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Kwik Brain with Jim Kwik
Neuroscience Behind Online Hostility & Social Behaviour with Dr. Ben Rein
00:19:55
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Kwik Brain Bite sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik. Free your mind. Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity.
- [00:15]
B
I wasn't high, wasn't wired, just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know kung fu.
- [00:23]
A
Show me. Welcome back Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Together we are going to be discussing the neuro biology of social interactions and understand the science behind why it's easy for people to behave negatively online, how social media has changed our brain development and what we can do to make the digital world a more empathetic space. Our guest today is Dr. Ben Rine. He is a neuroscientist whose groundbreaking research on the neurobiology of social behavior has earned him recognition from the NIH, the Society for Neuroscience and many others. Dr. Ben has published 19 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals uncovering information about neuroscience of empathy, the genetic basis of autism spectrum disorder and how connections between brain cells regulate social behaviors. He's also the chief science officer of the Mind Science foundation and founder of the aspiring Scient this coalition, helping guide the next generation of scientists around the globe. Welcome to the show, Dr. Ben.
- [01:43]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Jim. It's great to be here.
- [01:45]
A
So we connected on social media so it's very meta. One of the upsides of social media, you always come up rather early on my feed because I really love your content. So thank you. People don't realize how much work and effort goes on behind the scenes to produce that. So our team, we're really excited to have you and much of our community also as well. Let's talk about the digital era now. I'm in my 50s, I've been on social media almost two decades. But I had what I feel like was granted this gift where I didn't have a cell phone growing up or tablets growing up in a digital era, has it changed the brain development process? In contrast to people who grew up without digital devices, smartphones without social media, have you seen a distinction at all?
- [02:43]
B
I don't think that the research is quite there to compare intergenerationally, but there are many things that we could certainly point at that we could kind of wave our hands around and say maybe this would be something that changes the way people act, the way people's brains function. I think I'm personally quite interested in. Like you said, you didn't grow up with a phone. You know, I'm in sort of the era where I was maybe one of the like first generations to get a phone in like my teen years. And it wasn't the modern phones. You know, I had like a flip phone, it was like a Virgin mobile and it was completely different. And now you see really young kids using iPads and you know, they have all sorts of tools at their disposal, the digital tools that capture their attention and the forms of media that they're paying attention to are quite different. You know, I used to watch like hey Arnold and stuff like that and now it's like what is it, Coco Melon or something like that. And social media, the clips are very short. There's certainly discussion to be had around attention development. Also of course the social nature of it. You know, I don't know what it's like to be a middle schooler or a high schooler in today's world. But I would imagine that the virtual environments take up a lot of space. You know, they, we spend a lot of people spend a lot of time there on average, I would imagine young people spend maybe the most time there. And I wonder about, you know, do people like. I remember growing up, I used to have my friends come over my house and we would play PlayStation and we would sit together with two controllers wired to the PlayStation and we would play on the same screen and it would be split screen and we'd be talking while we played. You know, now it's, it's virtual. You can do, you know, PlayStation Live or Xbox Live or whatever and play virtually. And you know what happens when you strip some of the kind of substance away from those interactions and you're not sitting beside each other, but you're rather just hearing each other's voices in a microphone. You know, do people spend, do they facetime quickly or text instead of getting together after school, you know, or I don't know what it's like. And I would imagine that without as much face to face contact, there may be some differences in the way people develop social behaviors because that those early stages of life, the social experience that you have is quite important for shaping your sort of long term social behavior.
- [05:08]
A
Now, you know, you recently released a scientific paper with one of your students on social media and empathy. Maybe you could share some of your highlight some of the findings there. Maybe you could tell us what is happening to our brain when someone is consuming social media, media especially, and I'm sure a lot of our audience has seen these in the comments, why people feel More free to behave in a more, let's just say a more mean way online with what's going on there and how's it related. Social media and empathy.
- [05:40]
B
Yeah, so back in like the 80s when computers first started becoming popular, there were some early studies that found that subjects in research studies, when interacting with others online in virtual settings through computers, they, they interacted strangely. They became disinhibited and they would start swearing and calling each other names and doing weird things. And I think, you know, fast forward 40 years, here we are with this modern social media environment that's pretty toxic. And you know, some people know that more than others. Jim, I'm sure you've seen this. I've personally experienced this. You post something on the Internet and when it gets enough views, you start to discover that there are pockets of the Internet that disagree quite passionately and they want you to know it. And they start posting comments that are overly hostile. You know, like there's a difference between, hey, I disagree with your idea and like, I hate you and I hate what you represent. And you know, and, and that comes through a lot. And, and it's not just me, it's not just you, it's all across the Internet. I mean, I challenge anybody listening to, if you are on X or Instagram or whatever, if you see a post that's really popular and you click on the comments or you click on the replies and you just scroll for one or two screens, I guarantee you'll see some hostility. Guarantee it. And I think that's kind of not representative of how we interact face to face. You know, if, if I speak, if I'm speaking to a group of friends, you know, or a group of strangers, even the likelihood that, even if one of them disagrees with me, the likelihood that they will speak up and say, you know, I really don't like you and I don't like what you're saying is very, very low. And so I think that there are of course many factors at play there. Certainly one of them is like the physical safety that virtual environments offer. You know, if the stranger in my group says something really mean, I might get angry and start physically threatening them. I wouldn't, but, you know, others might. And so there's a threat of your safety coming into question if you are critical in person. And that's non existent online. But I think that there's something even more fundamental happening, which is, as you've mentioned, something happening to our empathy circuitry in our brain. And so I proposed in this paper, I called it the virtual disengagement hypothesis. And what that's supposed to indicate is that in virtual environments, the brain areas that regulate empathy theoretically disengage. And I think that this happens because, so empathy is when you take on someone else's emotions, you either understand their emotions or you share their emotions. So for example, if you see someone in pain, you might start to feel a sense of like, oof, like, get me away from this, this is bad. I don't like the way this feels to see someone in pain. If you've ever seen like a gruesome football injury, something like that, it's like, oh, that cringy feeling, that's empathy. And the way that we arrive at empathy is through detecting and processing other people's social cues. There are studies showing that hearing vocal noises like crying or laughing activates certain brain areas that are involved with empathy, like the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, two core areas involved in empathy. When we process facial expressions, those areas come online again. But when we interact with people online, like on X or Instagram or whatever it is, we're not always, especially in text based interactions, we are not seeing facial expressions, we are not hearing vocal tone, we are not processing body language language. All of that substance is stripped away. And so what you're left with is this kind of hollow text on a screen. And the only humanity to it is represented by a small avatar picture and a handle, which, you know, could be your name, it could be anything. And there's just no reason to believe that the human brain would engage its empathy circuits for this type of representation of social information. And so I think what happens is since those empathy circuits don't engage, we do not put ourselves in the perspective of what that other person is feeling. You know, if someone puts a tweet up, I'm in pain. You're not going to feel that same cringy sense of discomfort just from reading that. But if you see that person step on attack and their face contorts and you can see the pain in their face, that's completely different. You will feel their pain. If you, if you, you know, if they shriek in agony, you will feel their pain. But if they just say it and it's just text, you won't. And so that disengagement of both our empathy circuitry and consequently our emotions, I think that funnels us into a place where we just don't care. You are emotionally free. And I think that's a very sort of dangerous dynamic because the other unfortunate part of this is that the recipient of those attacks still feel the full force. There's people, when they're hurt in virtual environments, there's research for this as well. They still feel bad. You know, social pain still hurts, even if it's a person on a screen who doesn't want to throw the ball to you in a virtual game of catch. You know, these virtual studies have shown that social pain still hurts online. You know, there is. There are real consequences. And so it's like the. There's some, like, tilt to it. Right? Like, the people on the receiving end still bear the weight, but those on the delivering end are kind of emotionally detached.
- [10:53]
A
Yeah, cyberbullying, unfortunately, it's so rampant and so common now. Are there any signs people could look for, for themselves or the people around them that their brain is being negatively affected by social media? And then I guess part two is how can we counteract these effects? You see people posting about a digital or dopamine detox or social media detox. Take a day off or a week off or any benefits.
- [11:23]
B
In. In your opinion, if you notice that you are using this, you know, using social media in a way that's unhealthy. You know, I think that there's. There's a general awareness there that you can tell. I actually don't want to be on social media right now. I'd really love to get off the couch or get out of bed and do that other thing, but I just kind of can't. You know, I think if you feel you can sense that it's. It's getting in the way of your life, that's a bad sign. And, you know, I know they have these apps and things like that where you can, like, lock your phone to not use it. But those may be helpful for certain people. But I know that to answer your second question, there are many studies where they're sort of clinical trials have been done. Although clinical trial is usually testing, like, the efficacy of a drug, in this case, they tested the efficacy or the outcome of taking time off of social media. Many studies have done this, and from what I've seen, they're generally pretty clear, pretty clearly showing that people who take time off of social media feel better. You know, their depression scores go in the right direction, the anxiety scores go in the right direction. You know, they may sleep better. You know, they. They just feel better. And so, you know, there. There are a few different kind of, like, protocols from those studies. Some of them were like, no phone use at all. What I think is a more reasonable and doable approach is to just try to limit your, your screen time, your exposure to certain apps specifically, you know, I mean texting, things like that, you know, if you need to text for communication purposes, but you can, you could put a timer on and you know, make sure you only spend, I don't know, five, ten minutes a day on social media. Like sometimes they, these studies will have them like maximum five minutes per app, per, you know, Instagram, TikTok, X, whatever. And I don't know in truth if the people in those studies are like hitting that five minutes every day just trying to get like their little like dose of social media. But I think that in the long term, you know, just being conscious of how much you're using the apps and you could try setting a timer and you know, when the, when the buzzer goes off, you put the phone away, you close the app. But just being aware of your use and monitoring it I think is a great step in the right direction. And over time you'll, you'll sort of strengthen that cognitive muscle of recognizing, oh, you know, I've probably been doing this for a bit too long or you know, turn on a timer. When you use social media and even if you don't monitor it, you might think you're scrolling for 10 minutes and then check your timer and it's been 45 minutes and that might be a wake up call too. So I think just being conscious of how we're spending our time is a simple and perhaps effective way to, you know, reduce the potentially negative side effects of social media use.
- [14:00]
A
Yeah, I would, I would say that could extend in so many areas beyond social media. Just the self awareness. There's a time distortion when we don't realize we've been binge watched. You know, our favorite show, it just keeps on going. It's, it's really designed that way. And when we're talking about these algorithms, social media platforms, they use various algorithms that can shape our thinking and beliefs. Right. Whatever you're engaged with, they'll show you more of that content. But it's very, it's, it could be very one dimensional. Right. Looking ahead, do you have any thoughts on the future of the relationship between social media and the brain or cognitive health, you know, as if you were to extrapolate you to go forward and any, any insights or thoughts in terms of how it'll evolve or change? Are you tired and frustrated of struggling with forgetfulness and longing for greater mental retention and clarity? I have a special invitation for you you to watch my free 3 part memory power video training where you'll discover the secrets to effortlessly recall crucial information, details, experiences, remembering what you read, giving a speech without notes and remembering names, transforming you into an exceptional mental achiever. You'll also discover 10 powerful ingredients to supercharge your brain. So don't miss out on this life changing opportunity. Simply click the button or go to jimquick.com.
- [15:35]
B
Power yeah, I, I can't help but think that in the long term phones are going away. You know, I, I think about, you go into a public area, especially like ideal place to see. This is like a line like in, let's say you're in line at Disney, you're waiting for a ride. Everyone's just standing there, right? You look around, everybody's got their neck craned, they're looking down at their phone. Not, not everybody, but truly probably 50 to 75% of people. I think that will probably change. I think we'll end up more with like, you know, eyeglasses or things like that, you know, maybe, hopefully not. I, I don't want this but like brain implants where you can so you know, swipe on social media and stuff. But I think that things are going to change and those attention grabbing sources like social media are going to become more and more accessible where, you know, you could be driving your car and you have your Instagram feed on the left side of your screen and you're swiping videos while you're driving and stuff like that. Of course this is only a prediction. I have no idea. I don't really want things to go this way but I think that we're just going to be increasingly kind of pummeled by distractors, things that can just slurp up our attention away from the real world. And you know, I think we need to be very cautious and deliberate about the way we spend that attention because I mean at the end of the day the social media, social media is not going away. It is a very legitimate source of information and news. And you know, as, as technology evolves, these platforms will want to continue absorbing attention and they will. You know, I don't, I don't see that changing or going away. So I, I don't see it, I don't see it getting better. Like I don't see a, a ten year change from, from now that you know, Instagram is no longer the thing and instead we have an app that like is educational and everybody's learning all the time. I don't see that happening. I, I think it's Going to the nature of social media to drive us into like short, crisp edu or short, crisp, engaging, compelling, attention grabbing is going to deepen and the longer form educational stuff is going to become more and more of its own separate thing that, that is less popular. So. But I hope that, you know, educational stuff sticks around.
- [17:47]
A
You know this. But this podcast at its core is all about learning. Maybe 10 this episode. I'm just, I'm just personally curious. Is there maybe you could share one thing that you are currently learning or studying that has you particularly excited? Is there something that's on your, your, your learning list, Something you're dedicating time to that interests you currently?
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B
This is kind of a funny answer, but stretching, Stretching, stretching.
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A
Tell me more.
- [18:19]
B
Yeah, like I'm sure you expect me to be like, well, I'm learning about the like how dopamine and serotonin interact with nucleus accumbens. No, no, it's stretching. I don't know. I, I've all. I've always suffered from like tense muscles and I've recently started stretching more and I'm just like, I'm learning about stretching. Like, I'm learning that I feel better. It's kind of like exercise or sleep. I feel better after I stretch. And I'm also learning. Like I prefer certain stretches. Like certain stretches will really open up certain muscles for me that I feel much better after doing. And while that may not be, you know, learning in the typical sense of like reading and studying, yeah, I am learning a lot. And it's, it's interesting because it's also, it's nice because it's one of those things that as I learn I feel my health improving and that's pretty, pretty rare to, you know, open and unravel something like that in life. So I'm enjoying it.
- [19:11]
A
I love it. Dr. Ben Ryan. How can people stay in touch with you? How can they go deeper, stay connected?
- [19:18]
B
Yeah. So I'm on social media at Dr. Brain B R E I n my name and then you. I also have a website that just again, my name but this time benriin.com R E I N. I have lots of stuff on there. I have resources for students in science. I have a whole list of scientific papers that I've made videos on. So if you want to learn about science and you don't want to read a ton of papers, you know, there's 60 second video summaries that link to my social media pages and you can also contact me directly through there, all sorts of stuff. But yeah, I appreciate you having me on, Jim, and anybody's interested in learning more.
- [19:57]
A
Yeah, I recommend everyone stay in touch with Dr. Ben. We'll put all the links to his website, to his social media as we always do in the show notes@jimquik.com notes and as always, you could find more useful ways of fuel your brain's potential on our YouTube where we put the extension extended version. And this is definitely when extended beyond the 20 minutes. 20 minutes will be on the audio on Spotify and iTunes. But YouTube, please join us there or you'll be part of 1.8 million subscribers and get to see the extended version of this episode. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Leave a comment I read all of them under the episode. Let us know what you thought. And until our next episode, this is your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Until next time, be limitless.