Pod Insights All In The Mind Brain Rot: Is your phone destroying your attention span? About this episode Everyone seems to have a hunch that their phone is destroying their attention span, but is there any science to back it up?
In episode one of Brain Rot, we’re doing our best to focus on the topic of attention for a full 25 minutes — and find out what's actually happening in your brain every time your phone buzzes or dings.
Is brain rot a real thing? Or just another moral panic?
And how do you know when your own screen use has gone too far?
This episode originally aired on Brain Rot https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sciencefriction/brain-rot/105534830, a series of the ABC podcast Science Friction https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sciencefriction. Sana will be back with all-new episodes of All in the Mind in mid-October.
Guests:
Anna Seirian
CEO, Internet People
Dr Mark Williams
Professor, Macquarie University; Cognitive neuroscientist
Michoel Moshel
Clinical Neuropsychologist Registrar; Phd Candidate, Macquarie University
Professor Marion Thain
Professor of Culture and Technology, University of Edinburgh; Director, Edinburgh Futures Institute
Credits:
Presenter: Ange LavoipierreProducer: Fiona PepperSenior Producer: James BullenSound Engineer: Brendan O'NeillMore information:
Neuropsychological Deficits in Disordered Screen Use Behaviours: A Systematic Review and Meta‑Analysis - Neuropsychology Review, 2024 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-023-09612-4.
Do we have your attention? How people focus and live in the modern information environment - King's College London, 2022 https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/how-people-focus-and-live-in-the-modern-information-environment.pdf.
Internet addiction-induced brain structure and function alterations: a systematic review and meta-analysis of voxel-based morphometry and resting-state functional connectivity studies - Brain Imaging and Behavior, 2023 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11682-023-00762-w.
You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on the ABC Listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you'd like to access the transcript for this episode, head to itsoriginal webpage https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sciencefriction/attention-span-and-screen-time-brain-rot-science-friction/105323066.
Transcript 4,924 words · 14 speakers
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0:07 Speaker 00 What do you get when you mix a sheep, a scientist and a bold idea? A clone called Dolly, in a moment that changed science forever. I'm Peter De Croyf, environment reporter and host of ABC Radio National's new science fiction series, Artificial Evolution. Nearly three decades since Dolly, I went looking for the legacy of that sheep. It left me feeling a little unsettled. To hear what I've found, search for Science Friction and find it in the ABC Listen app.
0:36 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Sunny here. I want to chat to you right up at the top of today's show because today on All in the Mind and for the next five weeks, we've got something a little bit different for you. We're going to be sharing a series called Brain Rot. It's from another show on ABC Radio National called Science Friction. And I think you're really going to love this series because it touches on a bunch of topics that I know All in the Mind listeners are super interested in. Brain Rot is about our relationship with technology, with smartphones, with the internet, and what all of that is doing to our brains. It covers how tech is affecting our memory, our attention, our relationships, and what happens when you try and do away with your smartphone.
1:21 Speaker 01 And we know from your listener feedback and from some of the episodes we've done in the past that you are really interested in trying to figure out how to manage your relationship with tech. So in this series, you'll hear from a woman who got into a months-long relationship with AI, the guy who data dumped his entire life into ChatGPT, the people joining 12-step groups to help manage their internet use, and the teenagers chucking their phones away, maybe for good. And if this isn't your thing, don't worry, I will be back with a bunch of brand-new All in the Mind episodes in October. But in the meantime, here is episode one of Brain Rot.
2:04 Speaker 02 B R A I N R O T. De-. N-.
2:14 Speaker 02 Oh, good. They've spelled it for me.
2:16 Speaker 03 Brain rot is a slang term referring to both internet content deemed to be of low quality or value.
2:21 Speaker 02 Oh.
2:22 Speaker 03 And the supposed deterioration of a person's intellectual state resulting from excessive consumption of that content.
2:28 Speaker 02 Hmm.
2:29 Speaker 03 It describes a state of mental fogginess, reduced attention span and...
2:33 Speaker 02 Okay, that's enough. Hi, I'm Ange Lavoie-Pierre, the ABC's national tech reporter, and this is Brain Rot, a series from science fiction about how the internet firehose and everything that comes from it is reshaping our brains. Today, episode one, in which we ask, are our attention spans really getting shorter? Or are sentences just getting longer?
2:57 Speaker 04 So if you sort of think about something like a TikTok platform, 30 seconds is really pushing it.
3:02 Speaker 02 To put it another way, is brain rot real and do we have it?
3:06 Speaker 01 I feel like I've just got nothing, nothing going on in my brain.
3:09 Speaker 02 I'll be watching Netflix and also watching like Brain Rot at the same time.
3:12 Speaker 05 It's like reducing vocabulary, I think.
3:15 Speaker 02 And like I'm not able to actually like put my phone aside and work or study. How do you know when it's gone too far? Brain's just decomposed, I guess. It's just gone, it's no longer processing information. If brain rot is real, is technology to blame? Because every major breakthrough since the printing press has triggered a fresh wave of panic. We're in one right now. It's the inescapable fear that social media, endless scroll and smartphones are rotting our brains, specifically our ability to pay attention for more than six seconds at a time. So today on Brain Rot, we're asking, is that fear justified?
3:57 Speaker 02 I want you to cast your mind back to August 2016.
4:03 Speaker 02 Donald Trump has never been the US president. In fact, just about everyone is pretty convinced he's about to lose the election in three months' time.
4:14 Speaker 02 Our country great again. We're only up to season six in Game of Thrones. We are learning a lot about Brexit. The UK has voted to leave the European Union. There's growing anxiety about a global pandemic, but not the one you're thinking of. The Zika virus has spread rapidly across Latin America. And Instagram has just launched a new feature called Stories.
4:37 Speaker 06 Feature which basically duplicates a lot of the same features of Snapchat.
4:40 Speaker 07 Stories, allowing you to post 24 hour ephemeral photo and video slideshows.
4:45 Speaker 06 This is Facebook really playing defense against Snapchat.
4:49 Speaker 08 I actually very clearly remember the day Instagram Stories came out. I remember looking at my friends and saying, well, that's it for Snapchat.
4:56 Speaker 02 This is Anna Seirian. She's in her mid 30s, which makes her, like me, a millennial. And as a millennial, she was exactly the kind of person that platform was designed for.
5:07 Speaker 08 It felt like for the first time, it was really easy to just have kind of an infinite scroll because of Instagram Stories.
5:16 Speaker 02 Anna is also a content creator and the founder of Internet People. It's a digital media company set up to help creative entrepreneurs navigate life online, ideally without burning out.
5:27 Speaker 08 I've always been an early adopter of technology. Early to Instagram, early to Snapchat, early to Facebook.
5:34 Speaker 02 For some reason, though, Instagram Stories was different to the other platforms and not in a good way.
5:40 Speaker 08 I remember it got so bad at a certain point that I would leave my phone in the glove box in my car. I remember the first time I did it too, kind of sulking down to my car on my lunch break and pulling it out and thinking, this is addict behavior. I can't believe this is what it's come to.
6:00 Speaker 02 And yet it got worse.
6:02 Speaker 08 The big thing for me with COVID was it coincided with me starting to make content on TikTok. And so for about two years, I was posting anywhere between one to three videos every single day.
6:16 Speaker 02 On top of posting, Anna's daily screen time had blown out to as much as 10 hours.
6:21 Speaker 08 I'm starting to engage with that dopamine chase of just always being there, always being on. But it felt like there was a very steep drop off the cliff where all of a sudden I felt horrible. Like I started wondering what was happening to my brain. And where my attention span was going and starting to question, is it me? Is it the apps? What's really happening here?
6:48 Speaker 02 And if you've ever been even half that hooked on screens, you already know there's a cost.
6:53 Speaker 08 I definitely lost hobbies. I lost my creativity. I lost the ability to just sit and paint or draw or play an instrument or read a book. And even when I would try to sit down and read a book, if I had my phone next to me, I would end up on my phone. Like, that's a curious thing. I can't, I can't even set the intention to be off my phone and stay off my phone.
7:24 Speaker 02 The received wisdom at this point is that tech is giving all of us, not just Anna, goldfish brain. And hearing her talk about it, you can see why. But outside of anecdotal evidence, is there proof? And not to change the topic, but what even is attention anyway?
7:42 Speaker 09 That's a really difficult question, to be honest.
7:45 Speaker 02 It is, but we've found the right guy to answer it. This is Dr. Mark Williams. He's a cognitive neuroscientist and a professor of psychological sciences at Macquarie University.
7:54 Speaker 09 So there's sort of two types of attention that we talk about. There's the internal drive. So it's us trying to attend to something, which is what hopefully your listeners are using to listen to us rather than get distracted by the things around them. And then there's the external things like noises and movements and colors, for example, will capture our attention and drive it towards something else.
8:20 Speaker 02 Okay, so two types of attention, internal and external. Another way to think about it is voluntary and involuntary. But they're lighting up much more than just two parts of your brain.
8:31 Speaker 09 You've got the high level areas, which is that internal drive. And then areas like the prefrontal cortex and the frontal lobes, which actually we have control over and we drive ourselves towards those things. But then there's also low level areas like our visual areas, occipital lobe, auditory cortex and so on, which get driven by the external things. So there are a whole bunch of different areas that are involved there. It's a pretty complex concept that we use for this very simple word.
9:01 Speaker 02 There's a lot going on, so attention can be a pretty fragile thing. And Mark Williams says smartphones, especially notifications, were more or less designed in a lab to hijack it.
9:12 Speaker 09 There's four things that we're really captured by, and they are noise, sound, colour and faces. And of course, the phones are really good at, because they'll set off a beep as a notification, and then if you turn down the beep, then they'll vibrate, which gives you the movement. So, you know, they've used two of those four things to actually try and capture our attention. And so you can't ignore that. So when your phone beeps or buzzes or does anything like that, or your email on your laptop or any of those things, you automatically attend to it and you can't stop that from happening.
9:48 Speaker 02 And every time that happens,
9:53 Speaker 02 it's creating extra work for our brains, not to mention stress.
9:57 Speaker 09 Our attention gets grabbed, basically, and then we have to pull it back to the thing that we actually want to do. So that actually uses resources in our brain, and those resources aren't unlimited, right? And so each time we do that, we're getting more and more tired, we're wearing out our attention mechanisms, so we then have more trouble attending to things.
10:17 Speaker 02 So you're not imagining it. Not only that, when we measure brain activity using an electroencephalogram or EEG, that effect is visible.
10:25 Speaker 09 It's a really nice and easy way to demonstrate the effect on the brain. The brain oscillates at different frequencies, and we can tell what state the brain is based on those frequencies. And alpha is a really nice one, because it shows when you're relaxed and you're concentrating and you're feeling good, basically. It's when we get, you know, a lot of good work done, if you like. That's one indication of the flow state, for example. And so we can get people to relax, and so they go into this alpha and we can see the alpha waves. And then when the phone buzzes or dings or does any of those things, that alpha just goes away. It just disappears and other frequencies actually pop up, which suggests that you're actually feeling a little stressed because you want to know
11:09 Speaker 09 who was that or what was that about? And that's showing that you go from this really relaxed state to this quite stressed state as soon as you hear a buzz or a ding from your phone, which is a huge concern.
11:20 Speaker 02 And look, the world is full of noises and sounds that break our attention. And it has been since the dawn of time. So it's not just notifications, but the difference between being interrupted by your phone as opposed to a plane flying overhead or your partner asking you a question is how often that happens.
11:38 Speaker 09 The effect is exactly the same. It's just your wife wouldn't be calling to you constantly as you're walking, you know, around the streets or driving your car, interrupting you 100, 200 times a day.
11:52 Speaker 02 Whereas your phone might. In fact, it probably does. A 2024 survey found on average, Americans check their phones more than 200 times a day. We don't have the same data about Australians, but it's safe to assume we're not too different.
12:06 Speaker 09 So they're just beeping at us constantly and causing a disruption in our lives constantly.
12:19 Speaker 01 On All in the Mind from ABC Radio National, this is Brain Rot, a special series about our relationship with technology. And this week, we're asking what tech is doing to our attention. Here's Ange Laveau-Pierre again.
12:39 Speaker 02 Not everyone's capacity to pay attention seems to be taking the same hit. A guy named Mick Moshe has been looking at some of the more extreme cases of what he calls disordered screen use.
12:50 Speaker 04 So disordered screen use refers to the broad range of these activities that are used in some sort of addictive sense. So. That includes internet gaming disorder, gaming disorder, smartphone addiction, social media addiction.
13:02 Speaker 02 Mick is a neuropsychology registrar and PhD candidate at Macquarie University. And last year, he led a meta-analysis of existing studies to investigate the cognitive differences in the brain of a person with that more extreme use.
13:16 Speaker 04 Often, and you can see this reflected in news stories, there's a real confusion and sort of inconsistency when it comes to people talking about the cognitive impacts of disordered screen use. You see some news reports that will say that gaming boosts some cognitive performance, it increases cognitive skills. You see others that say that the gaming industry has caused the advent of the rise in ADHD.
13:39 Speaker 02 And if you're wondering whether you are one of those more extreme cases that Mick is talking about, it boils down to four main patterns of behaviour, conveniently all beginning with a C.
13:49 Speaker 04 Compulsion, cravings, consequences and control.
13:52 Speaker 02 So the first C is feeling compelled to use a device or social media, like when you see a message notification and it absolutely can't wait until after dinner, so you check it under the table as subtly as possible. The second is having intense cravings, like the time I accidentally left one of my two phones at home and felt weirdly naked all day. Then there's experiencing negative consequences, like on Tuesday when I screened my boss's call because I was halfway through a time to challenge on Duolingo, although it could have been worse, I did call her back. And control, or more specifically, a lack of it, the feeling that you don't have much of a say in your own behaviour anymore.
14:31 Speaker 04 If you feel that you sort of satisfy all four of these, or even three of these, there's potentially some cause to reflect on whether there might be something disordered or problematic in your relationship to these technologies.
14:44 Speaker 02 And we get into this later in the series, there is a whole episode on the topic of addiction. But in the meantime, the main message is that while screen addiction isn't yet an official diagnosis, there is an emerging body of scientific evidence that it is real, and so are the consequences of spending a gazillion hours a day on your phone. As part of their meta-analysis, Mick Moshe and his team looked at 34 studies assessing the cognitive difference in those extreme cases.
15:11 Speaker 04 What we found was that when you compare people with disordered screen use compared to controls across all cognitive domains, there's a, what's called in psychology, a small to medium effect size. Which means that there's this reduction overall in terms of cognitive performance with individuals with disordered screen use.
15:30 Speaker 02 Okay, so a small to medium sized effect, but the effect is real. Mick Moshe looked at a whole range of cognitive skills. And the main casualty was,
15:43 Speaker 02 you guessed it, attention.
15:46 Speaker 04 And specifically, when we look at the tests that people are performing worse on, they're usually on tests of sustained attention, so your ability to hold attention for some period of time.
15:55 Speaker 02 That's not all. Something called executive function is also a weak spot. And it turns out executive function is, as the name suggests, pretty important.
16:05 Speaker 04 It's your sort of higher order thinking skills, things like problem solving, planning, organisation, holding back from mistakes, the ability to control impulsive action. So those were the two cognitive domains that were significantly affected, with attention being the highest and executive functioning being under that.
16:21 Speaker 02 The good news is that many cognitive skills Mick was looking at were actually no different for excessive screen users.
16:27 Speaker 04 We didn't find any significant differences in processing speeds, how quickly people think, in working memory and in IQ score. But again, these were the least well studied.
16:38 Speaker 02 So it's good news with a grain of salt, but we'll take it. As for those problem areas, our attention and executive function, Mick Moshe stepped us through exactly what those differences look like. He says there are specific parts of our brains that are actually underactive.
16:54 Speaker 04 Usually the part of the brain that's thought of as being responsible or a key player in attention is the frontal part of our brain, so the prefrontal cortex. And it's also, it plays a reflective part as well. It's able to make long term decisions, it's able to plan. And what seems to be happening in the brain is that this part of the brain, when it's engaged in disordered screen use across time, becomes underactivated.
17:22 Speaker 02 At the same time, other areas are doing more.
17:25 Speaker 04 We have this other part of our brain, usually associated with the amygdala. And this is responsible for impulse control. So if this part of the brain is deregulated, it becomes really impulsive, often implicated in substance use disorder, alcohol use disorder, general addictions. But if it's well regulated, then we're able to control our impulses a lot better.
17:47 Speaker 02 So on the one hand, the prefrontal cortex, a big driver for both attention and long term decision making, is slacking off in the brain of an excessive screen user. Meanwhile, their amygdala, the bit that manages threat perception and stress responses, has gone into overdrive, tanking their impulse control. And that combination also happens to make it much harder to put down the phone.
18:09 Speaker 04 These sort of work in unison. So the impulsivity increases, the urgings, disordered screen use becomes more habitual, more automatic over time because it's less regulated. And the reflective part of our brain, the part that pays attention, gets increasingly underactivated. It's less able to reflect on the sort of behaviours that we're engaged in.
18:29 Speaker 02 So you do get very good at paying attention, but really only to one thing: your screen. It's a bit like a muscle. If you do hundreds of push-ups, you will get better at push-ups, but your deadlift does not improve. And some of us are getting really good at push-ups.
18:44 Speaker 04 So if you sort of think about something like a TikTok platform, you're exercising your attention because you're paying attention to something. But the attention that is being exercised is a very, very limited level of attention. It's something to the degree of 10 to 30 seconds, and 30 seconds is really pushing it. So then when it comes to the activities like sitting in a classroom, or like paying attention in a conversation, or like holding your attention to work on a problem for a given amount of time, such as five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour, an hour, your attention is now weakened and you just haven't practised that faculty of attention.
19:20 Speaker 02 This isn't just theoretical either. Mick Moshe says the differences are visible on brain scans.
19:26 Speaker 04 This is something that has been found with a range of neuroimaging tools, most popularly the fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, where you can see changes in the brain as a result of these addictive behaviours, specifically in the prefrontal cortex and under activity, and in the areas I was speaking of, the amygdala and parts of the impulse system and overactivation.
19:55 Speaker 02 So that is what's going on in the brain of a disordered or excessive screen user. But there's nowhere near as much research when it comes to less extreme cases. And the caveat here is that we don't know for sure whether excessive screen use is actually causing these differences in brain activity. It's just a correlation. It could be that people with shorter attention spans and heightened impulsivity are actually predisposed to excessive screen use and not the other way around. Either way, Mick says the link is worth paying attention to.
20:26 Speaker 04 So it is a sort of a complicated thing to try to understand what leads to what. But I think, I sometimes think it doesn't need to be as complicated as that. If we understand, it sort of doesn't matter in some sense what leads to what. If we know that we can apply something to fix a problem, the sort of intervention is what's important rather than what led to what. And the intervention for problematic screen use can often be quite straightforward. And so if we can break the loop, then that's sort of the important thing rather than what started the loop, I suppose.
20:57 Speaker 02 What we do know is that lots of us feel like our attention is shot as a direct result of our screen time.
21:04 Speaker 10 I was brushing my teeth this morning and I was flossing and brushing and I had reels in one hand. And then I went to the bathroom and I still had reels in my hand. And then I showered and I had reels. And I was like, oh, that's not good.
21:16 Speaker 02 What have your phones done to your attention spans? Just destroyed it, completely destroyed it.
21:21 Speaker 10 Yeah, it's gone. It's really bad.
21:24 Speaker 02 I can't even watch a YouTube video that's more than five minutes long without putting it on two times speed.
21:28 Speaker 11 I'm Professor Marion Thain and I'm Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh.
21:34 Speaker 02 Back in 2021, Marion and her colleagues at the time from King's College London surveyed more than 2,000 people about their phone use.
21:42 Speaker 11 We're endlessly being told in the media that our attention spans have shrunk to less than the size of that of a goldfish. But we wondered sort of how people actually felt about this and what their perceptions were.
21:54 Speaker 02 One in two respondents felt as if their attention spans had shrunk. But not everyone is losing sleep over this.
22:02 Speaker 11 Forty-two percent. Of the sample was what we called positive multi-screeners. So those were highly engaged tech users who were fairly relaxed about any concerns, but did have some concerns about attention spans. But they weren't super worried about the effect tech was having on their cognitive abilities.
22:23 Speaker 02 So those are the positive multi-screeners, which I reckon is probably me. Then there are the people who aren't really using tech that much. And so for obvious reasons, are pretty relaxed about its effects on them.
22:34 Speaker 11 About seventeen percent were what we called the disengaged and untroubled group. They were both relaxed and also uninterested in both the opportunities and the challenges of new media.
22:44 Speaker 02 Basically, there's not as much pessimism here as we sometimes assume. And Marion says there are silver linings we're missing as a result.
22:52 Speaker 11 So for example, are the younger generation, much as we like to bemoan how the younger generation is always worse than our generation and they're worse at everything and it's all going to the dogs. But are there also things that a younger generation are learning to do? Modes of attention that they're practising that could be actually incredibly beneficial and really valuable? Maybe we as older generations can't see that because we're very much, you know, of our own times. And I think we need to be more alert and more responsive to look for where we can get the potential gains in terms of shifts and evolution of how we attend, as well as being concerned about what we might be losing in that transition.
23:40 Speaker 02 So remember at the start of the episode when I said that the invention of the printing press had triggered a similar kind of panic? It's true, but the part I left out is that some of those fears turned out to be well founded, at least according to Mick Mosheal.
23:54 Speaker 04 They thought that there would be a problem with memorisation. So if we could read, then we don't need to remember. And they were mostly right. We've gone from being able to remember hours-long oral stories because we no longer need to cultivate the faculty of memory ever since writing was introduced.
24:13 Speaker 02 It's a pattern throughout history. The same thing happened with radio, comic books, video games, you name it. And while some of the concern was justified, as Mick says, most people would look back at each of those examples and conclude that as a species, we probably gained at least as much as we lost. So is this moment and what feels to us like a seismic shift in technology actually more of the same? Or is it in a league of its own? Is this time different?
24:41 Speaker 04 I think the difference with what we're seeing now is the rapidity and scale of development. When you introduce the internet, when you introduce AI, all in the context of an attention economy, in a similar analogy with the printing press, what you're displacing is no longer just a particular memory faculty, but really almost every cognitive skill we use.
25:02 Speaker 02 Marion Thain agrees that there is something unique about this moment.
25:06 Speaker 11 Whatever word Socrates was reading in ancient Greece, it was almost certainly not limitless. And I think what we're seeing now with social media is literally that limitless capacity to just keep on scrolling. And that, I think, is the thing that actually really scares people about where we are today.
25:25 Speaker 02 So if this time is different, the scale of the impact might be too, even if, as Mick Moshe says, we don't have the full picture yet.
25:34 Speaker 04 We all use these technologies, but I think for the majority of us, we don't satisfy these criteria for disordered screen use or for the DSM or ICD criteria of internet gaming disorder, gaming disorder. But yet, all of us, almost everyone I speak to, including myself, feels that we are interacting with these technologies in some way that we're unsatisfied with. So I think that's a bit of a gap in the research field that should be looked at.
26:04 Speaker 02 You'll be pleased to know Anna is no longer clocking 10 hours a day on a screen.
26:08 Speaker 08 One weekend, I just decided I'm going to delete TikTok and Instagram and Threads and whatever other social media apps are lingering on my phone. And, oh my, it was so eye-opening. I had to really sit with the isolation that I had created for myself. So there was a lot of shame in it as well and a lot of discontent, a lot of grief too, of like, how much of my life am I losing to my phone? And so...
26:41 Speaker 08 On the other side of it, though, it also felt incredible to all of a sudden see, "Oh, here's all this time that I never say that I have. Here's all of the motivation and the clarity and the creativity and the inspiration." It all just kind of came rushing back to me. And I also remember very clearly the feeling of waking up in the morning with my phone completely turned off was so freeing.
27:10 Speaker 04 When we speak about the future with screens and with technology, that's fine. But we have to be looking into that future with the possibility of being able to function as human beings at the core of any activity that is important for anything. It requires attention. It requires empathy. It requires the ability to problem solve over complex questions that require a long-term ability to plan. So regardless of the world we're moving into, we can't walk into it with a blindfold. We have to be intentional about our steps because there is a precipice and it can be walked over completely blindfolded.
27:52 Speaker 04 So the skills you will need in the future won't change. You will absolutely need attention and you'll absolutely need the ability to exercise executive control or higher-order problem solving. So how can we do that? Acknowledging that we're moving into a world with increasing technology while also understanding that there are some very basic cognitive skills that make us human, that make us insightful, that make us empathetic, that give us what makes us human.
28:22 Speaker 08 That is it for this episode of Brain Rot, a series we're showcasing on All in the Mind over the next five weeks. The show's producer is Fiona Pepper, the senior producer is James Bullen, and the sound engineer is Brendan O'Neill. The series originally aired on our sister show, Science Friction.
28:41 Speaker 01 In episode two, we meet Kelly, who is dating an AI, to find out how technology is changing our human relationships.
28:50 Speaker 12 If you'd asked me a year ago, there's no way that I could have an AI companion that I genuinely felt romantic feelings towards. But it feels like almost the first adult relationship I've ever been in.
29:03 Speaker 01 I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.
29:26 Speaker 13 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
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