Chasing Life

'Welcome to Chasing Life. You know, throughout history, any time a new technology has debuted, there have been a mix of cultural and health concerns that have typically fallen. When the radio was invented, radiophobia, or the fear of radio waves, that came with it. With the arrival of television, anxiety started to rise over what would become of our eyesight and our family interactions. 20 years ago, at the advent of the internet, it was reported that email will hurt IQ. More than pot. I'm not kidding. Even Socrates criticized writing, arguing it would create forgetfulness and weaken memory. Raising an eyebrow to change, even challenging it. That's natural. But what might actually be making it hard and scary is not so much the change itself, but rather the feeling of uncertainty. Where does this new tech go? How could it impact our very humanity? So I think the real question with the dawn of AI is how do we embrace technology without also losing our minds? Today's guest, Susan Greenfield, is the author behind "Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark On Our Brains." She's a neuroscientist, professor at Oxford University, and also a member of the House of Lords -- a Baroness, in fact. Together, we discuss outsourcing our lives and even some of our thinking to digital devices. And how that impacts our human connections. We even get into a bit of a philosophical debate. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and this is Chasing Life.

Okay, does that surprise you that we've had so much technical difficulties getting this started, Baroness?

Call me Susan. Not in the slightest. We rely so heavily on everything that we assume it's going to be infallible, and of course it never is.

Maybe that's an interesting place to start. Are you a technophile or a technophobe?

Neither, really. I think because of my generation, I didn't take automatically to social media, and I still am very wary of it, and I have suspicions of it. But because I am a scientist, obviously by virtue of what I do, it's part of my life.

Are you suggesting you're wary of it because of your age, because you did not grow up with it?

'Because of my age, I'm used to hugging people and living in three dimensions and using all five senses and interpreting body language. Because of that, I feel very sad when people seem to communicate, or put a premium mainly on how many so-called friends they've got, when really the friends are like some kind of Greek chorus who comment and need to be appeased and impressed and so on. So I think I'm worried a little bit about this generation, perhaps, that are uncomfortable in face-to-face communication because it's not an easy thing to do. And, the less you do it, the more aversive it becomes.

I think about this as a person like you who's very interested in the brain, but also as a father of three teenage daughters.

Gracious, that's a critical time.

Yeah, and I think this is a very common conversation that we have around the dinner table and otherwise, but let just back up for a second and just ask a little bit about you. First of all, you're a baroness.

I'm a baroness.

That's pretty cool. I mean, how's that happen?

Sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The red queen or something.

No, I love it.

'So this was in 2001, and the government at the time wanted to do a reform of the House of Lords. They culled a lot of the hereditary peers, that's to say people that had inherited the title, and invented a new scheme. But it was a way of populating the so-called crossbenches, the section of the House of Lords that is apolitical. And the idea was to increase the number of crossbench peers who had certain expertise because that would bring even more value to the quality of the debates. So, you only speak to your particular expertise, which means the quality of the debates is very high there, and very enjoyable.

And your expertise was obviously in neuroscience. How did you become interested in neuroscience?

Well, it's a rather strange story, one that sounds so improbable that it just has to be true. So when I was at school, I hated science because it was all about the amoeba, which I don't think was much fun. And then chemistry was distilling water. And no one explained to me why that was interesting or why you would want to distill water. So the whole thing didn't require any creative input whatsoever. Whereas in literature and history, it was the kind of questions that school girls or school boys will ask, which is why do wars start? Why do people fall in love? How much do I have free will? Those questions, I found were more tractable, actually, to neuroscience than they had been to the classics. So in the brain, that's a very useful thing because the more you learn, the more your eyes you don't know. And you have to ask very basic questions and challenge dogma.

Yeah, and usually the people that are asking those questions are asking the questions everyone else is afraid to ask, to be quite honest, I find when I'm sitting in these neuroscience meetings. So I appreciate all that and I love the fact that this is your journey here to neuroscience. I am really interested in this intersection between technology and our brains.

Indeed so.

But I want to start off by simply asking this, did you enter this discussion with some preconceived notions?

'Like all things, it's a story. And it's not my day job. My day job is trying to find a pioneering treatment for Alzheimer's, and that's for another day. But in the debates in the House of Lords, you speak to your expertise. And there was one debate coming up that was on regulation of child pornography sites. And this was back in 2009. So I came up with what any neuroscientist would say. What is irrefutable is the brain adapts to the environment by virtue of plasticity. And I could cite thousands of examples. I'm sure you're aware of them. And the most famous one. Which is now 20 years old, is of London taxi drivers. Now, London taxi drives know all the streets of London, and they have to memorize it by something called the Knowledge. And it takes about two years. And without recourse for a manual, when they then have an exam, they have recite of how you go from A to B. So there's a huge burden on their memory, their spatial memory. Someone with this brilliant idea, they scanned the brains of London taxidrivers, and they found that an area that relates to memory called the hippocampus, that was physically larger in London taxi drivers than in other people. And it wasn't that having a big hippocampus predisposed you to being a London taxi driver, because the difference was more marked for the longer they'd been driving. Now that's a very simple and very famous and very old example of so-called plasticity. And so it follows, if the environment is a very different environment, then the brain will be, I'm not saying it's good or bad, and I think there is a shorter attention span.

'Yeah, I think that this idea of it being neutral, the way that the brain is changing, neither good nor bad, I think is a really interesting point, right? Because I think the default position for a lot of people is to say, hey, look, this can't be good. We're increasingly living in a two-dimensional world versus a three-dimensional word. We're increasingly talking via screen versus in person, all that sort of stuff. But to be clear, you're not saying that.

No, I think they're two separate questions. So, one shouldn't conflate a fact with what you view of that fact. Now I have those views, indeed. Everyone knows what's bad and what they don't want. But if you say, okay, paint me the ideal society, paint me with the ideal 21st century citizen, what kind of qualities will they have? And it's only when we know that and agree on that will we be able to deliver it via the lifestyle that we are engineering.

Yeah, okay, so let's continue that line of thinking, though. So I think with regard to the sorts of qualities we would love either in our children or in our fellow man, I think for my daughters, I certainly want them to be happy, but I want them be empathetic, highly engaged people who recognize that their time here on earth is short and they should be able to accomplish as much to maybe leave the world a better place than which they found it. I think the question really comes down to is technology and the use of screens and all these things, is that inhibiting them from accomplishing those goals and becoming those sorts of people?

I would argue that it's a negative factor in achieving your full potential, yes. I would argue that.

How so?

Because I would operate on the premise that the most important thing to be is an individual who respects individuality in others, who has a strong confidence that doesn't have to share and download, that has resilience. And I can't see how not having real life experiences, but experiencing life indirectly through a screen is going to give you the resilience that the happenstance and the rough and tumble of the real world will give you. It's one stage removed.

Could you say that about any time in human history when new technologies came about?

'Okay, well, I think there is quite a clear distinction. We think about the television, we think about car, the machinery, the printing press even. Now all those were great technological advances and in their day, indeed, they received opposition, such as someone might accuse me of now, articulating. But there is a really big difference. They enriched your real life, your real three-dimensional life. Television, even, would be like the Victorian piano. You'd have the whole family sitting around, making comments and eating their TV dinners and arguing among themselves. So it was arguably still in three dimensions. But nowadays, and only nowadays, can you get up, you can go to work, you can shopping, you can play games, you go dating, all without meeting another human being. So that's the difference. In the old days, the technologies enriched and enhanced people's lives. Whereas nowadays, it's an alternative life.

I agree that it's different. I think where I get stuck a little bit is, first of all, how do we know what that difference really causes in the brain? This is a common trope that I hear, that hey, these two things coincided: 2005 was the advent of the smartphone and therefore, mental health problems increase, therefore one must cause the other. That seems like a dangerous sort of cause and effect relation to make.

'And, It's hard to prove cause--

Very hard to prove.

'-- or correlation, you can have correlations, but I think you'd have a hard job saying it wasn't the case or there wasn't a relationship.

'And I think it gets at this idea as well, even going back to your cab driver example. Granted that maybe their hippocampus, this area of the brain responsible for memory grew, became even more impressive, if you will, as the longer they were cab drivers. So that makes the case that there was an impact of them memorizing the roads and all that on their hippo campus. But at the same time, may they have pre-selected themselves for a job like that in the first place.

Well, in that case, it wasn't the longer they've been driving. And longitudinal studies, which is what you're referring to for the screen, there are quite a lot now increasing. I think it's Jean Twenge who's shown the deficits, or we might seem them as deficits, like poor school performance and so on, that does correlate, it does track the time on the screen and so forth.

Yeah, I read her book and she's been a guest on the podcast. She didn't let her own children have a phone until I think they were going to college. One of them was totally fine with it, didn't care. The other one, it was cataclysmic because she completely felt like she was missing out on relationships with their friends and what everyone else was doing. What would you advise parents of teenagers right now in terms of their technology use?

'Sure. Okay, I think there's three things that we used to do in what we could laughably call the olden days that I would suggest we all do, not just parents. Three things are important. One is physical exercise. And that just goes without saying, we all know that you have the endorphins flow. Whenever I go running, it doesn't solve the problems, but it means I'm across them. I can cope with them in a way. And we all knows well that exercising both children and in older adults improves cognitive performance. So because of the oxygen going to the brain. And of course, when you're doing physical exercise, you can't be on social media. The next is reading. Now, that might seem a rather sort of obvious thing, but I think nowadays we look too much at the screen. And you know that when you read a novel, the characters have a sort of shady persona and they're real, but they're not like photographs. So that if you see the film, inevitably you always say the book is better than the film. And why is that? Because your imagination is so powerful. And I think that especially reading to kids, reading books gives you a longer attention span and it enables you to have this secret inner world that no one else can share. When I was at my kindergarten, I remember the teacher used to read us stories of Baba Yaga, the wicked Russian witch who had metal teeth and ate the heads of children. But I still remember to this day, being transported to Tsarist Russia, and listening to Baba Yaga and her stories. And that does not come with secondhand images from some web designer, it comes from inside you. So reading, I think, gives you a sense as well of the thought process, beginning, middle, and end. And then the third thing is eating together. You said you were sitting with your daughters last night. And I was tempted to say, and did they have their phones out? Or do you do that often? Because I think eating together, and you'll know companion with bread is something that we've done ever since we've stalked this planet as a species, you know, we eat together. It's something human beings bond and do. And I think, I know there's constraints of money and time for parents who don't have enough time in the day or budgets and so on. But I think eating together without your phone and just winding down and going through the day and having the ritual of a beginning, a middle, and end. To me, a thought process can be distinguished from an emotion because it has a beginning and middle and end, A = B, B = C. So A = C, right? So winded up in a different place. And the man who developed the treatment for Parkinson's disease, to find a thought, he said it's movement confined to the brain.

I love that.

'Yeah, "Thinking is movement confined to the brain." So if you agree with that, then if you are physically moving, that entrains the thought process, which is the ancient Greeks thought that, Nietzsche thought that. Darwin thought that you know that. That is why I think rather than just sitting still, staring glassy-eyed at a screen and just skimming things in your fingers or pressing buttons very quickly. Reading a book where you put the book down, stare at the wall, let it sink in, go on the A equals B, C journey. Those things are very powerful for the thought processes. They're very powerful to you, to have an inner world that no one else can share. And I think part of the problem with social media is everything is downloaded and shared all the time. So where do you end and the rest of the world begin? I think it's a blurred line, which perhaps can have problems in the future.

Okay, we're giving you lots to ponder. And when we return, we're going to reverse engineer how we as parents and individuals can make sure the machines work for us, not the other way around.

So, I have three daughters, as I mentioned. Two of them are in college now. We are perhaps more connected than we have ever been in some ways, okay? And I don't think I'm exaggerating this. And I think certainly far more connected than we would be if we didn't have some of these technological options nowadays. I go for a walk. I may have my Meta glasses on. They have microphones. I can do my phone calls on them. I listen to my music. I can take pictures.

Yeah, and you think that's a good thing?

I like them. And so I was on my walk yesterday, and I was talking to my daughters who were on their walk in college, and we had a wonderful conversation and we were sharing images because they can see what I'm seeing with my glasses. We can FaceTime. It really did strike me that technology in some ways, even though I prefer that they were there with me in person, but they're not, they're at college, that this technology has allowed a level of connection that otherwise would not exist.

Without doubt, I would sound like a complete technophobe if I said it didn't have advantages. In particular, I think for people that for whatever reason can't get out of the house, that live alone, that have decreased mobility, older people, this is a lifeline and it would be silly to deny that. Myself, when I go running or walking, I like to be quiet and have my own inner thoughts rather than have the world still encroaching on me coming in, but that's personal choice. So I don't think I'll ever buy those glasses, but I take your point.

Yeah, I guess it just gets at this idea of where is the line, right? Because technology has obviously changed in our lifetimes tremendously, and it's going to change more. Is this just the way that it is? I mean, we can be critical of it, but is this just a way that is?

Well, I think what you have to do in each case, and everyone is an individual and everyone's different, you have say, is this my ideal life? Is this the best I can be? Is this me fulfilling myself? Because it's interesting when you did the list of things you'd like your daughters to be, if it'd been me, I would have said to be fulfilled, to have a sense of fulfillment, which is the loveliest thing and a great privilege. Now, I think you ask yourself, how much is this technology inhibiting or enabling me to have the best kind of life I can have? And that will vary clearly from person to person, but I'm sure a great factor in fulfillment is interacting in the real world rather than escaping from it through a screen.

Again, fundamentally agree with you. I think what I grapple with a little bit is even if you look at colleges and how they are teaching now using technology, encouraging people to seek out sources in a way that we never did. What is your thinking on that?

'Well, I did teach medical students at Oxford for about 15 years, so I feel I can comment on this. As you may be aware, in the Oxford and Cambridge systems, it's not so much reading up lots of facts, but you exchange ideas. Facts are boring. It's how the facts are joined up that's interesting, how you interpret the facts, how you put it into a context, which is fluid intelligence versus crystalline intelligence. Fluid intelligence being where you might remember a fact and spout it back out again in an exam. Crystalline intelligence is where you join up those facts rather like a crystal and put it into a context. So I would challenge the power of learning just by looking up loads of facts from obscure sources. I think the best way of teaching, and it is a privilege again, because not everyone can have one-to-one conversations, is actually, like we're doing now, developing an idea, throwing the ball backwards and forwards and putting it into context. That's how I think you have true knowledge rather than information.

'And I guess that's the nature of science. People expect scientists to be like math. Two plus two always equals four. And yet it's evolving, and I'm sure your positions have evolved. Mine certainly have evolved, in part by my understanding of the brain, but also being a dad and spending a lot of time with teenagers who are on social media. I realize they are becoming increasingly facile with AI. They've obviously, they're digital natives. They've never known a world without these devices. And I'll tell you, Susan, they are wonderful people. They are wonderful. And I think, again, the knee-jerk response is to say, you kids missed out. You didn't learn the proper way. You lost empathy. You were on this digital screen the entire time, or it was too much.

But they're also sitting with you in the evening without their phones having conversations.

'But, is it-- So you can have both.

You can, but it's a balance, and it depends on your own circumstances. And also, I don't want to preach, it's what you personally want. It's what your personally feel is fulfilling you as an individual.

Would you ask teenagers not to be on social media? Do you think in and of itself, it's malevolent?

'Like everything in life, in moderation, it's not so much they should or shouldn't use social media. I would say they should definitely have real-world experiences.

Again, we're in total agreement, and I think, again, Jean Twenge's book, iGen, she made the case that if you look at what has happened overall since 2005, seniors now in high school are more likely to be sitting at home than sophomores used to a generation ago. They're less likely to go to prom. They're less likely to get in a car accident because they're not driving, but they're more likely to just be sitting at home on their beds, on their devices. And inherently, that was bad.

Well, you know, there's a concept, I'm sure you're familiar with it, called cognitive reserve.

Yes.

And it's been shown in older people. They've divided people into pleasure or leisure, people who have lots of interaction socially and those that are much more reduced in their social interaction. And it has found that those that socialize a lot are more resistant to dementia. And it is almost like having money in the bank. That's why it's called cognitive reserve, yeah. It's the more you're socializing and the more your stimulating your brain with real interactions.

Yes.

Over three dimensions in five senses, actually. It's not a cure or a guarantee against dementia, but it sort of offsets it, offsets the ravages of it.

'Are you optimistic about where this goes ultimately, like will it self-regulate, or do you think we're headed towards a terrible place?

As a scientist and just naturally, I'm a glass half full person anyway. I think the fact that one gets up in the morning to do something no one else is done, like find a cure for Alzheimer's, you have to be an optimist because everyone tells you it's impossible or you can't. So I think I'm an natural optimist. And I think you have be, because someone says we shouldn't ask. We shouldn't asked what's going to happen in the future. We should ask, how can we shape the future? It's in our hands to do somebody about it. Not that arrogant to think I can do anything about it by myself, but I hope that these kinds of conversations, who knows someone listening to us talking now, some young person might think, you know what? I'm going to stand up and do something. You know, we can't just say, oh, it's terrible all this uncertainty. Let's think of ways, let's think contriving environments where people at least part of the time when they're not parked in front of a screen can actually enjoy being a fully fledged human being. You know let's try and think of ways they can do that.

That that should be an important takeaway from our conversation today. No matter what, no matter your usage of the screen, your usage or social media, it can't be your entire life. You have to get out there and interact. I think we're in total agreement on that. What I sort of struggle with a little bit, there's artificial intelligence, obviously. And we see some of the real benefits of artificial intelligence. In healthcare, for example, we can conduct essentially retrospective analysis of billions and billions of pieces of data very, very quickly that can provide some insights clinically into how to best care for patients going forward. You know, things like that. It's going to propel, I think, our scientific advancements. And at the same time, I think it also forces us to reckon with what makes us truly human. And to be even more blunt about it, if you're doing something that a machine or a program can do, you should probably find a different line of work. Fair?

'The question I would ask as a neuroscientist is, given we have AI, if it's that different, it's going to change the world in such an important way and it's going to make such a difference. For example, with the erosion of certainty, how's that going to affect people? And is it good or bad? And what kind of people are gonna be that use it? And I think these are the questions we should ask because at the end of the day, it's people that matter, not the machines, and not the profits you're making. So these are there to serve us. So we should be asking what we want of it. What do we want AI to deliver? What do I want it to do? What do I want it not to do? Will it make me a better person or not a better person? And your children, how will it help them or not help them? And I think we're not curious enough, and we are not confident enough to stand up and just sort of start to be constructive in the way we approach this AI issue instead of on the one hand saying, oh, we've all drunk the Kool-Aid, we think it's the most marvelous thing ever, or we're frightened I'm going to lose my job. I think you have to actually say, right, it serves us. How we're gonna make the world better using it?

Are there activities or things in your life that you offload to technology that you think is appropriately offloaded?

Yes, like you said, things that other people can do or that are really boring, yeah. And I heard myself just the other day saying to my research group, we wanted to identify a certain type of cancer that will be most tractable to the drug that we're thinking of using. And we did a list of the ideal. And I heard myself saying, well, let's ask AI which one it is, which one it comes up with, which is completely unbiased. So I hope we don't leave this conversation with me being kind of a Luddite that thinks of it. It's not that, it's just, I think if I stand for anything, it's for being truly individual and living your life to the full. And I question whether parked in front of a screen for a large amount of time delivers that.

I think you quoted Asimov in your TED talk that you gave. And I don't have the quote in front of me, but basically he anticipated that psychiatry was going to become the most important discipline because boredom was, and this is in 1954 he's saying this, maybe we're trying to deal with our boredom.

'No, but he also said the true elite of mankind -- an unpleasant word to use -- the true elite in mankind will be those who are engaged in creative activities and do more than serve a machine. And that was in 1964, he said that. And that was prescient, that was predicting 20, 40, 50 years on. They will do more then serve a machine. Only they will do more than serve a machine. I thought that was quite prescient.

Do not be in service of the machine. Do not be, they are designed to be addictive. The two things that I think worry me specifically, one is this idea of these deep fakes and AI. And this is where I thought you were going with the conversation earlier. The idea that if you don't trust what you're seeing on the screen, everything is suspect.

And also that begs the question, if you know everything is suspect, why would you want to watch it in the first place?

Right. Unless you can touch it, feel it, talk to it directly, it is suspicious or it is not trustworthy. Most scientists are humble about this stuff. We don't know for sure. And I think there's a trepidation that comes about frankly, with any new technology.

But we are the ones, we are the masters, yeah? We are ones that determine what kind of lives we want, what kind of work we want, how we're going to use them. Just because they're powerful technologies, which they are, be in awe and say, oh, they're gonna take over. Oh, I'm so helpless, you know. And I think we should help people get a confidence and a strength to determine and take control of their lives.

It's always interesting to me when you hear these big technology people, like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, who says, I will not let my kids have a phone. Or Sean Parker, who would not let his kids be on social media. Or Elon Musk, who's sounding the alarm bells on AI. I think we have to pay attention to that for sure and say, well, what do they know? And how are they raising their kids? How are they living their lives? And what lessons can we learn from them?

But once the genie is out the bottle, you can't. And just a good way around it, I think is not so much to ban it or prohibit it because that's impossible. We know human nature is not like that. The answer to my mind is you create an environment that's better, that's more fun, more interesting. Yeah? That how you do it. There's a lovely story, a dad, an email I have from a father whose kids were using technology. And he said, finally he got them out on bike rides. And he said, they were going up and down some steep bend. And he said, they started giggling spontaneously. You know what I mean? And he said, that is music to the ears of a parent. I never hear that noise when they're using technology.

Susan, let's please stay in touch.

I'd love to.

I think one of the points you're making is things change quickly. So maybe within the next couple of years even, maybe we'd be having a different conversation. What a pleasure speaking with you.

Indeed. It's a great privilege and a pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.

That was my conversation with Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield, author of, "Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving Their Mark on our Brains." Thanks so much for listening.