3 ways to defend your mind against social media distortions

Summary

The video explores how technology and social media overload our brains with information and desire, making it difficult to focus our attention. It explains mimetic desire theory - how we adopt others' desires as our own. With so many models online, we compare ourselves and become envious. Leaders manipulate consensus. We must recognize the distortion social media creates and counteract it with real relationships. To strengthen our fragile attention system assaulted by threats, stress and the attention economy, we can train our brains via mindfulness meditation.

Takeaways

• 📚 Technology's rapid scale and speed in generating opinions are highly appealing to our brains, leading to a constant stream of engagement and information overload.
• 📱 Social media creates a virtual environment where individuals, regardless of their geographical location or social status, can interact and compete for attention, blurring traditional social hierarchies.
• 🚫 The distraction caused by digital notifications and endless scrolling impairs our ability to concentrate and form new memories, highlighting the need for digital mindfulness.
• 💳 Cybersecurity threats, such as data breaches and identity theft, pose significant risks to our digital identities, emphasizing the importance of robust security measures like Aura's all-in-one protection service.
• 🧭 Mimetic desire, the phenomenon of adopting others' desires as our own, is amplified by social media, increasing our exposure to numerous models of desire and potentially impacting our mental and emotional health.
• ⚡️ Social media divides mimetic models into external (unreachable idols) and internal (peers and rivals) mediators of desire, influencing our aspirations and potentially leading to envy and rivalry.
• 🛡️ The democratizing aspect of social media allows for widespread communication and expression, but it also fosters collective illusions and misinformation, driven by vocal minorities.
• 💬 Offline interactions and maintaining connections with our immediate community are crucial for counteracting the distortions and pressures of online engagement.
• ✍️ Mindfulness and attention management are essential for psychological well-being, helping us navigate the challenges posed by the attention economy and our own tendency towards mental time travel.
• ✨ Mindfulness training, including practices like meditation, enhances our attentional control and meta-awareness, empowering us to live more present, fulfilled lives amid digital distractions.

Q & A

How does technology influence the creation and speed of opinions according to the transcript?

Technology allows a scale and speed of opinion creation that is extremely seductive to our brains, significantly influencing how quickly and broadly opinions can spread.

What impact does social media have on our sense of social and existential placement?

Social media has compressed our social and existential experiences, making us feel like we're all existing closely together, allowing interactions across vast distances and social divides.

How can being constantly online affect our ability to make new memories?

Being constantly online and distracted by alerts and feeds impairs our ability to pay attention, which is crucial for forming new memories.

What are the potential risks of not securing your digital information timely?

Not securing your digital information in time can lead to unauthorized access to your data, strange transactions on your credit statements, being locked out of social media accounts, or identity theft.

What is mimetic desire and how is it affected by social media?

Mimetic desire refers to adopting another person's desires as our own, often unconsciously. Social media has expanded our exposure to mimetic models, increasing the number of desires we adopt and impacting our mental and emotional health.

What are the two kinds of mimetic models described in the transcript?

The transcript describes external mediators of desire, who are outside of our direct social sphere and not rivals, and internal mediators of desire, who are people we interact with and could become rivals.

How does the 'Attention Economy' impact our focus and attention?

The Attention Economy is designed to capture and hold our attention through engineering efforts, making our attention a product and diverting it from our real-life experiences and priorities.

What role does mindfulness training play in managing attention according to the transcript?

Mindfulness training helps strengthen our attention by promoting present-moment awareness, which can combat the distraction and fragmentation caused by stress and the Attention Economy.

What is Meta-Awareness and why is it beneficial?

Meta-Awareness is the ability to be aware of the contents and processes of our minds moment by moment. It is beneficial because it gives us more control over our attention, enabling us to own it and use it more effectively.

How does social media create a distorted perception of consensus and majority opinions?

Social media can create the illusion of consensus by amplifying the voices of a vocal minority, leading others to conform or self-silence, which can distort the perception of what the majority believes.

Outlines

00:00

🌐 The Seductive Power and Risks of Social Media

This paragraph discusses the alluring yet dangerous aspects of social media and technology's influence on society. It highlights how technology facilitates rapid and widespread sharing of opinions, making users susceptible to distractions and information overload. This can prevent new memory formation and increase vulnerability to data breaches and identity theft. The segment also introduces Aura, an identity theft protection service, suggesting it as a solution for users to protect themselves online. The discussion transitions to the psychological impacts of social media, exploring concepts like mimetic desire, where individuals unconsciously adopt desires from influential figures or peers. The narrative distinguishes between 'external' and 'internal' mediators of desire, suggesting that social media has expanded the range of these models, affecting individuals' mental and emotional health.

05:01

🤔 Understanding and Managing Desires in a Digital Age

This paragraph elaborates on the concept of mimetic desire and its implications for personal and social dynamics. It addresses the endless nature of desires, emphasizing the importance of choosing positive role models and setting boundaries to prevent envy and dissatisfaction. The text critiques how social media shapes our desires and perceptions, contributing to a skewed understanding of reality based on a minority's extreme views. This can lead to collective illusions and conformity, distorting societal norms and values. The segment suggests stepping back from online platforms and engaging more with real-life communities to maintain a grounded perspective. Additionally, it mentions the phenomenon of 'social bots' and their role in manipulating public opinion, as illustrated by the case of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

10:02

🧠 The Importance of Attention and Mindfulness

This paragraph discusses the human attention system's role in defining our experiences and its vulnerability to stress, negative moods, and threats. It highlights the negative impact of the 'attention economy' on our mental well-being and introduces mindfulness as a method to strengthen attention and promote mental health. The narrative explains how mindfulness training can help individuals regain control over their attention, thereby enhancing their ability to enjoy life, connect with others, and navigate challenges. The segment emphasizes the importance of present-moment awareness and the practice of gently refocusing the mind when it wanders, advocating for a daily routine to cultivate mindfulness.

15:06

🌟 Achieving Fulfillment Through Mindfulness and Community

In this concluding paragraph, the discussion centers on mindfulness as a tool for achieving personal fulfillment and effectively facing life's challenges. It underscores the concept of meta-awareness, the ability to observe and direct one's focus, which can be enhanced through mindfulness practices. The segment suggests that by maintaining awareness and control over our attention, we can improve our quality of life and relationships. Finally, the narrative invites viewers to engage further with the topic by joining a members-only community for deeper insights and discussions, thereby promoting continued learning and personal growth.

Keywords

💡Mimetic Desire

Mimetic desire refers to the concept that our desires are not entirely our own, but are instead borrowed or imitated from others, often without our conscious realization. This phenomenon is highlighted in the context of social media, where the presence of millions of potential models to imitate exponentially increases. The video illustrates how social media exposes individuals to a vast array of mimetic models, thereby influencing their desires and behaviors. For instance, people may adopt desires based on what they see influencers or peers valuing, such as lifestyle choices, opinions, or material possessions.

💡Attention Economy

The attention economy concept describes a market where human attention is treated as a scarce commodity, and businesses compete to capture and hold it, often through digital platforms. The video discusses how social media platforms and other online entities design their content and interfaces to be as engaging and addictive as possible, to ensure that users spend a significant amount of their time interacting with these platforms. This competition for attention can detract from meaningful personal interactions and mental well-being.

💡Identity Theft

Identity theft is a major concern in the digital age, where personal information can be compromised through data breaches and then sold on the dark web. The video mentions scenarios such as unauthorized transactions or getting locked out of social media accounts as consequences of identity theft. It highlights the importance of securing online information and the role of services like Aura in providing comprehensive protection against such threats.

💡Meta-Awareness

Meta-awareness is defined as the ability to be aware of and reflect on one's own mental processes and states of mind, including attention. The video advocates for mindfulness training as a way to cultivate meta-awareness, thereby enhancing control over one's attention and improving mental well-being. By practicing mindfulness, individuals can strengthen their attention, enjoy the present moment more fully, and better navigate the challenges of life.

💡Social Media

Social media is portrayed as a double-edged sword in the video, offering unprecedented opportunities for connection and engagement across the globe, but also presenting challenges related to attention, mental health, and privacy. The video discusses the impact of social media on shaping desires, opinions, and behaviors through the constant exposure to a multitude of influences and the competitive nature of online engagement.

💡Collective Illusions

Collective illusions refer to the phenomenon where a vocal minority's opinions are perceived as representing the majority, leading others to either self-silence or conform. This concept is discussed in relation to social media, where a small percentage of users generate the majority of content, potentially skewing perceptions of societal norms and values. The video suggests that recognizing and challenging these illusions is crucial for a more authentic and diverse public discourse.

💡Digital Well-being

Digital well-being involves managing one's use of technology to promote mental and physical health. The video addresses concerns about how excessive engagement with digital devices and platforms can detract from attention, memory formation, and overall well-being. It suggests strategies such as mindfulness and spending time offline to mitigate these effects and enhance personal connections.

💡Mental Time Travel

Mental time travel is the mind's tendency to wander away from the present moment, either reminiscing about the past or worrying about the future. The video mentions that this phenomenon occupies about 50% of our waking moments and can significantly impact our ability to focus and be present. It presents mindfulness as a method to counteract this tendency by training the brain to stay more in the present.

💡Data Breach

A data breach is a security incident in which sensitive, protected, or confidential data is accessed or disclosed without authorization. The video uses data breaches as an example of how personal information can be compromised online, leading to issues like identity theft. It underscores the importance of proactive measures, such as changing passwords and using identity theft protection services, to safeguard against such threats.

💡VUCA Environment

VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, and describes environments or situations that are challenging to navigate due to their unpredictable and complicated nature. The video explains that the modern world, exacerbated by the rapid pace of digital information and social media, often feels like a constant VUCA environment, putting additional strain on individuals' attention and well-being.

Highlights

Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin socially and existentially speaking.

Mimetic desire means adopting another person's desire as our own, usually without realizing it.

Having positive models to emulate is good, but we must understand their limitations.

Choose models wisely and know when they inflame desire versus bring fulfillment.

Social media presents billions of desires modeled 24/7 that we must understand or be controlled by.

A vocal fringe minority on social media can be perceived as the majority, creating collective illusions.

Leaders like Maduro used social bots to manufacture consensus and attack opposition.

Get offline occasionally to avoid distorting how you treat people in real life.

Attention allows us to prioritize information and fuels thinking, feeling, and connecting.

Stress, threat, and negative mood disable attention like kryptonite.

The attention economy lures our focus through threats, novelty, self-interest and fun.

Mental time travel hijacks attention to past and future, taking us out of the present.

Mindfulness meditation strengthens attention by cultivating awareness of mind processes.

Meta-awareness gives us control of our attention to meet life's demands.

Gently return wandering minds to the present; beginning again trains the brain.

Transcripts

- Technology allows a scale and speed of opinion creation

that is extremely seductive to our brain.

Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin,

socially speaking, existentially speaking.

- We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody

Even if they're on the other side of the planet,

even if they have a lot more money than we do,

We can still compete with them on engagement.

We're pulled in so many directions between the texts alerts

and the constantly scrolling feeds.

And if we're distracted, we can't pay attention.

If I can't pay attention, I can't make new memories.

Every time you go online, you are in a funhouse of mirrors.

Have you ever seen a news story about a data breach for a website you use?

When that happens, someone anywhere in the world can access

that information for a couple of cents on the dark web.

If you don't change your passwords or secure your information in time,

you might start seeing strange transactions appear on your credit

or debit statements.

In some cases, you could get locked out of your social media accounts.

Or worst of all, full on, have your identity stolen.

These scenarios give you anxiety.

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Now let's get back to the discussion of the impacts of social media.

I'm Luke Burgis, founder of Fourth Wall Ventures,

professor of business,

and author of the book

"Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life."

- We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody

or engage with somebody,

could even be the President of the United States.

And they might react to us back.

Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin,

socially speaking, existentially speaking.

Even if they're on the other side of the planet,

even if they have a lot more money than we do,

we can still interact with them.

We can still compete with them on engagement.

They're inside of our world.

We have a mimetic machine in our pocket

where all of these people exist.

So, what is mimetic desire?

Mimetic desire means that we're adopting

another person's desire as our own,

usually without even realizing that we're doing it.

So, social media has given us millions of mimetic models

that we now have to contend with.

Some people have went from having 10 mimetic models

to now having a million,

and we haven't quite come to grips as a culture

with what that means for our mental and emotional health.

There are two kinds of mimetic models.

The first kind is called an external mediator of desire.

These are models that are outside of our world;

whether because they exist in a different social sphere

than we do,

there's no possibility of us coming into contact with them

and certainly not becoming rivals with them.

They're in some sense, outside of our world of desire,

outside of our world of competition.

Now, these external models of desire

can be real, or they can be fictional.

The other kind of model is inside of our world

called internal mediators of desire.

These are people that we do come into contact with,

and there is a possibility of conflict

or rivalry with these people.

These are people that are in our family;

these are people in our workplace;

these are people that could even be our friends.

It's easier to compare ourselves to them.

These are the kinds of people that we look to as benchmarks,

and we're far more likely to be envious

of somebody that we went to high school with

who now has a great job and a beautiful spouse,

than we are to be envious

of the richest person in the world.

The danger with external mediators of desire,

with keeping up with people that are very successful,

with people that have modeled a certain kind of lifestyle,

is that there's no end to that process.

All desire is a form of transcendence.

We desire to go beyond the boundaries,

to go just over the mountain,

to be the kind of person

that we don't feel that we currently are.

Having positive models of desire to emulate

is a very good thing.

It's important to have people that model virtues

and goodness that we would like,

but we have to understand the limitations of any model.

And understanding how the dynamic

between us and our models changes in that scenario

is really, really important.

It's also important to understand

when somebody is an internal model of desire to us

because, in that case, we have to have boundaries.

All desire comes from us feeling like we lack something,

and that can bring us into a dangerous, vicious cycle

because there will always be another model to find.

We have to choose our models wisely.

We also have to know when the model

is inflaming us with the desire

for something that's gonna bring real fulfillment

or whether it's going to bring a dopamine hit

or allow us to fantasize about a life

that we'll probably never have.

And even if we did have,

it would probably make us miserable.

All you need to do is go on Instagram

and spend five minutes,

and you see lifestyle's model,

you see vacation destination's model, fashions,

manners of speech, ways of engagement,

ways of speaking, political preferences.

All of these desires are modeled for us 24 hours a day,

billions of them, and we need to understand

the mimetic landscape of social media

or else we'll become totally controlled by it.

The greatest strength of social media

is its 'democratizing tendency.'

We don't have to just look to elites

and a few news outlets to tell us about us.

We can actually communicate with each other.

But when we engage online, we tend to think

that we're interacting with a reasonable sample

of the actual population, but it's not true.

Close to 80% of all content on social media

is generated by about 10% of the users.

That 10% tends to be extreme on most social issues.

They are the vocal fringe.

When you have a vocal minority

that is perceived as the majority,

critical mass of us will actually either self-silence,

or we will actually go along to get along,

and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is how collective illusions form.

It's not terribly surprising that some of the first people

to start to use these tools to manipulate

were leaders who need consensus to conserve power.

- Venezuela. (speaks Spanish)

- An example of this is Nicolás Maduro,

the leader of Venezuela.

For a long time, it looked like, on social media,

that he had a pretty good beat

on the consensus of the people that he led.

So, almost everything that he would say,

stories that were written about him that were positive,

would be retweeted and shared,

and it looked like this represented some kind of consensus,

but it turned out a significant percentage

of his so-called "followers"

were actually what we call 'social bots.'

These are fake accounts that only exist

to retweet anything positive about him or that he said,

and, importantly, to attack the opposition.

When Twitter banned them,

the real consensus was with the opposition,

and that started to emerge and be retweeted

as more and more people recognized

that it was okay to say what they actually thought.

Social media is a free-for-all

in terms of who can shout the loudest,

and who can silence other people

in the name of masquerading as a majority

and manufacturing collective illusions.

Your willingness to conform

and your unwillingness to challenge

what you think the group believes

will actually contribute to leading the group astray.

The solution to our online life

is to get offline once in a while.

The most important thing you can do

is continue to have conversations with your family,

with your neighbors, with your community.

Don't carry that distortion over

into the way you treat people in real life.

My name is Amishi Jha. I'm a neuroscientist and professor

at the University of Miami,

and the author of the book "Peak Mind:

Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention,

Invest 12 Minutes a Day."

- Where is your attention right now?

The human brain's attention system

is actually the success story

of what makes us unique as human beings.

Because attention fuels our ability to think,

to feel, and connect,

what we pay attention to is our life.

For a long time, through our evolutionary history,

the brain started to suffer from a very big problem

which is that there's far more information

out in the environment than could be fully processed.

Attention ended up becoming a very useful solution

because it allows us to prioritize information,

but there are qualities of the human experience

that disable attention.

Given how powerful attention is, we need to really respect

where we place this precious brain resource.

The mind is no different than the body.

The mind needs to be exercised daily

to optimize our psychological well-being.

Knowing this, I became very interested in understanding

if we might be able to train attention.

The brain's attention system is incredibly powerful.

There's three big ways we use attention as a fuel

for having success in our daily activities.

We use our attention to actually 'Think'-

during thinking there's an idea that comes to mind,

and then we hyperlink it to other ideas.

That's what thought actually is,

and the glue between those hyperlinks is attention.

But it's not only used for the purposes

of what we might call cognitive functioning,

we also use our attention to 'Feel.'

Think about the last time you actually had a joyful moment

in your lives.

If you weren't paying attention to it,

chances are you missed it.

You didn't get the benefit

of the positive emotional response.

Finally, the third area

is 'Connecting'-

our social interactions with other people.

Without devoting attention, we don't experience care

and we can't extend care.

In fact, you might say that paying attention

to another person is our highest form of love.

But while attention is so incredibly powerful,

it's fragile and vulnerable.

The three biggies that we've learned about in my labs are:

Stress

Threat

or Negative Mood.

Maybe you could even say they're like kryptonite

for attention.

But we all know you can't live a life

without experiencing stress, threat, or negative mood.

A lot of our work with high-performing groups describe

this feeling of not having full access to their attention

when they need it most.

So what are those circumstances?

There's a shorthand that we can use to think about this.

The term is VUCA:

Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous.

The world today feels like it's a constant VUCA environment,

but there's another challenge that our attention faces,

and why many of us feel like we're in an attentional crisis.

Frankly, the brain was designed to be lured by,

for our evolutionary success and survival,

certain kinds of information; threatening information

novel information, self-related information,

and even things that are fun and enticing.

I'm talking about the 'Attention Economy.'

Everything is being done by teams of engineers

to actually capture your attention and keep it there;

your attention is the product.

Finally, the mind can be hijacked away by something

called 'Mental Time Travel.'

That means that our attention is not in the present moment,

so when we're thinking about the past,

our attention is fully in the past,

same thing with the future.

About 50% of our waking moments,

we aren't in the present moment.

Now, that may seem very disempowering,

like, 'How are we ever gonna fight that fight?'

But, the good news is that decades of research in my own lab

and many others has now given us a solution-

mindfulness training, something that's been around

for millennia.

We can train our brain so that we do not need to fight.

What we know

is that when people practice mindfulness meditation,

which is attending to the present moment,

their attention is stronger.

12 minutes or more a day can cultivate

something called 'Meta-Awareness.'

What is Meta-Awareness?

It's the ability to be aware of the contents and processes

of what's going on in our mind moment by moment.

We're paying attention to our attention.

Now, why would that awareness be beneficial?

Because every time we are aware, we have more control.

We can own our attention, and we have it available to us

to not only enjoy the moments of our lives

and feel fulfillment,

but to meet the challenges and demands

that we certainly will all face.

Minds wander; it's a natural thing that the brain does.

When our mind moves away, gently return it back-

simply begin again.

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