It’s easy to forget the unique place human beings occupy in evolutionary history. A recent discovery published in the journal Nature dates the earliest Homo sapiens to be 300,000 years old. By comparison the scientific revolution is only 500 years old, the United States only 200 years old, and the iPhone just 10 years old.
For hundreds of thousands of years, we have lived in small and atomized communities where technology only played a peripheral role and information technologies were virtually nonexistent. Information was transmitted primarily through speech limiting its spreading power to the confines of geography and oral tradition. The advent of the communications and computer revolutions have hurled us into what’s called the “information age”. From an evolutionary timescale, this just happened.
But our evolutionary heritage continues to whir in the background while our smartphones immerse us in a sea of information available at the speed of light. We simultaneously live in two bifurcated domains. In one we’re lowly ape-like animals while in the other we’re ethereal techno-gods. This fact must be dealt with properly if we hope to mature into the information age and preserve our relationship with truth.
Every second, an avalanche of data pours in through our senses. To process this deluge, the brain is continuously sifting and sorting information, trying to tease apart the critical from the casual. And since nothing is more critical to the brain than survival, the first filter most of this incoming information encounters is the amygdala.
The amygdala is an almond-shaped sliver of the temporal lobe responsible for primal emotions like rage, hate, and fear. It’s our early warning system, an organ always on high alert, whose job is to find anything in our environment that could threaten survival. Anxious under normal conditions, once stimulated, the amygdala becomes hypervigilant. Then our focus tightens and our fight-or-flight response turns on. Heart rate speeds up, nerves fire faster, eyes dilate for improved vision, the skin cools as blood moves toward our muscles for faster reaction times. Cognitively, our pattern-recognition system scours our memories, hunting for similar situations (to help ID the threat) and potential solutions (to help neutralize the threat). But so potent is this response that once turned on, it’s almost impossible to shut off, and this is a problem in the modern world.
These days, we are saturated with information. We have millions of news outlets competing for our mind share. And how do they compete? By vying for the amygdala’s attention. The old newspaper saw “If it bleeds, it leads” works because the first stop that all incoming information encounters is an organ already primed to look for danger. We’re feeding a fiend. Pick up the Washington Post and compare the number of positive to negative stories. If your experiment goes anything like mine, you’ll find that over 90 percent of the articles are pessimistic. Quite simply, good news doesn’t catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.
Diamandis, Peter H.; Kotler, Steven (2012-02-21). Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Kindle Locations 652-662). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
The amygdala is a remnant of human beings’ deep Darwinian history. It’s our brain’s evolutionary gatekeeper which processes events deemed immediately relevant to survival. The prefrontal cortex on the other hand, is the later-evolved “rational” and abstracting part of the brain. It would much rather index information into its respective areas of importance (dare I say truth), but the paranoidal amygdala has a monopoly on all incoming sense-data. We may be living in cities, sipping lattes, and Netflixing ourselves into comatose, but to the amygdala it’s time to party like it’s 250,000BC (which incidentally wasn’t the safest time to be partying).
Our screens show us news happening all over the world, sometimes thousands of miles away. But our brain responds as if the danger is inches away. This is an instance of media hacking the brain to capture attention. Regardless of whether we are statistically likely to be in the sort of danger that warrants a “fight or flight” response, the news hijacks it anyway.
But this has an immediate impact on our perception. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, explains that even under mundane circumstances, attention is a limited resource. “Imagine you’re watching a short film with a single actor cooking an omelet. The camera cuts to a different angle as the actor continues cooking. Surely you would notice if the actor changed into a different person, right? Two-thirds of observers don’t.” This happens because attention is a seriously limited resource, and once we’re focused on one thing, we often don’t notice the next. Of course, any fear response only amplifies the effect. What all of this means is that once the amygdala begins hunting bad news, it’s mostly going to find bad news.
Diamandis, Peter H.; Kotler, Steven (2012-02-21). Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Kindle Locations 665-679). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
A better known version of this experiment involves a basketball and a gorilla suit, try it out for yourself. I predict your results will be similar to Eagleman’s. But myopic attention is also a more general sort of problem that plagues multiple fields. In science it goes under the guise of "confirmation bias", when our attention selects only confirmatory evidence to a theory and ignores the rest. The edifice of peer-review is our best attempt to institutionalize a solution to confirmation bias, but even the hallowed halls of science can fall prey to this problem.
It’s surprising that a simple bug in our attention system can lead to such a devastatingly skewed picture of reality. For all the godly progress humanity has made in the past few centuries, we are still inextricably tied to an ancient animal brain. The amygdala acts as puppet master while we carry on our daily lives blissfully (or maniacally) ignorant of our strings.
Compounding this, our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Things have changed since. Many of today’s dangers are probabilistic— the economy might nose-dive, there could be a terrorist attack— and the amygdala can’t tell the difference. Worse, the system is also designed not to shut off until the potential danger has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely. Add in an impossible-to-avoid media continuously scaring us in an attempt to capture market share, and you have a brain convinced that it’s living in a state of siege— a state that’s especially troubling, as New York University’s Dr. Marc Siegel explains in his book False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear, because nothing could be further from the truth:
“Statistically, the industrialized world has never been safer. Many of us are living longer and more uneventfully. Nevertheless, we live in worst-case fear scenarios. Over the past century, we Americans have dramatically reduced our risk in virtually every area of life, resulting in life spans 60 percent longer in 2000 than in 1900. Antibiotics have reduced the likelihood of dying from infections … Public health measures dictate standards for drinkable water and breathable air. Our garbage is removed quickly. We live in temperature-controlled, disease-controlled lives. And yet, we worry more than ever before. The natural dangers are no longer there, but the response mechanisms are still in place, and now they are turned on much of the time. We implode, turning our adaptive fear mechanism into a maladaptive panicked response.”
Diamandis, Peter H.; Kotler, Steven (2012-02-21). Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Kindle Locations 665-679). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
I think being aware of this cognitive quirk is indispensable to living in the 21st century. It is a foundational piece of knowledge that colors all information we consume. It’s the sort of knowledge that will help us acclimate to the very character of our time. Without it, we submit to the manufactured climate of fear which perpetually assaults the amygdala, or worse, our sanity.
From where I sit, we are in serious need of a new cognitive toolkit that tells us where our Darwinian biology might fail in its relationship with technology. There exists a widening asymmetry between the evolutionary heritage that shaped us and the information technologies that could still liberate us. Reconciling these will be one of our generation’s greatest challenges.
More generally I speculate that any answer to this problem will require a wholesale replacement of the axioms we use to perceive the world. Civilization’s operating system is running version 1.0 when reality has been running on 2.0 for decades. It’s time to update. Understanding the role of the amygdala is just one potential pillar to a new kind of framework.
Other pillars might be educational, like relevant facts concerning evolutionary psychology. Or maybe technological, like filtering algorithms that provide news in quantities proportional to their corresponding statistical realities. But the longer we delay, the more susceptible we are to being manipulated by our own tools. The faster we update, the better we will be able to navigate through the information age and into a brighter future.
I have noticed myself avoiding news on purpose. Everyday we get bombarded by all the bad stuff happening around the globe meaning there is always something negative to report on. Bombing there, shooting here and stabbings between the two.
I'd rather see the positives only.So I agree, we have a problem.
It's crazy. But then again there's a large part of me that thinks the negativity-obsession is weirdly an endearing trait of human beings. If humans are by nature empathetic, then you might predict a myopia towards the terrible features of our species so that we can identify and alleviate it! So that's a way to look at it optimistically haha
I get concerned when that obsession, while well-intentioned, ends up working against its own goal. We stop looking at what progress we have already made and conflate any talk about the productive things with "denying there is any problem at all".
But that is exactly NOT what I'm saying! I'm saying that to further the amelioration of human suffering requires identifying the factors that have contributed to the progress made thusfar, and improving those factors, guiding the process in the direction those factors pointed.
Rant over. Lol
Maybe using Steem journalism can be something else than clickbait titles and exploiting our lizard brains since money doesn't come from ads rather than people.
I really hope so. Steem could at the very least temper the polarization effects from the ad-monetization schemes that the other (fiat) platforms use now.
I wonder if anyone has considered that opportunity seriously yet. It's a brilliant point. I'm sure communities could sprout around alternative models of journalism. And again the bar doesn't have to be set so high... could be as modest as doing deeper dives into whatever the subject matter is, or deeper than what's being done now which isn't saying much.
Instead of writing to provoke or produce clickbait the journalist could write to understand and present nuance. But now I'm just hearing myself saying "we should bring back those good old days when journalism was objective!" ( even though I wasn't around for those good old days and it's probably BS anyways haha)
But more than improving on the current model I could imagine new subject matter entirely being explored, and then let the Steemit market decide what sticks.
In the end Steem is backend system that enables shareholders to reward content via clicks from shared rewards pool. This in itself can be utilized in many ways but to give more power to growth of smaller communities around Steem, we are soon getting smart media tokens(SMT). These SMT's will then work as another layer on top of Steem, like inception these smart media tokens work just like Steem and Steem Power but the issuer has more control on how to issue these new tokens out. For example, let's say you would be to create a new website that encourages positive news only and objective journalism. You could then issue a new token revolving around this new website, where contributors get rewards in this token of yours. These new tokens could then be traded back to Steem, or later, to btc if it gains big user rates. This way, your new token would be hold by those who contribute a lot to your particular website and they have more say, where new tokens will go by upvoting.
At least that is my current knowledge of the SMT's. It will help smaller ecosystems grow within Steem. Every website could have their own, if they choose so.
That's really good to know. I've been wondering about how much flexibility there is for engineers to build alternative incentive structures with Steem, but circumventing the Steemit platform to make on-boarding new and less tech savvy users as easy as possible.
But that's even besides the point, these smart media tokens sound like something I should get more familiar with.
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:
https://medium.com/@brianluchsinger/how-media-is-hacking-our-brains-fb6bef252d37
^ that is my medium account :\
I'll be avoiding the copy and paste shortcut from here on out haha
This post on "cheetah" was helpful
Great writing style and content. Hope to read more of what you write man!
Thanks so much! I'm so excited about Steem because it's going to light a fire under my ass in a way that writing a personal blog or posting to Medium didn't. I love to write but so far have found just about every reason to procrastinate/put it off.
Not to mention the community here seems like exactly the kind of people I've been looking for on other platforms with little success. It's like I've known about blockchain and its revolutionary potential, but was totally unaware that it was being built in real-time.
I was posting to Reddit in the Futurology subreddit and places like that trying to engage people and talk about all these cool ideas, totally unaware that Reddit 2.0 was happening under my feet! haha
You should do #introduceyourself post. Put effort in it and look for like minded people and you'll have better time here.
I've been thinking I should get my feet wet first... but maybe I'm just rationalizing the fact that I'm nervous haha
Or maybe posting like screenshots/quoting a bunch of my older blogs when I had no idea what the hell I was talking about but for some reason was convinced I was solving the mysteries of the universe... it'll either be funny in a self-deprecating way or horrifically embarrassing. Stakes would be high.
It looks like there's a lot of interesting communities that I'm starting to look into. This post by @torico lays out a bunch of them.
I'm hoping I'll find some luck there.
Any suggestions for a minnow like me? Next steps I could take?
I guess "Try to find your audience rather than wait for audience to find you" is fitting anywhere on the internet. Everyone has a voice and suddenly, when there's money involved, it does get a lot more noisy.
Your Post Has Been Featured on @Resteemable!
Feature any Steemit post using resteemit.com!
How It Works:
1. Take Any Steemit URL
2. Erase
https://3. Type
reGet Featured Instantly � Featured Posts are voted every 2.4hrs
Join the Curation Team Here | Vote Resteemable for Witness
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by distillationsbl from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
Only recently, have I noticed a lot of negative news. The school shooting that just happened in the USA for example. Even though it is getting sensationalized, school shootings have been going down, and most of them have been suicides or accidental discharges where no one got hurt. This will defiantly be a more pressing matter later on down the road.
I've been trying to think more positively, like for the changes in the YouTube ad revenue. While lots of people are losing revenue, it's only a little bit, and it makes it so those who work up have way more money, and might not have to work so much for so long.
The "ad-pocalypse" has definitely been getting a huge amount of coverage, I'm not so familiar with the monetization program though. I just started a channel there--can't really add any insight, BUT this could be a case where the hysteria ends up benefitting the adoption of DTube by big players.
I think it's so important for people to at least be aware that statistics about violence and the risk of death at the hands of a fellow human being have been dropping for all of human history. Steven Pinker does a great job detailing the argument in "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". It isn't foolproof though, Nassim Nicholas Taleb rebutted Pinker's book in this paper called "What Are The Chances of a Third World War? and I think he's pretty damn smart so it gives me pause haha
Anyway I'll probably do a blog post soon trying to make sense of that disagreement because I believe these are some of the most important debates at this moment in history.
Thanks for the read and your thoughts!
I actually wrote a post today that takes a different angle on the same process, although it's less about how the media is click-baiting us and more how we select the media we consume. This is going to be an important thing for people to understand going forward with the ridiculous information flow we're all dealing with.
https://steemit.com/psychology/@cygon/understanding-your-mind-palace
Great post I really enjoyed it! That comic was terrific too.
It really hits me every time I think about what kids are learning in K-12, even college-level education. We have a generation completely ill-equipped for navigating an informational landscape, and I was included in that group until I stumbled upon these ideas serendipitously.
Some of these facts are so simple, but so powerful in recontextualizing how you process information and what kind of information needs to be processed in the first place.
If you enjoyed this then I'd suggest my other post too!
"Do We Have A Crisis In Perspective?"
I'm sure I'll be writing more on this topic (I'll stay updated on your posts too!), in my link above I talk about this new group "The New Optimists" who are all doing really good work in this area. But I'd definitely like to explore the debate and put it into technological context as well, with the likes of Kurzweil and his Law of Accelerating Returns. These are the sorts of ideas I think the Gen Z's should consider "cornerstone" for liberal arts in the 21st century!