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The Unexamined Algorithm: What is social media doing to your brain?

Writer: Sadali Wanniarachchi
Sadali Wanniarachchi
11 minutes ago
8 min read

Whether it is being condemned by a productivity influencer who will not get off it or championed by a tech oligarch who refuses to touch it, or having its effects on the brain critiqued by some Gen Z who is still hopelessly addicted to it - social media often seems to find itself centred at the court of public opinion. In these times of growing division, as partisan lines become ever sharper, perhaps we can all take comfort in knowing there exists a thing shared across humanity, one that transcends political persuasion. And that is our disaster of a relationship with social media. 


Given that this bizarre mass dependency appears to have gripped people across all age, cultural, and economic brackets, it stands to reason that there may be some innate drivers at play here - some universal brain reflex that makes us respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the ring of a new notification. A recent conversation on the ABC podcast Science vs. examined this very phenomenon in an episode titled Social Media: Is it Rotting Your Brain? Consulting a range of research across psychology and neuroscience, the hosts investigated the effects of social media on the brain, and how they shape our relationship with the virtual world. The present article will be reviewing this discussion alongside related studies from the field, with the aim to better understand how the contemporary brain responds to a life that is increasingly being lived online. 


To gauge the public’s sentiment on this question, the hosts of Science Vs took to the streets of New York, asking pedestrians how they felt about their digital consumption. And to no one’s surprise, every single respondent reported their frustration with social media - describing it as attention-sapping and damaging. Yet they all stayed, and stayed on it often, testifying to hours of screen time spent each day. This certainly feels uncomfortably familiar. Why do we all seem to have suspended our intellect and surrendered to this electronic-induced inertia?  


The modern brain is haunted by incessant notifications and the promise of pleasure. Our phones purr for our attention and we abandon our will, finding ourselves back on our IV drip of a feed. Social media, through tools like notifications, autoplay and the infinite scroll, engender addiction-like processes by manipulating the brain’s reward systems (1). Dopamine is a neurochemical that drives you towards pleasurable actions, rising in anticipation of pleasure and especially so, when that pleasure is uncertain. The unpredictability of a reward evokes a sense of urgency to compel you to identify its source and ensure you don’t miss it when it arrives next. In this way, the gamble of a new message or “like” can quickly enchant us into compulsive usage patterns, with the chronic dopaminergic signal generating the illusion of enjoyment, without any meaningful satisfaction. Through relentless phone checking and uninterrupted posts, the repeated stimulation of our reward centres blunts our sensitivity to dopamine, necessitating ever more activity to achieve the same satisfaction. How then can the slow habitual pleasure of real life ever compete with this endless, erratic schedule of highs?


"An infinite feed was not meant to meet the finite capacity of a human brain."

It can’t. An infinite feed was not meant to meet the finite capacity of a human brain. Our pages are carefully crafted storms of stimuli that cannot be processed in their entirety. Kindly however, tech developers have designed algorithms for us to streamline our decision making and avoid any risk of reflection or thought. This has consequently resulted in a surge of digital echo chambers, conspiratorial thinking and misinformation (2). Where ignorance was once born from a lack of information, it now appears to be feeding off an excess of it. With constant, visible access to peer attitudes through likes and comments, our minds are gradually being furnished by the same opinions and impulses. This can inadvertently create cognitive biases like groupthink (3). One fMRI study, for example, found that people preferred photos with ostensibly more likes on Instagram - and showed greater activity in the brain’s reward centres when viewing them - compared to pictures with fewer likes. This was in spite of the fact that the likes were completely randomly assigned, and counterbalanced by the researchers beforehand (i.e., the photos shown as having less likes to one participant would be shown as having more likes to another, thereby removing the confounder of the photo’s content itself) (4). Thus, through features like feedback- and recommendation-driven algorithms, social media seems to be sculpting us from the scale of biology to behaviour. And, masterfully, it does this all while on a page that it insists was made for you. 


"Social media seems to be sculpting us from the scale of biology to behaviour."

While information and connection have never been more at our fingertips, it still often feels as if something has been slipping through our grasp. The data shows that in the past few years, our concentration has become worse, our memory has declined, and our ability to be present has all but vanished (3-7) - but you already knew that. The podcast host talks to attention researcher Professor Gloria Mark (7) whose decades of work have revealed major indications of a decline in our attention span, with the average time spent on a single screen dropping from two and a half minutes in the early 2000s to less than a minute in the past six years (7, 8). 


This is no surprise. Behaviours and mental processes require practice to sustain and develop. Your brain will not prioritise a process that is not regularly performed (9). Media platforms, from YouTube to Instagram, are designed to maximise engagement and offer as little friction as possible to your attention. Through tools like short-form content to produce rapid-release pleasure, and autoplay to hold your focus hostage (4,10,11), social media tailors for you a kingdom of mechanised indulgence – equipped with all you could want but the opportunity to exert your own will. 


Naturally, these habits can manifest in the brain, with greater social media use frequently being associated with structural and functional differences in regions responsible for decision-making and impulse control (12,13). Maintaining this routine can also have tangible consequences across the lifespan, accelerating neurodegeneration and mental decline due to a loss of neural reserve (6). Our ultra-processed digital distractions are dazzling but, ultimately, useless for the refinement of our better mental faculties. 

However, in the same way that our brain adapts to the harms of social media, it can also adapt to its healthier use. Implementing this idea on a wider scale, of course, requires mass institutional coordination, from public health bodies and academia to big tech. This includes increasing government investment into digital literacy programmes and making the building of age-appropriate media environments a research priority (14). Robust, data driven approaches to regulation are essential if we want public confidence when it becomes time to introduce new restriction policies like the recent social media ban for under 16s. A greater burden of transparency also ought to be placed on social media companies, particularly regarding data on how their products affect consumer health. User concerns must be meaningfully incorporated into platform development and the endless design of features to maximise a user’s time, must be mandated against (14). Until the arrival of this utopia however, our best safeguard will be, by all likelihood, to simply self-moderate. This can involve adopting tools like app blocks, attempting prolonged breaks from social media, introducing other mindless activities into our routine (e.g., physical play, colouring, knitting) and, crucially, shaping our feed with intention. Namely, we must make it a practice to constantly examine what drives that algorithms impose upon our minds.

And so, the podcast closes with a reflection on a chief reason that we use social media: to relax. Rote activities that demand and produce little, like bouncing a ball or scrolling, are valuable tools to settle the mind. The space they offer to exist with no purpose is particularly precious in a society reigned over by productivity; one whose needs have recently begun to overtake its own citizens’. So, neither the futility of social media nor the thing vaguely resembling calm that it offers, are in, and of themselves, problematic. Rather, the danger of these platforms lies in the custom they have created of constantly outsourcing our thought - and in the way they do this for a neural cost that other mindless tasks never seem to ask for. Ultimately, your relationship with social media does not have to be abandoned, but it cannot continue unexamined; it cannot become among your closest connections, and it certainly cannot lose sight of who between the two of you is meant to be doing the consuming.


References

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This article was written by Sadali Wanniarachchi and edited by Rebecca Pope, with graphics produced by Ishika Joshi. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.

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