Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age

An award-winning neurologist on the Stone-Age roots of our screen addictions, and what to do about them.

The human brain hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age, let alone in the mere thirty years of the Screen Age. That’s why, according to neurologist Richard Cytowic—who, Oliver Sacks observed, “changed the way we think of the human brain”—our brains are so poorly equipped to resist the incursions of Big Tech: They are programmed for the wildly different needs of a prehistoric world. In Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Cytowic explains exactly how this programming works—from the brain’s point of view. What he reveals in this book shows why we are easily addicted to screen devices; why young, developing brains are particularly vulnerable; why we need silence; and what we can do to push back.

In the engaging storytelling style of his popular TED Talk, Cytowic draws an easily comprehensible picture of the Stone Age brain’s workings—the function of neurotransmitters like dopamine in basic instincts for survival such as desire and reward; the role of comparison in emotion, and emotion in competition; and, most significantly, the orienting reflex, one of the unconscious circuits that automatically focus, shift, and sustain attention. Given this picture, the nature of our susceptibility to digital devices becomes clear, along with the possibility of how to break their spell.

Full of practical actions that we can start taking right away, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age offers compelling evidence that we can change the way we use technology, resist its addictive power over us, and take back the control we have lost.Contents
Your Stone-Age Brain—3 Million BCE vs. Today
1   Engineered Addiction: Brain Drain and “Virtual” Autism
2   Selfies Kill More People Than Sharks
3   The Brain-Energy Cost of Screen Distractions
4   The Brain-Energy Cost of Multitasking
5   The Digital Difference: We Treat It Socially
6   Silence Is an Essential Nutrient
7   Your Brain Is a Hackable Change Detector
8   What Gets Caught in the Corner of Your Eye
9   Missing Critical Windows Degrades Empathy
10   How Blue Screen Light Wrecks Normal Sleep
11   Hooked in the Pursuit of Happiness
12   Pandora’s Box: How Ambivalence Keeps Us Hooked
13   iPads in the Nursery or Not?
14   Human Contact Traded for a Googlized Mind
15   The Consequences of Forced Viewing
16   Does Heavy Viewing Induce Autistic-Like Symptoms?
17   Social Learning: Kindergarten, Handwriting, and Dexterity
18   War Games: Is the Only Winning Move Not to Play?
19   Coda: Lessons from the Lockdown Years
Appendix: Keeping a Dream Diary
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index“Cytowic's common-sense takeaway—Use technology less and only on what really matters.”
—Booklist

“This is a book that it would benefit us all to read, and heed . . . compelling to read, truly fascinating.”
—Narrative Species
“This is an extraordinary and masterful work, meticulously documented and argued. It is one of the best books I've read in years. It is also one of the most frightening but at the same time hopeful, because only by becoming aware of the danger around us can we be alert, proactive, and mature about avoiding it.”
—Daniel J. Levitin, best-selling author of The Organized Mind and I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
 
“This book is an urgent must-read for parents like myself who are worried about their screen-addicted kids, but also a warning to us all of the Trojan horse of consumer technology as it rapidly degrades our tragically ill-adapted brains.”
—Marcos Lutyens, international artist, Los Angeles, CaliforniaRichard E. Cytowic, a pioneering researcher in synesthesia, is Professor of Neurology at George Washington University. He is the author of Synesthesia, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology, and, with David M. Eagleman, the Montaigne Medal–winner Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, all published by the MIT Press.