Hamish Macdonald

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.

But as a human race, we're experimenting with

uh the written word on page which we've been doing now for a few hundred years uh now that's all digital and it happens you know if any of you pick up your phone how many different apps and web browser pages would you have in there that you would toggle between in the course of a couple of hours

Because –

In part, it's because if I have to pick up a physical book, I have to put the phone down.