on the platforms.

You know, these are conversations that have been well traversed.

The issue is, are these algorithms doing something back to us?

You know, is the consumption of all of this material through screens, through devices, doing something to us?

You know, we're not born able to read.

It's something that we learn.

So this is the sort of neuroplasticity of the brain.

We meet this researcher in the United States, Marianne Wolfe, who researches all of this.

and she she is looking into what this kind of large-scale human uh humanity-wide experiment is doing to our brains you know part of this series came here to melbourne to the school of psychology um had my head wired up to to computers to to measure my response to distraction

my ability to just function, to read things, to identify mistakes in text.

As soon as you're having a little light flash or a sound pop off or ask me to press another button, your ability to deal with, consume any of this stuff in a rational, functional way drops away.