The Surprising Power of Notebooks & What Screens Are Really Doing to Us - SYSK Choice

0:00Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech, alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bring you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescik and Anna Rathman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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 Also, how advertisers try to trick you and how you can prevent that.

1:02And 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. 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. All this today on Something You Should Know. Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like$1 ,000 to spend on shopping, especially with the holidays coming? Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called Shop.com.

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2:33Enter to win the$1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with 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.

3:21I'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.

4:10Men 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.

4:36Whether 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.

5:21And 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 Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. Hi, Roland. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on. 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.

6:03It's always there, but you never talk about it. So, why are you talking about it? 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 the changes that they've made to our lives. I guess that's what got me really into them. And is there any idea when the first something like a notebook began? The first something like a notebook that we know of is from about the year 1300 BC.

6:45So that's coming up for 3 ,500 years old. They found it in a shipwreck off the south coast of Turkey. It's called the Ulu Burun shipwreck. And it's pretty well preserved considering how old it is. You can see it in a 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. Certainly today here in the U.S., when you say the word notebook, people probably think of school. The notebooks in school are kind of your first official real notebooks.

7:26But 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? it has to be paper that's the only real uh definition i have um so an electronic thing doesn't really count as a notebook for me although you can do lots of the same things uh historically parchment and paper as 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 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 you think there's a substantial difference i think there is actually a substantial difference yeah i think the way we use paper notebooks is much tends to be much more casual much more immediate and they they make a permanent record you make a thing you make an object when you fill up a notebook.

8:31So 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. 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.

9:10Yeah, 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 theatre, 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 US, Canada, Japan in particular for some reason and they've found that in a studying context writing handwriting by 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.

9:53So that's one of the reasons why writing is better. When you look back at the history of notebooks, like who are the superstars of the notebook world? 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.

10:36So 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 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.

11:19Do 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 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.

11:57And 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, 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.

12:37And 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? 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.

13:12So, 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. 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? 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 It really wasn't.

14:15But 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. 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. Fall has never looked or tasted this good. Sweetgreen's fall harvest menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and made to be devoured. Warm roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed Brussels, and crave worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate, and roasted bacon Brussels side.

15:01The season's most desirable menu has returned to Sweetgreen, featuring fall's best dressed. Make your move. Order on the Sweetgreen app. 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. So, and there is a lot of research on this, I think there are 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.

15:46So the first study was done by a professor called James Pennebacher, 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 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.

16:26They 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.

17:09Just getting them out of your head and on the page will help you recover from an operation. I find that mind-blowing. It is. It's magical. And it's probably hard to explain why that is 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 that, I'm afraid. Because, 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.

17:52It 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. What about the, because, you know, there are different kinds of notebooks and then 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 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.

19:03But you also had tiny little pocket notebooks for going around and making your everyday records, keeping track of your expenses, for instance. And then over time, notebooks get more and more specialized in 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 are practical in their own way and its glorious variety.

19:38I love it. Well, it would seem like maybe that adding lines to the page must have been somewhat revolutionary or not. 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. 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 arrangements of lots of pens in parallel, and the paper is moved underneath them.

20:20So they're actually drawn on the page rather than printed. And I like that very much. but that three ring binder that that thing's always puzzled me because it's 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 what why three rings why three holes why why do we know that uh now that 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 But yeah, three ring binders I find kind of ugly.

20:54Two ring binders are slightly more elegant, I suppose. And you have a 33 and a third less chance of pinching your finger in that thing. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. 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 and two does the work. Yeah. i can't 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 a4 and a3 and a naught and so on is uh again what is a4 and a3 i don't think i know what that means oh mike this is wonderful so this is the metric system as it applies to paper sizes so uh there is a good deal of math involves, which I will spare you.

21:50But essentially, it means that you're dealing with fractions of a square meter of paper. And so you can bring your paper size 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 letter being eight and a half by eleven yes 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 i think you can think about a notebook as being the nearest thing we had to a computer for hundreds of years.

22:48And then think of it as a bit of hardware. And then there's 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 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. What is double entry bookkeeping? 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.

23:39And 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.

24:23And 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. You know, the great scientists, Newton and so on, all made their breakthrough discoveries basically on the pages of their working notebooks or their lab notebooks.

25:07Well, 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 Notebook, 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. So, Mike, thanks very much for having me. That was a real pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

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26:14How 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.

26:56Richard Saitoik. He is a professor of neurology at George Washington University and author of a couple of books including Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload. Hi Richard, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me, Mike. 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. 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.

27:47And this is a problem when we're faced with the overabundance of screens. these limitations and restrictions on our brain are things like what? 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 are 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.

28:36There'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. And the symptoms of not handling it are what? And so what happens to us? Visibly overload is that we feel exhausted and frustrated and tired all the time, that we can't keep up. So we're asking it to do things that it simply never evolved to do. 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?

29:33It's really, really hard for them to put it down, and there must be a reason. 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 minor hit, then you get a medium hit, then you get a larger hit, and you keep putting money into the machine, hoping to get a big jackpot. And this is what scrolling, you know. 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.

30:22So 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. 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.

31:04I mean, if there was something better to do, they could stop. 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. 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 but i don't think they see it as a problem problem in in the sense that they could 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 they won't they're then And they have become wholly captive to this tech industrial complex.

32:05And so they are now at the mercy of a third party who determines what they will see, what they will think, how they will feel. 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? 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.

32:56That 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 at you know 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, his son was there and he's playing with his games and he has a battery pack because obviously he's gaming a great deal of time.

34:00And 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.

35:06And 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 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.

36:05Just 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 putting these artificial devices in front of people, I think, does real harm. 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 peer pressure is enormous. in DC 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 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 they need to learn this for the future, their future occupation, et cetera.

37:16Well, 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 argument that one needs to learn how to do this. I mean, President Obama not many years ago said, oh, kids need to learn how to code. Learning how to code will be as important as, you know, reading and writing in arithmetic. Well, guess what? Now you could use ChatGP2 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.

38:08So I think it's hard to predict what people will need to know for the future because the future is very uncertain. 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 him. I have to know where I'm picking him up. 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.

38:48They knew I'd show up after school or during lunch or after recess and all that. So 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. right but it but it's their perception and so you're gonna 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 i think i think their perception is wrong um and you know they they i'm they're welcome to have it but i think it only makes them anxious and so when you ask like well what good 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.

39:58What's wrong with you? Why can't you just let them be an adolescent or a teenager or an adult? Well, I think what you pointed out is when you take phones away from kids, because my My son went off to a camp where he couldn't have a phone for a month. Oh, for a month? He was a different kid. I mean, when we saw him at the end of the month, he was just like, wow. And this was a summer month, I take it? Yeah, it was a month of July. 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.

40:40And 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 they had like 14 hours of daylight a day. and the only light was the fire light 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. Well, here's another thing, too, is I can live without my phone. And often I don't have it. and people get upset.

41:36I 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 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. Well, the response to that is, why didn't you text back? I didn't need to. I will do so. So, you know, I text back at four o 'clock every afternoon or I check my emails at 8 a.m. 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.

42:23It was, yes, you couldn't because I'm only on during these hours. And here's when 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.

43:07And they follow that willingly. You know, once you set out guidelines of how to contact me, people act accordingly. 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. 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.

43:51So 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? 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, you know, 20 minutes on TikTok, etc. etc. 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? And the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.

44:39And it is certainly worth asking that question a lot more often. I've been talking to Dr. Richard Saitoik. 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. Thanks, Mike. It's been really pleasurable. It's been a hoot. Thank you so much for having me on.

45:12When 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?

45:56There 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 Mike Carruthers.

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