← Something You Should Know
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- [00:00]
Mike Carruthers
Bingo Blitz rules. If your bingo has ads in it, that's not a bingo.
- [00:06]
Dr. Richard Satowic
If it doesn't have the coolest tournaments, mini games and the most breathtaking design.
- [00:10]
Mike Carruthers
Nope, not a bingo.
- [00:11]
Dr. Richard Satowic
If your bingo moment makes you feel so excited that you just want to.
- [00:15]
Mike Carruthers
Burst in joy and scream out loud, Bingo.
- [00:17]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Sorry. So you're playing Bingo Blitz.
- [00:20]
Mike Carruthers
Now that's a bingo step for a world of excitement with Bingo Blitz, the number one free bingo game. Download Bingo Blitz and play for free.
- [00:29]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Now that's a bingo.
- [00:33]
Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know. How the type of music you like can affect your love life. Then the magic of notebooks, simple notebooks, and how just writing down your thoughts does wonders.
- [00:46]
Roland Allen
There is a lot of research on this. I think there is something like more than 1,200 studies and they all confirm the same basic result, which is writing stuff down about your emotions makes you physically healthier.
- [00:59]
Mike Carruthers
Also, how advertisers try to trick you and how you you can prevent that. And just what are the dangers of spending too much time in front of a video screen or smartphone? Well, there are several. Here's one.
- [01:12]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Young individuals who have a very high screen exposure show symptoms that are similar to developmental autism. They refuse to make eye contact. They have reduced language. They have reduced social interaction.
- [01:28]
Mike Carruthers
All this today on something you should know. Dell Technologies Black Friday event is live. And if you've been waiting for an AI ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year. Tech enthusiasts love this sale because it's all the newest hits plus all the greatest hits all on sale at once. Savings on Dell technologies most popular PCs that accelerate AI with Intel Core Ultra processors are here like the XPS 16. So if you're ready to step up all the things you like to do, streaming, surfing, multitasking, whatever, Dell Technologies AI Ready PCs are the perfect upgrade. And for the best of Intel Core Ultra processors, look for Intel EVO Edition laptops engineered to do it all. Just visit Dell.com deals whether you're treating yourself or thinking of others, these Black Friday prices were worth the wait. But it's only for a limited time. Shop now@dell.com deals.
- [02:40]
Narrator
Something you should know.
- [02:41]
Mike Carruthers
Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and.
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Narrator
Practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.
- [02:52]
Mike Carruthers
You probably like music. Most people like music. But the question that we're going to start with today is what kind of music? Hi and welcome to another episode of Something you should know. I'm Mike Carruthers and if you are hoping to find A good relationship. The music you listen to really matters. According to a study in psychology of music, men and women with similar taste in music tend to have better sex lives, tend to communicate better, and have longer lasting relationships. That's because most of us develop specific musical preferences while we're growing up. And our taste in music can reflect our childhood, our emotional connections, and even our values. One study even broke down compatibility by music genre. And their findings suggest that devotion to country music makes both men and women less attractive to someone of the opposite sex who does not like country music. Men who liked heavy metal music were found more attractive, while women who liked heavy metal music were not. Guys liked women who liked classical music, while women shied away from guys who liked classical music. And both men and women who liked jazz and blues tend to be more open to new experiences. And that is something you should know. Whether you're at home or work or school, or maybe in your car, wherever you are, I suspect you're not more than a few feet away from a notebook of some sort. A big one, a small one, maybe a diary or a notepad for making lists. There is probably a notebook somewhere nearby to which you might be thinking to yourself, yeah, so what? How is that a topic worthy of a something you should know segment? Well, it is. It's actually far more interesting than you ever imagined. You see, somehow early on, humans figured out that they couldn't keep everything in their heads and they started writing things down in notebooks of some sort. And that is where this fascinating story begins. Here to tell it is Roland Allen. Roland works in the book publishing business and has written a few books of his own. His latest is called the A history of thinking on paper. Hi Roland, welcome to something you should know.
- [05:22]
Roland Allen
Hi Mike, thanks for having me on.
- [05:24]
Mike Carruthers
So notebooks are one of those things that you never talk about it as a topic with other people. You never go to a party and go, hey Bob, so tell me about your notebooks. I mean, no one does that. And yet they're everywhere. Everyone's got probably multiple notebooks. You know, a notebook's kind of like a fork or a spoon. It's, it's always there. But you never talk about it. So why are you talking about it?
- [05:52]
Roland Allen
Well, I guess if I've had one big idea in my life, it's to suddenly notice notebooks. And once you start noticing them, you notice them absolutely everywhere. And I suppose just thinking about the role, the different parts they play in all of our lives and the parts they've played in our lives through history and what the changes that they've made to our lives. I guess that's what got me really into them.
- [06:16]
Mike Carruthers
And is there any idea when the first something like a notebook began?
- [06:22]
Roland Allen
The first something like a notebook that we know of is from about the year 1300 BC. So that's coming up for 3500 years old. They found it in a shipwreck off the south coast of Turkey. It's called, called the Uluburun shipwreck. And it's pretty well preserved, considering how old it is. You can see it in the museum in Bodrum in Turkey. And that was very much a working notebook. It probably belonged to a merchant or some kind of sailor, ship's captain, something like that, and was probably to do with business. And the first notebooks nearly always are to do with business.
- [06:56]
Mike Carruthers
Certainly today here in the us, when you say the word notebook, people probably think of school. The notebooks in school are kind of your first, first official real notebooks. But notebooks, I mean, how do you define a notebook? What is a notebook to you? I mean, a shopping list is kind of a notebook, but what is it to you?
- [07:20]
Roland Allen
It has to be paper. That's the only real definition I have. So an electronic thing doesn't really count as a notebook for me, although you can do lots of the same things. Historically, parchment and papyrus things and wax tablets aren't quite the same. You can't do as much with them as you can do with paper. So I think notebooks can be really huge. I think they can be like massive business ledgers. I think they can be absolutely tiny, like the smallest little date books. But if they're made of paper and they've got blank pages, then I call them a notebook.
- [07:50]
Mike Carruthers
And why do you do that? Why do you discount electronic notebooks and things like that? Just because you needed to focus the topic, or do you think there's a substantial difference?
- [08:01]
Roland Allen
I think there is actually a substantial difference, yeah. I think the way we use paper notebooks tends to be much more casual, much more immediate, and they make a permanent record. You make a thing, you make an object when you fill up a notebook. So you start off with these beautiful blank pages, and a lot of people are afraid of the blank page. But when you filled up a notebook with your own thoughts and even with your own shopping lists or with something as trivial as that, or things to do lists, it becomes this unique kind of object which crystallizes a little bit of your personality or your soul in it.
- [08:34]
Mike Carruthers
I know there has been research and I know, as do most people know, that there's an intuitive understanding that there's something about writing something down. It makes it more sticky, it makes it more memorable. There's a magic. There's something to writing things down.
- [08:53]
Roland Allen
Yeah, There's a ton of research about it. Most of it is to do with education. So obviously, when you're dealing with students in a lecture theater, it's really important to know what the best way to get knowledge into their heads and then get it out of their heads as well, get them producing stuff. And they've done a lot of research on this Everywhere across the U.S. canada, Japan in particular, for some reason. And they've found that in a studying context, writing handwriting with a pen or pencil in a notebook is nearly always much, much better than typing. If you write stuff down, you tend to process it in a more involved way. You tend to paraphrase, you tend to understand the material that much better. So that's one of the reasons why writing is better.
- [09:39]
Mike Carruthers
When you look back at the history of notebooks, who are the superstars of the notebook world?
- [09:46]
Roland Allen
Well, Leonardo da Vinci is clearly the superstar, and in all of my research for the book, I never found anyone who did better notebooks than him. But I guess a really peculiar thing about Leonardo's notebooks is that they turned out to be very private. After he died, no one looked at them, really. They went into various libraries around the world and never got opened because they're quite difficult to read. People admired the drawings, but the actual notes he made, which are in many ways much more incredible than the drawings he did, were completely ignored. So fantastic as they were, they had a limited impact on the world. Whereas if you look at someone like Charles Darwin's notebooks, completely the opposite. They're horrible to look at. They're absolutely scrappy. But it was those notes which directly led to on the Origin of Species by natural selection. And so the theory of evolution, which has completely changed the way we think about the world. And this sprang out of 14 or 15 tiny, tiny notebooks, which together would fit, for instance, in a shoebox without any trouble. So although they're very unspectacular looking, very scrappy, no punctuation, these possibly are the ones which have had the greatest impact on the way we think.
- [11:02]
Mike Carruthers
Do we know when the first notebook was made? Like somebody said, you know, people are writing stuff down. Maybe we should create a book, call it a notebook, and then people will have an actual book instead of having to hunt for a piece of paper or however they did it before in.
- [11:20]
Roland Allen
Terms of a paper notebook, as we would think of it and recognize it with covers and paper pages. You're looking, I think at Baghdad around the year 800. That seems to be the general consensus. Because bookbinding, making paper into the shape that we recognize it today, that's a Western thing, paper is an Eastern thing. Came originally from China and they seem to meet in Baghdad around the year 800. And therefore that's where the first notebooks are going to have been. Very, very few of them, if any from that era seem to have survived. When they do start surviving in huge numbers for the first time, it is in Italy around 500 years later, and it is particularly in Florence. And that was just a notebook obsessed culture. And we have a lot of different kinds of notebooks from there and that. So that's really an important stage in the story.
- [12:09]
Mike Carruthers
I think as you're talking, I'm thinking about all the notebooks that I've had that I've written in from the time I was very young through all the way through high school, college. And even since then I've had notebooks to write things down. And wouldn't it be great to look in there and see what I wrote?
- [12:29]
Roland Allen
I would find it really interesting. And if you do have your notebooks from that time, then that's a sort of window back into the person that you were. You sort of get to meet them again. Looking backwards. If you were writing anything down for an educational reason or because you wanted to remember it, then writing stuff down in a notebook is really about the best way to remember it. I used to write down song lyrics, for instance, when I was a teenager. And those songs that I wrote down, I can still tell you all of the words to this day. So I mean, those are just two of the reasons. But also another reason is it probably made you feel better at the time. If you were writing down anything about your emotions in particular, how a given situation or an event or a person made you feel, just the act of writing it down would have made you feel measurably better.
- [13:14]
Mike Carruthers
So when you're writing in a notebook, generally you're writing notes to yourself, for yourself. When you write a letter, you're writing a note to someone else. So which came first?
- [13:26]
Roland Allen
Like, ah, that's an interesting question. In terms of emotional writing, this is interesting. People were writing about their own emotional states in letters for centuries before they were doing it in diaries. So it's quite normal now, it's considered quite normal to write a diary about how your day went how you feel about things. Like I said, how you how you feel about situations, people, events. They make you feel happy or sad and you write about it. And that's a very normal thing to do in the medieval era. In the Renaissance era, it really wasn't. But they would very happily write very personal letters to their friends and family telling with all of that same stuff in it how they felt about everything. So I think the letter came first in that sense.
- [14:11]
Mike Carruthers
Our topic today is notebooks and how important they are to all of us. My guest is Roland Allen. He is the author of the book the Notebook, A History of Thinking on paper. There are just some things you come across that you have to tell people about. And because I like you have a cell phone and I know it can get expensive, I'm telling people about Mint Mobile. They offer Premium Wireless for $15 a month when you purchase a three month plan. Now I have Mint Mobile and before that I was paying a lot more than that for my wireless plan. And I'm wondering why would anyone do that? You see, all Mint Mobile plans come with high speed data, unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts too. So ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile's deal and get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com something that's mintmobile.com something cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com something $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.
- [15:51]
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- [16:21]
Mike Carruthers
So Roland, there's something I've heard so many times in talking to people and I know this has been researched, but when you talk to people about writing things down, there's often an answer that starts this way. The simple act of writing it down makes all the difference, or words to that effect. There is something magical that seems to happen when you write something down.
- [16:45]
Roland Allen
So. And there is a lot of research on this. I think there is something like more than 1,200 studies, and they all confirm the same basic result, which is writing stuff down about your emotions makes you physically healthier. So the first study was done by a professor called James Pennebaker, and he's an American, and he got some of his students to just keep a short journal detailing an emotional trauma that they had experienced in their life, which he didn't have to specify what it was. It was just anything which they considered traumatic. So it might have been a bereavement or an assault or something bad which had happened to them. They wrote it down. They didn't do anything with it subsequently. And then for the following semester, visits to the doctor in that cohort of students went down by 50%. They were so much less stressed, they were carrying around so much less bad stuff in their heads that their bodies were literally just working better. So 50% lower visits to the doctor. So that's one. There's another, which I think is equally incredible, which is the same process. But imagine that you write an emotional diary like that about two weeks before you have an operation. Your body will heal measurably faster, something like twice as fast from that physical operation. If you've just dumped the bad, unhealthy, or unhappy emotions out of your head and onto the page, whether or not you throw them immediately on the fire or keep them forever or show them to a friend or to a therapist or whoever, it doesn't matter. Just getting them out of your head and on the page will help you recover from an operation. I find that mind blowing.
- [18:27]
Mike Carruthers
It is. It's magical, and yet it. And it's probably hard to explain why that is.
- [18:32]
Roland Allen
So I think, well, everyone says it must be to do with reducing stress in the body. And I think people are coming to understand that stress just has incredible negative effects on the way your entire body works. But no, I don't understand the mechanics of it. I can't pretend to do right, because.
- [18:51]
Mike Carruthers
I mean, I understand the stress part, but just writing it down doesn't do anything. If you're stressed about something, just writing it down doesn't fix whatever you're stressed about. But yet it has this magical effect.
- [19:03]
Roland Allen
It doesn't fix it. But what it does, because you are turning an emotion, a feeling, into words. You're turning it into something which you sort of have control over it stops being a sort of, for instance, a nameless dread or a massive overwhelming fear. When you turn that big analog fear in your head into something which is digital and which is concrete and which is measured by writing it down, that is in fact. In fact, it's a mindful process because you're identifying your feelings and naming them. And that is what reduces the stress.
- [19:38]
Mike Carruthers
What about the. Because, you know, there are different kinds of notebooks and somebody had to like formalize that. There's the three ring binder, there's the spiral notebook, there's the yellow legal pad. There's the like, where did all that? Or is that just, you know, somebody just came up with an idea or whatever.
- [19:55]
Roland Allen
Oh, the glorious variety. I mean, it's fantastic. But since people. Since people have started making notebooks. So let's go back to 1300 again. You had huge business ledgers which were so heavy. Sort of pages a foot high and a foot wide, hundreds of pages which were so heavy you could barely lift them. But you also had tiny little pocket notebooks for going around and making your everyday records to keeping track of your expenses, for instance. And then over time, notebooks get more and more specialized into different ways. So you start to have the date book and then you start to have the sort of dated journal which gives you a whole page to write about your day. And then you go up like legal pads, which I think are the late 19th century. And then you have spiral binding, which is the early 20th century, as people invent these new formats which have practical in their own way. And it's glorious variety. I love it.
- [20:50]
Mike Carruthers
Well, it would seem like maybe that adding lines to the page must have been somewhat revolutionary or not.
- [20:58]
Roland Allen
I think so. What I love about it is, for instance, musical staves appearing on the page. That made musicians lives a lot easier very quickly and composers lives much easier. Putting lines on the page was something that people did anyway. If they wanted to write more neatly, you know, they would rule them by hand themselves. And then what I love about this is that even sometimes when you see lines on the page today, they haven't necessarily been printed. They've been put on by these sort of arrangements of lots of pens in parallel and the paper is moved underneath them so they're actually drawn on the page rather than printed. And I like that very much.
- [21:35]
Mike Carruthers
But that three ring binder, that thing always puzzled me because you always pinch yourself when you open and close it. And I mean, I get the purpose of it. You can put pages in Take pages out. But why three rings? Why three holes? Why do we know that?
- [21:51]
Roland Allen
Now there you're looking at a cultural difference. Because over here in Europe, we don't have three ring binders, we have two ring binders. So I can't answer that, I'm afraid. Why that is, I've got no idea. But yeah, three ring binders I find kind of ugly. Two ring binders are slightly more elegant, I suppose.
- [22:09]
Mike Carruthers
And you have a 33 and a third less chance of pinching your finger in that thing. Because I have one less.
- [22:16]
Roland Allen
Absolutely.
- [22:17]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah. Well, that's a real plus because. Yeah, well, you wonder why three. Because two does the job, as evidenced by you in England. Two does the work.
- [22:29]
Roland Allen
Yeah, it's one of those differences. It's like letter paper versus A4 paper, I guess. Why Americans stick with letter. And Europeans have moved everything onto a 4 and a 3 and a 0 and so on.
- [22:44]
Mike Carruthers
Again, what is a 4 and a 3? I don't think I know what that means.
- [22:49]
Roland Allen
Oh, Mike, this is wonderful. So this is the metric system as it applies to paper sizes. So there is a good deal of math involved, which I will spare you. But essentially it means that you're dealing with fractions of a square meter of paper. And so you can bring your paper size into. Into the metric system, which of course is a really handy way of unifying your weights and your volumes and your lengths and widths and everything like that. So you have a sheet of paper which is slightly taller and skinnier than us letter, but which then turns into a really great system because you can fold it and it's in the same proportions as it originally was, just half the size, which you can't do with letter.
- [23:38]
Mike Carruthers
Letter being eight and a half by 11.
- [23:41]
Roland Allen
Yes.
- [23:42]
Mike Carruthers
I imagine you look at notebooks differently than I do, than most people do. So what is something that really just amazes you about notebooks?
- [23:52]
Roland Allen
I think you can think about a notebook as being the nearest thing we had to a computer for hundreds of years, and then think of it as a bit of hardware. And then there is different kinds of software which you can put into it. So, for instance, double entry bookkeeping, which every accountant or bookkeeper has to learn today. And so a lot of your, you know, I ask everyone in who's listening now to put up their hand if they've trained in double entry bookkeeping. And that changed the world. Double entry bookkeeping.
- [24:23]
Mike Carruthers
What is double entry bookkeeping?
- [24:26]
Roland Allen
Okay, so this is how accountancy works, right? So credits and debits and profit and loss. And balance sheets and valuing a company, valuing a business, valuing stock depreciation. All of these financial concepts entirely depend on writing stuff down, writing your numbers down in a careful format and then collecting them. And the only way you could do that for hundreds of years was in a notebook. So everyone who is in any kind of business had to have notebooks which they kept their financial records in. 1300 back in Italy. This is when they started doing this. And it's at that point that we see the first companies. So if you've ever worked for a company, they were invented back then in Italy, but so also were limited liability partnerships. So was futures trading. So were all kinds of really sophisticated financial instruments. The first merchant banks came from Italy. At this point you had international businesses which were really much better organized than a lot of businesses I've worked in today. And they all used notebooks as their basic technology. And that's the case for hundreds of years. And then you have sketchbooks. And I think sketching is another example of software which you do in this little bit of hardware which is a notebook. So people learn to sketch, they learn to scribble and crosshatch their shadows and they learn to do observational drawing which is faithful to life. And then you get the artists of the Renaissance. I find that just a mind blowing idea and it just carries on and on like that. The great scientists, Newton and so on, all made their breakthrough discoveries basically on the pages of their working notebooks or their lab notebooks.
- [26:18]
Mike Carruthers
Well, as I said right at the beginning, who would have thought that the story of notebooks would be so interesting? And yet when you think about it, they are so important to all of us and you can't imagine life without notebooks. I've been talking with Roland Allen. He is, well, he's the foremost authority I've ever met on the subject of notebooks. And he is author of the book the A History of Thinking on Paper. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. This was great. Thank you, Roland.
- [26:49]
Roland Allen
So, Mike, thanks very much for having me. That was a real pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
- [26:54]
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- [27:50]
Mike Carruthers
How many times have you heard people talk about the dangers, the problems, the concerns about putting a screen, a computer screen, a tablet or a smartphone putting a screen in front of your face for an extended period of time? We've heard everything from it messes up your sleep to the problem of overstimulation that people can become addicted to their phones and can't put it down to who knows what else. The idea is that screens in front of your face for a long time is bad. But why? How is it bad specifically, since so many people seem to do it an awful lot of the time? You're about to find out from this next discussion with Dr. Richard Satowic. He is a professor of neurology at George Washington University and author of a couple of books, including youg Stone Age Brain in the Screen, Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload. Hi Richard, welcome to something you should know.
- [28:49]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Thank you for having me, Mike.
- [28:52]
Mike Carruthers
So first, explain what you mean by our Stone Age brain, because, you know, I don't think of my brain as Stone Age, but so explain that.
- [29:01]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Well, today's brain is no different from those of our distant ancestors millions of years ago. It hasn't evolved one iota. And so we are still faced with the same restrictions and liabilities that our distant ancestors faced. And this is a problem when we're faced with the overabundance of screenshots.
- [29:29]
Mike Carruthers
These limitations and restrictions on our brain are things like what?
- [29:34]
Dr. Richard Satowic
I think what's going to surprise most people is that our brain has a fixed limit of energy available. I mean, most people don't think about when they're saying, oh, I'm addicted to my phone. They don't think about it in terms of what their brain is doing. But people like me who were trained in neurology and neuropsychology, we think about these issues of the brain's point of view all the time. And so the brain has a limited amount of energy available for it, and no amount of diet, exercise, Sudoku puzzles or supplements is going to be able to change that. There's a limited amount of energy and attention that you can devote at any one time and the Stone Age brain evolved in a much simpler time of limited resources, in a struggle, survival. And now it's being bombarded by this relentless amount of sensation thrown at it, and it simply can't handle it.
- [30:37]
Mike Carruthers
And the symptoms of not handling it are what? And so what happens to us, the.
- [30:43]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Overload, is that we feel exhausted and frustrated and tired all the time, that we can't keep up. So we're asking you to do things that it simply never evolved to do.
- [30:58]
Mike Carruthers
So can you explain why it is that it is so hard for so many people to put their phone down? Once they've picked it up and started doing what they're doing, it's really, really hard for them to put it down. And there must be a reason.
- [31:15]
Dr. Richard Satowic
The thing that makes the smartphone so addictive is the companies have really honed in on what psychology calls positive, intermittent reinforcement. And this is the same thing that slot machines use is that, you know, you're playing a slot machine and you get a. You get a minor hit, then get a medium hit, then you get a larger hit, and you keep. You keep putting money into the machine, hoping to get a big jackpot. And this is what, scrolling. So the scroll is what I call the infinite scroll. There's no end to the scroll. You just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. So you got a little hit of something interesting or amusing or meaningful or important. And so you keep scrolling, hoping for something bigger and a bigger hit, and it never comes. And that's how they have us hooked.
- [32:13]
Mike Carruthers
I have certainly seen it, witnessed it, especially in younger people when they've got a screen in front of them, it is so hard for them to stop. Like, they just. They cannot stop. But I'm wondering, what does that say about people's lives? That they cannot stop because they could stop if there was something better to do. They could stop if all of a sudden their house caught on fire or if somebody gave them a million dollars. I mean, if there was something better to do, they could stop.
- [32:45]
Dr. Richard Satowic
But often, for many people, there isn't anything better to do. They're bored and they're looking for stimulation. I mean, we have associated the phone with pleasure. I mean, it gives us all these really pleasurable things and in a way, frightening, I think.
- [33:04]
Mike Carruthers
So my observation, when I see people on their phones a lot or on their tablets, if you were to ask them, you know, is this a problem for you? People would chuckle and go, yeah, I spent too much time. But I don't think they see it as a problem problem in the sense that they can't identify the harm. In other words, if there's no problem, there's nothing to fix. If people don't perceive it as a problem, how are they ever going to want to fix it?
- [33:33]
Dr. Richard Satowic
They won't. Then they have become wholly captive to this tech industrial complex. And so they are now at the mercy of an, of a third party who determines what they will see, what they will think, how they will feel.
- [33:51]
Mike Carruthers
But specifically, what is the harm? Because it's one thing to say that, you know, this is ruining your life and your mind is being taken over by tech giants and all that, but all that's kind of vague and doesn't really land right. But what specifically is the harm in spending too much time on your phone?
- [34:12]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Well, one of the things that really concerns me is virtual autism, which you see particularly in younger individuals, and that is young individuals who have a very high screen exposure show symptoms that are similar to developmental autism. That is, they refuse to make eye contact, they have reduced language, they have reduced social interaction. This has been shown in a number of different studies that the greater the screen exposure, the greater the social isolation, the greater the lack of eye contact and the deeper the loss of language. And what is remarkable is that unlike developmental autism, if you take the screens away, these symptoms reverse. And these have been shown, kids have been, who have been shipped away to camp where there's no screens of any kind. And after just five days, all of a sudden, they start talking to one another and interacting socially. So, I mean, I've seen this firsthand. My nephew had a birthday party and a friend of his son was there and he's playing with his games and he has a battery pack because obviously he's be gaming a great deal of time. And the mother says, say hello to Richard. He said, I did. So all you get is grunts. If you get any reaction at all, the best you get is grunts. You don't get any kind of human interaction. So that's what I see as one of the biggest kinds of things. And then some. Some parents think that the iPad is marvelous because their, their kids are interacting with it and it keeps them quiet, and so mommy doesn't have to worry about it and all that. But the iPad is the worst babysitter of all time. And to put it in front of a child, in front of an infant or a toddler, is, I think, a form of child abuse, because what you're doing is you're blocking the developing central vision that they would normally be experiencing in the real world. By crawling around and putting everything in their mouth and having a visual apprenticeship with the world and you're blocking it and replacing it with mediated screen images. And by mediated, I mean artificial ones. So iPad characters, as cartoonish or wonderful as they may be, they don't talk to children, they talk at them. And that's not the same thing as an adult talking to them in full sentences and engaging them one on one. To an infant, nothing is more fascinating than a human face. Every parent knows this. Their eyes lock, lock on it. And they do not lock on an iPad in the same way. And don't forget that the brain is undergoing a huge amount of transformation in the first three years of life. And then again around puberty, there's an enormous reconfiguration. Just as the body changes, the brain is changing in the same way. But we never think about it that way. And it doesn't stop until about age 25. So these putting these artificial devices in front of people, I think does real harm.
- [38:00]
Mike Carruthers
Well, I don't think anybody who has kids would disagree with anything that you just said. The problem is that the peer pressure of, I mean, to have a kid go to school as a teenager in high school and not have a phone, I mean, he was, I know the.
- [38:17]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Peer, the peer pressure is enormous. In D.C. we happen to have one of the Waldorf schools and the Waldorf philosophy is no technology until about, I don't know, age 11. And I interviewed the principal and she said the hardest thing is getting the parents to agree to not have any technology. The kids are quite happy doing all their other stuff. And, you know, and the argument that, well, they need to learn this for their future occupation, et cetera. Well, by the time a three year old or a five year old is adept at whatever technology you're throwing at them, and by the time they get to be ready to work, that technology is going to be so obsolete that it won't matter. So I don't see the, I don't see the argument that one needs to learn how to do this. I mean, President Obama not many years ago said, oh, kids learn to need to learn how to code. Learning how to code will be as important as reading and writing arithmetic. Well, guess what? Now you could use ChatGPT2 and all these AI tools to write code for you. So there's no need to know how to code. So things become obsolete very, very fast. So I think it's hard to predict what people will need to know for the future because the future is very uncertain.
- [39:53]
Mike Carruthers
Well, also Wrapped up in all of this, and it's very hard to untangle these things is all the problems that you're talking about. But there's also a lot of convenience. I mean, there are parents who would say, my kid has to have a phone. I have to be able to get in touch with them. I have to know where I'm picking him up.
- [40:12]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Well, then I'd smack the parents in the face and say, back off. You don't need to be in contact with them all the time. I mean, my parents didn't need to be in contact with me all the time. They knew I'd show up after school or during lunch or after recess and all that. So. And if there's such an emergency, they can call the school office and then the principal will bring the kid to the phone. So I think that's just a ridiculous argument. I must be in contact. And I think what that, that's, I think shows helicopter parenting and that the parents are so anxious about losing control. And so that's their problem.
- [40:57]
Mike Carruthers
Right. But it, but it's their perception. And so you're going to have a hard time telling them, you know, let's go back to the good old days when kids didn't have phones, even though.
- [41:08]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Well, I think. I think their perception is wrong. And, you know, they're welcome to have it, but I think it only makes them anxious. And so when you ask, like, what good does it do for you to be so concerned that you have to reach your kid 24 hours a day and monitor them constantly and check on their whereabouts via, you know, app finders, what's wrong with you? Why can't you just let go? Why can't you just let them be an adolescent or a teenager or an adult?
- [41:43]
Mike Carruthers
Well, I think what you, what you pointed out is when you take phones away from kids, because my son went off to a camp where he couldn't have a phone for a month, and he was. Oh, for a month, he was a different kid. I mean, he was. When he. When we saw him at the end of the month, he was just like, wow.
- [42:01]
Dr. Richard Satowic
But so. And. And this was a summer month, I take it was.
- [42:04]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, it was a month of July.
- [42:05]
Dr. Richard Satowic
So not only did he not have screens to distract him, but if he was there in the summer months, he was probably outdoors a lot of the time, and he got a lot of daylight exposure. And this is another thing, is that it used to be the parents say, go out and play. Well, now nobody says, go out, go outside. And so kids are not exposed to sunlight. And again, other studies show that like for example, people have gone away to these camps where the only, where they had like 14 hours of daylight a day and the only light was the fire light of in the evening, which is highly infrared. And they came back entirely changed people and their sleep was so much improved. So yes, your observation is spot on.
- [43:02]
Mike Carruthers
Well, here's another thing too is I can live without my phone and often I don't have it and people get upset. I tried to call you, you didn't respond, you didn't pick up, you didn't text back. And so it's not just people who are, who feel like they want to be on their phones, it's other people who think you should be on your phone so you better have it handy.
- [43:28]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Well, the response to that is, why didn't you text back? Is I didn't need to, I will do. So I text back at 4:00 every afternoon or I check my emails at 8:00am every morning and that's it. There's no other window. And so the question is, why do you want to let other people dictate your attention span and your schedule? So this whole I couldn't get hold of you was yes, you couldn't, because I'm only on during these hours and here's where you can reach me. And basically the question is, what could possibly be so important that I have to drop everything and respond to your text or your email in my own website? I have a way to contact me and I've got, I think, three ways that says, you know, this is urgent, number two, get back to me within a month or three, get back to me if and when you can. And it's amazing. And I said, you know, please be specific about what you want, et cetera, what you want to ask. And it's amazing how people respond to that and they follow that willingly. Once you set out guidelines of how to contact me, people act accordingly.
- [44:56]
Mike Carruthers
Right? Well, I've always felt, and it's been my experience that if you respond to people right away, you are training them that you respond right away. And if you respond by taking a day, then people know if you really need to get a hold of him, I wouldn't text him because he doesn't respond right away. So you get a reputation based on how you respond.
- [45:17]
Dr. Richard Satowic
This is like Pavlov's dogs, you know, if you respond right away, indeed, you've trained people to know that you will respond right away.
- [45:28]
Mike Carruthers
So let me ask you, do you practice what you preach or might you sometimes pick up your phone and start endlessly scrolling like everybody else does?
- [45:40]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Oh, listen, I will be the first to admit that I'm just as guilty as everybody else to these forces. I know. Except I know that what's going on? But yes, I will pick it up, I will scroll, and I realize that I've spent. Oh my God, I've spent 20 minutes on TikTok, et cetera. And it takes a lot of willpower to say no to these things and ask, you know, is this really what I want to be doing with my time?
- [46:11]
Mike Carruthers
And the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. And it is certainly worth asking that question a lot more often. I've been talking to Dr. Richard Saitoic. He is a professor of neurology at George Washington University, and the name of his book is your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Richard, thanks for coming on today.
- [46:39]
Dr. Richard Satowic
Thanks, Mike. It's been really pleasurable. It's been a hoot. Thank you so much for having me on.
- [46:48]
Mike Carruthers
When you hear or read, say, a shampoo will make your hair five times silkier. Well, that sure sounds impressive, but what does it actually mean? Well, it actually means nothing. It's one of those numbers used in advertising and by politicians that has no real meaning. Charles Seif, the author of a book called Proofiness, says there is no way to measure your hair's silkiness in the first place, let alone measure that it is now five times silkier than it was before or when Vaseline says it delivers 70% more moisture than other leading brands. Well, what in the world does that mean? How do you measure how much moisture something is delivering? There is something about a number or a statistic that sounds convincing on the surface, but with a little critical thinking, you can offer uncover the truth about some of these claims, and many of them are meaningless. And that is something you should know. Well, that wraps up this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope if you did enjoy it, you will tell people about this show. In the crowded world of podcasting, it can be a challenge to acquire new listeners, and one of the best ways is to have existing listeners tell their friends and family. And it would help if you could do that. I'm Micahruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.
- [48:12]
Donna Shil Dugan
What if we could disagree in a way that encouraged empathy even during an election year? With a new episode of Thread the Needle, A better way to disagree. I'm your host, Donna Shil Dugan. I use my background in journalism and draw from my life experiences to explore topics that matter to fellow feminists like you. In this episode, activist and professor Loretta Ross charges us to try her calling into technique.
- [48:38]
Rob Benedict and Richard Speight
I'm always going to hold people accountable for the harm that they do. The question is, am I going to do it with anger or am I going to do it with love and grace? And I choose love and grace because it makes me feel better about myself when I walk through the world that way.
- [49:02]
Donna Shil Dugan
You can listen to Thread the Needle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [49:13]
Narrator
Hi, this is Rob Benedict and I am Richard Speight. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural.
- [49:21]
Rob Benedict and Richard Speight
It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes.
- [49:25]
Narrator
And though we have seen of course every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again.
- [49:32]
Rob Benedict and Richard Speight
And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers.
- [49:49]
Jack in the Box Ad Voice
It was kind of a little bit.
- [49:49]
Roland Allen
Of a left field choice in the best way possible.
- [49:53]
Mike Carruthers
The note from Kripke was he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type with.
- [50:00]
Rob Benedict and Richard Speight
15 seasons to explore. It's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.