A Neuroscientist explains what Doomscrolling is doing to your brain

Dr. Michael Keane is a medical doctor and psychologist who holds a PHD in behavioural Neuroscience. We chat about creativity, trauma and social media use Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Greetings, you bandy-legged chandeliers. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast. And if you're a regular listener, if you're a ten-foot Declan, a steaming Quiva, then you know the crack. You're familiar with the lore of this podcast. Let's begin this week with a poem. We haven't had a poem in a very, very long time. This piece was submitted to me by the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. And this poem is called, "Is It A Priest Or A Seagull?"

• 1:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it a priest or a seagull who has his hands inside my mouth? Is it a communion or a feather that bleeds into my soul? Is it a priest or a seagull who has vandalized my bin? Do my eyes hurt from the sunlight glinting on your plumage? Did the raindrops stain your collar?

• 2:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Say your mass into a can of Fanta. Bless my shin bones with your claws. Is it a priest or a seagull who was shitting in the wind? That was Is It a Priest or a Seagull by Daniel Del Lewis. I wrote a treatment for a fucking sitcom years ago and submitted it to RTE where it was, it was a puppet show about, it's about Daniel Del Lewis wanting to shrink himself so small that he could be intravenously injected into Gabriel Byrne.

• 2:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And needless to say, that was not commissioned by Radio Telefiche Iron, but it was, it was revisited in my 2018 collection of short stories Boulevard Rain. I wrote, um, I wrote a short story called The Skin Method, inspired by the work of J.G. Ballard. It was about Gabriel Byrne snorting bags of his own skin to revisit earlier versions of himself, like system restore pints, where he could, he would save bags of his own skin from when he was younger and snort them. And then this then created an online trend amongst young men where they all, they started

• 3:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  to engage in, in body modification and snorting bags of their own skin to achieve eternal youth and beauty. And when I published that, the Irish, the Irish Times wrote, wrote a review that, the review was, the review was so bad that the Irish Times argued.

• 4:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  That I shouldn't be allowed to write any more books. Which really hurt me at the time. But now, I'm actually very proud to get such a strong reaction, to get a review so powerful, that the Irish Times would argue that I shouldn't be allowed to write anymore. And I wrote it as an absurdist satire, but in 2018, in 2026 now, where the manosphere is heading with these cunts like Clivicular, smashing themselves into the heads with hammers. I ended up inadvertently predicting that that's where things were headed. I'm gonna be having a conversation with a neuroscientist this week.

• 4:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I had a conversation with a neuroscientist in Leisure Land, which is a real sentence in the English language, that describes events that actually happened. I usually don't do two interviews in a row, but... Ah, fuck it, I spoke to a guest at the weekend in Galway, a neuroscientist called Dr. Michael Keane. And it was really, really wonderful, a wonderful conversation. And it's incredibly pertinent to write now, to get to speak with an expert.

• 5:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  We speak about what the internet is doing to human brains. What things like doom scrolling is doing to the the human brain and the condition of humanity. The reason I'm mentioning my strange, some of the strange short stories that I've written is that's how I came to meet Dr. Michael Keane. He's a medical doctor who has a PhD in neuroscience. And he scans brain activity via EEG scans.

• 5:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Michael Keane read one of my short stories once. And after he read it, he was struck by how odd the story was and kind of went, "I'd like to scan this fellow's brain. I'd like to see what's going on in his head, because this is very odd." So he got in contact with me and he scanned my brain. But while he was doing it, we had a cracking chat. And I soon realised, fuck it, this is a very interesting person. I click with him, really get along. I need to have him on the fucking podcast. I need to have him on the podcast for a chat. So that's what this is. If you want to check him out, he's drmichaelkeane.com. And also, I'll tag him on Instagram. When I post this, I'll tag him on the Instagram post.

• 6:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's at my Instagram, Blind by Boat Club. The weather in Ireland is gorgeous and sunny at the moment. We're all going for lovely long walks. So this is a long podcast. I think this comes in at about two hours long. But the beauty of a long podcast, it's not fucking TV, it's not the radio. You don't have to listen to it all in one go. You can if you want. But you don't have to. You can stub it out, put it in your pocket and take a few pulls off it. All week long, if you like. That's what I do. I love podcasts that are three hours, four hours long. I love that because then I've got a week of content. I dip in and out of it all week. I love doing that.

• 7:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  We don't just speak about the impact that doom scrolling and social media is having on the human brain. We speak about creativity in the human brain, trauma in the human brain. Michael also does chats on the neuroscience of Irish trauma, intergenerational trauma. He's fascinating. So without further ado, here's the chat that we had. Can you tell us what it is you do?

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, scanning brains, I think, pretty much sums it up. So my background's in neuroscience, psychology and medicine.

• 7:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're a medical doctor too?

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  And it has always brought me back to understanding what brains do. So when you're, it's interesting reading the short stories. That's what got me interested in talking to you.

• 8:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what I meant to say. So you had read a short story of mine and it was so strange. You thought, I want to scan this man's brain.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 8:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Pamela Fags.

• 8:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Pamela Fags was the story, which is actually weirder than that one.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  I can attest to that. And I have a brother whose name is Declan and there's a wet Declan in, he's a greyhound. So I thought, yeah.

• 8:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Declan is just a great name though, isn't it?

• 8:40Speaker 03

  It is, yeah. And that was enough. I got in touch then to see what was happening.

• 8:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  And.

• 8:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it was, you gave me an EEG scan, which was very interesting. I just had to sit down while you put wet things on my head for about 10 minutes.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the results were interesting. You said something to me, which I found fascinating was you, you looked at the results and you said, there's something going on in my brain that some people need to take psychedelics in order to get. And I just seem to be walking around like this. Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  It was, I mean, the genesis of it in, in reading the stories as in a lot of good literature, poetry or whatever, is to your point about sitting down in a linear fashion to write an interesting thing. And, and your process is obviously different to that. For a lot of people, the kind of linearity exists and the world kind of reinforces that. But it's not really that interesting. But when you get people who can connect random ideas together in interesting ways, or who can see a situation from a different perspective, or whatever it might be, what we might call kind of lateral thinking is what people describe it as.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  For a lot of people to get to that point, it takes a lot of work or a lot of effort or a lot of practice, or you ingest substances to do it, or whatever it might be. And, yeah, when we were looking at your brain data, so we put the EEG on, and from that we can build up a 3D functional model, and we can look at connectivity and we can look at networks, in particular, we were interested in some of the networks in your brain, and seeing how those networks switch on and switch off. And for a lot of people, they switch on and switch off in a predictable fashion, and you have to do an awful lot of work to get networks which don't normally communicate

• 10:45Speaker 03

  with each other to communicate with each other. And this is a process that, you know, people talk about creativity or whatever, and people in corporates go away on retreats and that, and they have, they spend so much money creating the conditions to get you out of your normal way of thinking in order to come up with the big idea. And when we're looking at your brain, your capacity to get there is very ready. The difficulty, of course, with that is, is when you have to do kind of mundane maths homework.

• 11:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the thing.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  And that thing is acting, wanting to, wanting to generate mad ideas.

• 11:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I would say about my scan, right, is, so I've always naturally been that kind of way, I've always had a propensity towards lateral thinking, but also it's, it's a daily practice. I, like, someone who really changed things for me when it came to the, the act of creativity, when you become a professional artist, every professional artist, whether it's a musician, comedian, fucking painter, whatever, you're handy added in school, and then you get paid, and it's like, shit, how do I do this all the time in order to serve as capitalism? And I used to just get good ideas in the shower, we'll say, and then as I got older

• 12:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  and it's like, fuck, I have to write a script next week for telly or whatever. I started, I discovered a fella called Chicks in Me Hi. You've heard of him, have you? So he is the psychologist who coined the phrase flow. And Chicks in Me Hi had, he studied a bunch of artists. And by looking at artists and creative people and how they did their thing and how they achieved this state of flow. He managed to break it down into paths that you could follow. And that's what I do. What he called it was the closed mind and the open mind. So he said that the goal of, you know, if you want to write a short story, if you write a, if you want to get to the flow part of your brain. Everyone has a good idea in the fucking shower.

• 12:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  You have a fucking shower and all of a sudden something unlocks. If you're a professional artist, you have to figure out, how can I make the shower part unlock when I'm sitting at my boring desk? So the first step is you agree upon a time. So for me, it's like 90 minutes. So I'm going to sit in this desk and this space and I'm going to do it for 90 minutes. And there's no phones, there's no distractions. I must only do this. And what it's about is learning to tolerate the frustration of nothing happening. The blank page. If you can tolerate the frustration of nothing happening for those first 15, 20 minutes.

• 13:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that means the horrible feelings of, I am a failure. Anything creative I've ever created before has been a complete accident. And this moment where, right now, where I can't come up with an idea is proof of it. It's gone. If you just can break through that. And how I break through it is trying to fail. If I'm scared of failing, then let's fucking fail. Let's write a story about a man's anus. You know what I mean? But then, once I go there, I, what Chicks in Me Hi said was, we use the, the closed mind throughout our day. The closed mind is, I need to pay my bills. I need to be at this place on time. I need to.

• 14:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Speak to people in a respectful way. But then you have the open mind, that's what he said, which is the flow state, where anything happen and humor is present and there's no rules and you're in a state of play. And I do that, I stick with that frustration and then before you know it, 15 minutes, I break through and now I'm in flow state. And I lose all sense of time, I don't look like I could be anywhere. It's just amazing and it's the best feeling of the world. And then when I exit flow state, I usually have a piece of work where I'm like, this isn't too fucking bad. But that is frequent, regular practice to me. So I go to the gym of doing that to my brain.

• 15:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  So when you looked at that scan, are you able to tell this is how this fellow's head is? Or is it this someone who just goes to the gym of creativity every day?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  I mean, you cannot tell whether it's always been there or not, unless you have data from previously. But you can piece together, I guess, with, you know, your context and your life story. And the fact that these patterns exist, you can talk a little bit about school or whatever. And this pattern of thinking is, as I say, it's difficult to do your maths homework like that and your Irish verbs and.

• 15:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  And this is my life, yeah, I've had school like.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, the school system doesn't reward that. If you listen to Ken Robinson talking about schools and creativity, we don't value in school creativity in general because the killing phrase is you'll never get a job at that. So we, as you say, we serve a particular way of, we reinforce a particular way of thinking. And creativity really flourishes. Or one of the key criteria for creativity to emerge is safety.

• 16:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  John Cleese talks about this, talks about the life of Brian or the Monty Python stuff.

• 16:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you see John Cleese's creativity talk?

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, so he, that's all from Chicks in Me, hi.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  It's the safety. Because again, as soon as you activate stress, and I mean, everybody talks about stress. But once you activate neural networks involved in that fight or flight, or that feeling that you're being judged or whatever. By its nature, it prevents the connection then of previously unconnected networks, which is a luxury to your brain.

• 16:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  And is that because you're scanning for threats? You're in survival.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I always think of is, that's the classic, when you, like, I have two little toddlers, you know, and I call them my teachers because I get to watch them playing all the time. I get to watch them playing with Lego or painting and shit. And you can just observe with little kids, when they are playing, you know they're fucking happy. But if they're a little bit stressed or worried or whatever, play doesn't happen. You know what I mean? And I think that's the same with us as adults, except it's, the threat that we feel is, for me anyway, it's, it's, it's identity.

• 17:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, anyone in this room who's, who's creative or is an artist would relate to this. It's, when I was in fucking school, I was shit at school, like so bad, but I was the kid who was good at drawing. So my identity latched onto, well, because I'm good at drawing, that gives me a sense of worth and value. But the danger of that then for me is that if I'm not careful, if I base my self-esteem and sense of self-worth on being a good artist, on being creative, then that threat of being a bad artist doesn't mean that I've just fucked up a short story. It means that I'm a terrible person. And that's what I have to be careful of, that's what I have to.

• 18:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  I always say at any, any time if I got a good review or get an award, I always say, I'm very mindful of this, I don't allow this to define me as, as a person. My work got a piece of reward, but I, I did not get a reward. You know? And to practice, I suppose humility. Humility of, of just someone being good at one thing, it doesn't make you a better person than someone else, you know what I mean? They're just aspects of behaviour.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  It, it's not easy to separate those two things out because we

• 18:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very hard.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  We have been trained very subtly to connect skills or capacity with worth. And then we internalize that as self-worth. And we reinforce.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Effort.

• 19:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  And we tend to punish lack of effort. And then we've managed to layer on top of that, a kind of a moral judgment.

• 19:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  So if you're not paying attention, or you're not doing your homework, or you're thinking in a different way, it is then seen, or if you're getting distracted all the time, or if you're hyperactive and you can't sit down.

• 19:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's misbehaving.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we've linked those two things together.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  To the extent that even to say that maybe they're not linked is a surprise to a lot of people. So we have layered on moral failure with anything that isn't what people ask you to do, or doing something different.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  And that's, I mean, that's pretty damaging for a lot of people. And I've seen it from both sides.

• 19:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  A lot of people blame that on Protestants. I know, I said that's a big one, but there's, oh, who wrote, there's a book called The Protestant Work Ethic. And apparently, modern capitalism as it is today, you can trace it to the Protestants of Scotland, England, and then America, where work ethic became, I think it was the Puritans and Calvinists, work ethic and your capacity to work and produce was a sign of moral goodness.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  And this was unique to specific types of Protestantism, Germanic Protestantism, that's what it was. So the book is called The Protestant Work Ethic. No one knows the name, who wrote that, no? Okay. It's a popular one, it's big in anyone who's studied economics.

• 20:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, you got it right, yeah. Sorry.

• 20:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sorry for forgetting sectarian there, ladies and gentlemen. But no, I know what you're saying. The, how we, we tend to put external value on our capacity to produce.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  And these things.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  And we do that in spite.

• 21:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Internalize it.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  In spite of the fact that.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  I mean, there's a thousand people here have come to listen, to see you and, and, you know, we, in Ireland in particular, we value the arts, creativity, music, you know, I would say disproportionately highly compared to other countries. We do, yeah, we don't think we do, but yeah, we do. Like, we, we are certainly, I mean, I, I, last September, I went down to, I, I, I grew up in a small village in North East Galway called Kilkern, I went down to our neighbours, my uncle had died, and we have a farm and there's a few farms around us, and I went down to our neighbours to say, my, my mother's brother had died, and he

• 21:57Speaker 03

  was, he was a farmer, he's 70s, out in the fields, I waved down to him, he came in, and I said, you know, Michael Abali Mo is dead, oh jeez, come in, went in, we had tea, and he took down a book of poetry, it was a farmer, he was out晒 on his wellies, and we sat at his kitchen table eating scones, drinking tea, and he was reciting a few poems, and it's a sort of part of our existence, we're all used to it, everybody's used to sing songs and whatnot, and going to see drama and whatever, we value disproportionately highly here, I think, compared to other countries, and yet, the process of getting

• 22:37Speaker 03

  there, we don't value, because we have got in our heads that, you know, the, it's the, 18-year entry into university, as Ken Robinson calls it, we value that kind of stepwise, linear idea, that, and anything that deviates from that is, as I say, a moral failure, unless, and, and as I say, I've seen this from both sides, because most of my work has been clinical work. Mm-hmm. But I've worked with professional footballers, fellows in the Premier League, World Cup winners, doing mad things, and they describe the same process in school, a lot of them, real difficulty with maths and paying attention, but they were- Go away out of it. But they were good at soccer, so they were good at something that people reinforce.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  So we, we are also familiar with that, that if it's grand, give him a football, you see what this fellow can do, there was a huge value. Yeah. It was unbelievable to me to listen to the similarity of the story of people who had played in the Champions League final, people who had played at World Cups. And incidentally, having all the same worries as you and me.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Talking about their school experience and kind of coming out of it by the skin of their teeth. So the advice I used to always give to parents of children who are struggling with ADHD or whatever it might be, is about school, was two things. If you can find their passion. Look for that and try to get to 18 with your confidence intact. You'll figure it out from there. And the reason I talked about the passion thing is, and we take it back to looking at the neural networks, the brain networks. If we look at our behaviour and our brain activity, not as good or bad, or black and white, or whatever, but look at it in terms of variability.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  If we think about behaviour in terms of variability, if you have a car or a friend who's high variability, it's pretty difficult to manage. If you have a car that's high variability, a most amazing car sometimes.

• 24:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you mean high variability?

• 24:46Speaker 03

  The most amazing car sometimes, but won't start another time and you can never predict friend.

• 24:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, right, okay, yeah, yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  The most unbelievably brilliant friend, sometimes, most of the time, but sometimes not. It's very difficult to manage with that.

• 25:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  You want that you're looking for the consistency, the predictability.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the low variance, low variability. The Toyota Yaris of a friend.

• 25:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  So we.

• 25:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  That sounds like a real country insult.

• 25:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  He's an old Toyota Yaris, isn't he?

• 25:22Speaker 03

  But that's, it's predictable.

• 25:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. And you think that's what we go for, we value that as a society, that predictable.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  I mean, that's because everything runs on time and you have to know how many people are turning up and what time they're turning up at and all that. And we've created those systems.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  But in the highly variable system.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  When you find that passion, so I could do forty minutes of Irish and then I could do forty minutes of maths and then I could do forty minutes of geography. And it was a kind of a meat and two veg kind of approach to life. But I couldn't do anything for more than two hours. But when you get the highly variable networks activated and you attach them to a passion, you attach them to something that this person is particularly interested in, you'll get this flow state, you'll get this six hours of reading a comic in the front hall of a house with their legs going purple from the cold because they're so into it. And if we have, if we could have a system whereby we can encourage that in some way

• 26:27Speaker 03

  and reward that, because we reward the end product.

• 26:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's beautiful, yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  We don't reward the process or we don't have the facility. Because our, our systems are so built for scale, it's hard to, to facilitate that.

• 26:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because I spoke about that recently on, on a podcast where I was remembering my time in school where I used to get in so much trouble that eventually I just wasn't allowed into classrooms, you know, and instead they just told me go to the art room and listen to music and draw. And when I was doing that, I was happy. But I used to get angry about, I used to leave school and then at home I'd be learning how to create music or I'd be learning about musicians and I would be so fucking passionate. I'd do it for hours. It was flow state. And I used to say to myself, I can't even, I wish the teacher could see what I was doing there and, and evaluate me on that, but I can't.

• 27:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I have to do it privately and I have to keep it away and I can't bring it, I can't bring up the music of Cypress Hill in economics class. Do you know what I mean? But if I could have, if only they could have, it's like I am doing good work, it's just nothing that's happening here, it's happening at home and it might pay off someday.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  And this is part of the, the layering in a failure because people see it as a choice.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  From the outside, because the implication is, well, he can do it when he wants to.

• 27:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, oh god, yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  He's not bothering to do it in here with me.

• 28:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  That is a pain in the fucking arse.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  And that's where it becomes a choice, where it appears to be a choice, then comes the judgment, then comes the internalisation of that, because then you think, Jesus, maybe it is a choice. Maybe I should be better.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  And then what do you say to an 11 year old or a 12 year old who says that to you?

• 28:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  You try and, like, how do you get them out of that? If we're, we'll say, speaking about what we call neurodivergent brains, right?

• 28:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, I'm very, I deliver a podcast each fucking week and I never miss it. And there's a huge amount of work involved in it, right? But I won't say I procrastinate, but I have, I need that fucking deadline. If I need to get to the point where it becomes terrifying and then it all unlocks. And it's not laziness, it's not procrastination. And I think there's something going on in my brain whereby only when I get to the point where it's like, fucking, you gotta do it, you gotta do it, then, whoa, but I can't do it. Like, today's Saturday, I was doing research, I don't know what Wednesday's podcast is gonna be,

• 29:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  having a fucking clue, I know it's gonna happen and I know it's gonna be good, but I don't know what it is yet, it's gonna have to arrive to me at some time around Monday and Tuesday, when I'm like, fuck, fuck, there's a podcast. But I think, what's going on there? What's my relationship with deadlines where suddenly something is unleashed? Because I'm doing it every week for nearly nine years and I still haven't sorted it out whereby, it's Thursday morning, sit down and do the podcast, like, no, forget about it.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Again, if you think about variability and think about extremes, right?

• 29:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, it's an extreme thing.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  The idea that if we think about identity versus, let's say, diagnosis, right? And I have a particular issue with the fast online assessments for things, right? You know, answer yes to these five questions and you have ADHD.

• 30:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  The DSM really, I suppose.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, that's a multiple choice.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  It's a bigger version.

• 30:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  But if you think about that, the five questions for ADHD, the framing of those questions is something like, have you ever put off a short, simple task for way too long and it got bigger and bigger and bigger? And of course, the question is phrased like, have you ever done that? And everybody does that, right? That is what you call human behaviour.

• 30:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Right? So this is an identity thing. It draws people in and it asks you questions. Barnum effect. Vague general statements that are true of everyone that you feel are specifically true of you. Now, what you're talking about is the difference from have you ever? Yes, we all have done that versus this happens to me all the time. I cannot do anything about it. I cannot change it. And it is so extreme as to create a functional impairment for me. And that's a different thing to have you ever. And if you say this to people and they say, oh, sure, that happens to me all the time. You say, no, no, it's a different quality.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  It's a dimensional thing for you that it's so extreme. It's so consistent, whereas.

• 31:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  The other thing I want to bring up around that specifically is, so when we did my EEG scan, I also presented with a brain that looked quite stressed. And I'm.

• 32:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I'm not on, I'm actually quite happy. So when I say, when I saw that, I was like, Jesus, I'm not that stressed. I enjoy life. But what I do to myself each week regarding the podcast, putting myself to, like, I'm not joking you when I say, on a Tuesday, I'll do 22, 23 hour day, not a bother on me. Like, I don't need sleep, I don't want that, like that. But the next day, it does feel like I took a load of ecstasy. I, I get like a chemical drain. And I think that's what the stress is that was showing up on that scan. It's not necessarily the stress of, I'm afraid of something, or my life is unpleasant. The stress of performing, doing that to myself.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Hmm, repeatedly?

• 32:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Repeatedly, every single week. There's a deadline tomorrow, you're fucked, you're fucked, do it, do it, do it. And then something, and then I'm working for 23 hours or not sleeping. I mean, that's stress. I'm, there's, I'm guessing there's cortisol hormones going there, but I'm, I'm using those stress hormones for motivation, rather than to beat the shit out of myself.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  And one of the issues with procrastination is, you know, everyone says, why do I keep doing this? You know, and last minute study for these exams, next set of exams, I'm definitely starting earlier. I'm sitting down Thursday morning, I'm going to do eight hours and all that. But the interesting thing about procrastination is, it's kind of reinforcing. Because the absolute unbridled joy of just escaping, just getting it in and getting it done.

• 33:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck off, yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Is so reinforcing. It's the going to someone's wedding, and you're being late, and you just nip in ahead of the bride.

• 33:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's that, is it?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  It's kind of reinforcing.

• 33:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  That lovely feeling of, I'm not in trouble. Fuck it, I did it, we did it this time.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 33:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  No fucking way.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  And, and life kind of reinforces it in some odd way. And

• 34:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, it's a little climax.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  It's a little rush.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  And look, I don't mean to trivialise like the difficulty of it, but there is a behavioural principle at play that makes it kind.

• 34:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  So there's a little dragon that we're chasing and the dragon is, it's when we procrastinate. Like for me, so like I said, I have not missed a podcast in eight years. I fucking do it every week, but I bring myself to utter an absolute terror in order to do it. And who else does it? The South Park lads, there's a wonderful documentary, I don't know if you've seen it, called Six Days to Air. And it's about how South Park make an episode every single fucking week. And they're sleeping in their offices. Like it's, they have to have it by a Friday and it's Wednesday and they don't know what it fucking is. So they're relying upon this. And

• 34:46Speaker 03

  But it's different across people. This is the interesting thing, is

• 34:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can I fix this?

• 34:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, it's all about, I reminded myself there, it sounded like, did you ever see the film The Elephant Men?

• 34:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  About John Merrick.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I know the one, yeah, I've never seen it.

• 35:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, he goes to Anthony Hopkins' character and goes, can you cure me? And then Anthony Hopkins goes, no, I can't. So can I fix this?

• 35:12Speaker 03

  The way I look at it is, is it's about being able to manage it when you want to and not bothering when you don't have to. I think that makes life a lot easier. But what you're talking about and this idea of reinforcement, and if we use that kind of simple example of being late, late, late, late, and you just get there on time. For some people, the getting there on time is a kind of a rush. Right? It's kind of, I mean, it's a rush to get there. It's a rush and you say, okay, I've got, this is amazing, brilliant. For me, if I'm rushing, rushing, rushing and I'm late, because I like to be early. If I'm late and I just manage to get to somewhere on time, I don't feel any joy. I just feel angry that this happened.

• 35:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Right. So I don't get the reinforcement.

• 36:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, but it's worth pointing out too. You became a medical doctor and that's fucking hard. And to become a medical doctor means you needed to have your shit together in junior cert and leave in cert.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  It's a, I mean, it's a different type of of existing, I guess. It's a different type of sort of, I, the only, honestly, the only way I can think about it is a meat and two veg kind of approach to life. Is it's not very variable, it's not very exciting, it's kind of predictable, all of that kind of thing.

• 36:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  So how was school for you, just grand, there's the work, let's just do it and get a good result?

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it wasn't brilliant, this is this.

• 36:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  You became a doctor.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's kind of predictable, do you know what I mean?

• 36:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  There, there's no big surprises. And, and what's interesting about that is, is we have a brain area called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which creates context for things.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  And depending on, and the same situation in front of two people can be, can create an exceptionally different internal context.

• 37:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  So if I could give you an example, and I, I was working with my co-founder Pete. Out at, he, he, he lives in London, but he was home at his dad's place in Navan. And they randomly have a sauna in a kind of a caravan out the front. And he's, he's real into cold baths. And anyway, we were working away in the dad's house and he said, um, we'll have a cold bath.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  And they have a bath out in the back garden that's filled with the hose. And I thought to myself, I can't think of anything worse than, than doing that.

• 37:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, me too, it's a bit of an ad request.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  But I, and we go to the sauna and we'll come in and notice, uh, I saw, okay. So I kind of felt slightly pressured into it.

• 37:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Even though he's a very good frie- very good friend of mine, we run a business together, whatever. I did feel a kind of a social pressure and, and it was November. And then I, he gave me a pair of shorts, so I had to put on a pair of his shorts. So I was standing in the, in his dad's back garden in, in Pete's shorts. And he was filling the bath and I was already freezing. So if you were looking at it from the outside, right? You would see two people doing physically, practically, exactly the same thing. Right? And everybody talks about the benefit of cold baths and all this kind of stuff.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  But the context for it was completely different internally. So for him, he's an avid gym goer. Cold baths and saunas and this type of thing is a part of a release. It's a part of a health, fitness plan that he has. It's part of de-stressing, et cetera. So the psychological context for him was positive. He goes in, he feels the cold and he braces himself and then goes to the sauna. So he gets all that positive, you know, people love talking about endorphins and all that. So he gets that positive neurochemical and neuroendocrine cascade into his body. I, on the other hand, again, if you're looking from the gate, you see two people doing the exact same thing.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  The psychological context for me was I was stressed. I didn't want to do it. I felt pressured into doing it. I have two small kids as well. I was thinking I'd rather get home and get them to bed.

• 39:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Maybe a bit afraid of how cold it's gonna be.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I just don't like it.

• 39:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  So the psychological, the physiological reality for me then was completely different.

• 39:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you didn't get that rush, you didn't get.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  I get cortisol.

• 39:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  I get stress and it's bad for me. He gets a complete.

• 39:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you think about it like. You jump in and it's like, I'm in freezing cold water and I'd rather be warm. I need to get the fuck out.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  This is terrible.

• 39:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  So the activation of that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex creates the psychological context. And that then, that psychological context then changes the physiological reality of what your body does afterwards.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  And that is the, I mean, that's a very simple trite example of how the way you think or the way something feels to you completely changes your physiology and completely changes physiological reality and means that you and I can have differing physiological reactions to essentially exactly the same experience, just because we think about it differently. And that's a reality.

• 40:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  What it reminds me of is a buddy of mine recently had his first child and he went to me going, look, what can I expect? And I said to him, it's like being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, but you don't experience it as torture because there's so much love. Do you know what I mean? And what I mean is like, if you've got small fucking kids, you're not sleeping. You haven't slept in a week and someone wants to scream into your ear all day. And now it's like, oh, I'm touching human shit five times a day. Yeah. But you know what I mean?

• 41:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  These are all, that's not a good Wednesday afternoon, but like, I do that all the time and I love it.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  If it's somebody else's children, this is the context. When it's yours, and I know exactly what you're talking about. Our kids don't sleep very well, so you're up half the night and, but you're doing it thinking.

• 41:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Totally. It's love, compassion.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Totally. If they wake up another hundred times, I'll get up a hundred times more. But if they're not yours.

• 41:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, I never find myself in that situation, but.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  You get a different psychological.

• 41:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  But even, look, to take it back to Guantanamo Bay, right? Some of my favorite heavy metal tracks were used to torture people in Guantanamo Bay. So like the band Slipknot, who I love, who I will listen to maybe five hours straight, that was an actual torture in Guantanamo Bay. They would force people to listen to Slipknot. The context is totally different. You can't escape this. You don't have choice. We're doing this aggressively at you.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  No control.

• 42:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Whereas I have full control. I love it. It's the same music and it helps me.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  This is the same reason they've put the. Long haul flights, you can see the camera views from the nose of the

• 42:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go away out of it.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  The nose of the plane and underneath.

• 42:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's that about?

• 42:40Speaker 03

  You have no control and you have no idea what's going on. So you can't normalize anything. But if you can watch it and the plane feels like it's doing all sorts of funny things, but if you actually watch it coming into land on those forward looking cameras.

• 42:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're feeling a bit of control.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  You can see how smooth it is. You can see how normal it is. And thi- this kind of sense of of of having no control is obviously, it seems accidental from from the, you know, sitting in the tube and you can't see the steering wheel. But, you know, tha- that's part of the process of of of removing removing control from you as you move through the airport and onto the flight. It's it's to kind of keep people compliant. So you, you know, you you kind of lose your independence and your autonomy once you get to the airport. And you're you're brought all the way through and a lot of people telling you what to do and a lot of rules. And

• 43:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know that was part of it because so much of it is is like I thi- this fucking a hundred milliliters of liquid thing. I reckon that's mostly bullshit to make people just afraid.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, this that's I think the stop now, that's two liters thing in Dublin. But why does the pilot wear a military style uniform? It's the same reason. There's no reason for him to use that.

• 43:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's also

• 43:52Speaker 03

  They could wear, I mean, they could wear a hoodie and a or shirt.

• 43:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  No one's getting on the fucking plane.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. It creates that sense of authority and trust.

• 44:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  It's purely a dry like it's it's it's made up.

• 44:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  I it it that's a whole thing, which you know, we're gonna have to talk about that in the second half because we've gone over the fucking interval, man. I can tell by my salberda- salberdali clock here on the floor. With the existential fucking, I'm not looking at that. Um, you can have a little pint and a piss and we'll be back out in about ten or fifteen minutes. But actually, before we do it, did anyone bring cans? Yeah, okay, here's a lovely thing that I like to do. Um, first off, yeah, when people bring cans to shows, no problem at all, but sometimes it sounds like someone tutting, and when I'm speaking to you, I don't want to hear. I'm like, what the fuck did I say? So what I like to do is collectively, if you do have a can, we open it together and it actually sounds very beautiful.

• 44:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  So on the count of three, on the three, if you do have a can, take it out and you can open it, right? So it's on the three. One.

• 44:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Two. Three. Isn't that gorgeous? All right, I'll see you in 15 minutes.

• 45:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  I love cracking a can open at the live podcasts. I really enjoy doing this. So let's have a little break here while the virtual audience are doing the same. We'll have an Ocarina pause for some adverts, right? And I'm gonna play my Ocarina. And I'll play it gently so I don't disturb any dogs or anyone who's trying to sleep.

• 45:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm laughing, sorry, I'm laughing. I'm laughing while I'm playing the Ocarina because

• 45:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  I just keep thinking of fucking people.

• 45:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  You might just get some person on the internet.

• 45:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Who's like, I'm gonna listen to the, having a clue what my podcast is, having a fucking clue. I'm just gonna listen to this podcast here about neuroscience, where he's, this podcast where this person is interviewing a neuroscientist about the human brain, and now I'm playing an Ocarina, I'm not even gonna explain it. You have to go back and figure out the lore of this podcast. Those are my favourite podcast listeners. Not my favourite, but the most rewarding podcast listeners for me are the ones who are like... They hadn't, having a fucking clue who I am. Having a clue, they stumble across one episode because of the title of the podcast. My title might have nothing to do whatsoever with the subject matter of the podcast.

• 46:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then they just find themselves listening, unsure whether they hate it or not, and then end up becoming like a listener to the podcast. I get a lot of mails from people like that, Australian listeners in particular, for some reason. Just get a, a random Australian person just comes across one of my episodes. They were Google searching a topic that I might have discussed in an episode and then my podcast arrives as a result in Google and they listen to it.

• 47:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they're like, what the fuck is this? And then they stay. That's how I end up with little strange pockets of listeners in various parts of the world. Anyway, I was in the middle of an Ocarina pause there and I, I paused the Ocarina pause. So we'll have to have a second one now.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Most women have been there. Something feels off. You don't feel like yourself, yet your doctor says everything looks fine. Spoiler, it's your hormones. Midi is a virtual care platform built for women by women and offers specialized hormone care from trained clinicians. Plus it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. It's not you, it's your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit. That's join M I D I dot com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Sponsored by Zocdoc. Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Have you been putting off that annual doctor's appointment because you don't want to make the call? Or maybe you've been meaning to find a new dentist, but you have no idea where to start? I find that's especially true when you move. It's hard to find your people. I've been there, which is why I use Zocdoc. Now, as a busy podcaster, parent, and someone who's always juggling a million things, I love anything that makes life easier. And Zocdoc lets you search and compare local, in-network doctors with over 250,000 providers across more than 200 specialties. You can read reviews from real patients, find a provider who feels like the right fit, see actual appointment openings, and book instantly. I recently had a last-minute health issue pop up and needed to see someone fast.

• 49:16Speaker 04

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• 49:42Speaker 01

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready-to-cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings? And sushi made fresh daily? Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  This ad is sponsored by Zocdoc. Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Have you been putting off that annual doctor's appointment because you don't want to make the call? Or maybe you've been meaning to find a new dentist, but you have no idea where to start? I find that's especially true when you move. It's hard to find your people. I've been there, which is why I use Zocdoc. Now, as a busy podcaster, parent, and someone who's always juggling a million things, I love anything that makes life easier. And Zocdoc lets you search and compare local, in-network doctors with over 250,000 providers across more than 200 specialties. You can read reviews from real patients, find a provider who feels like the right fit, see actual appointment openings and book instantly. I recently had a last minute health issue pop up and I needed to see someone fast. And instead of calling around

• 50:55Speaker 04

  or sitting on hold, I found a doctor on Zocdoc and booked an appointment in just a few minutes. It made the whole process so much less stressful. Now, taking care of your health just got easier. Download the Zocdoc app today. That's Zocdoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C, and book that appointment on your to-do list.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Most women have been there. Something feels off. You don't feel like yourself, yet your doctor says everything looks fine. Spoiler, it's your hormones. Midi is a virtual care platform built for women by women and offers specialized hormone care from trained clinicians. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. It's not you, it's your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit. That's join M-I-D-I dot com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 51:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very pathetic. Very pathetic a corina pause this week. Nothing wrong with that.

• 51:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Nothing.

• 51:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's, that's after fucking some cocker spaniel now is having a panic attack.

• 52:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because of that, some poor prick of a dashund is having an epileptic fit. As a result of that pitch.

• 52:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's enough of that. All right, support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck you're doing listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I do, because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This is how I rent out my studio, how I pay my bills. This is how I have the time and space and energy to deliver a podcast each week. So if you enjoy it and you're a regular listener, please consider becoming part of the Patreon

• 52:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  community. Even though I wouldn't call it a community, because I deliberately don't update the Patreon page. I want everybody to get the same experience, whether they, whether they contribute or not, right? So it's, all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast I get to earn a living. This is a listener funded experience. Patreon.com forward slash the Blind by Podcast. Also, it keeps this independent. So I'm, advertisers can't come in here and tell me

• 53:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  what to speak about or dictate the content or even suggest the content in any way. If they're advertising here, it's on my terms. All right. Upcoming live podcasts. On the ninth of May, which is about a week away, I accidentally booked two gigs on one day. All right. I'm after booking two gigs on one day. They're not clashing. They're not happening at the exact same time. They're in close proximity. It'll be grand. We'll get it done. So anyway, the first gig, the ninth of fucking May, the first gig is at the Arts and Minds Festival in Maynooth, which is a daytime gig at 1:30pm, right?

• 54:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's, that's in Maynooth University. All right. It's the Arts and Minds Festival, Maynooth. And then, later that day, three hours later, to be precise, I'm above in Dublin, which isn't too far away from fucking Maynooth really, is it? I'm above in Dublin at Wellfest, all right, which is in the Royal, Royal Hospital Kilmarnock, which is, it used to be the, the, the centre of colonial military administration for the British Empire in Ireland until the fucking IRA sorted that out. Absolutely gorgeous building, which

• 55:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  is walking distance from Kilmarnock Jail, where some of the leaders of 1916 were executed. So I'll be doing a, a, two gigs in one day. All right. And the second one is at Wellfest at Royal Hospital Kilmarnock on the ninth of November. Then I'm doing fuck all until the middle of June. I won't be doing fuck all, I'll be at home playing with my analogue synthesizers until the middle of June, right, where I'm gonna be gigging in Berlin. On the 19th of June, I'm in Berlin, that's sold out. And then on the 20th, I'm also gigging in Berlin. That one, very few tickets left, that could be sold out, I dunno. Check it out, at the Babylon Theatre, Berlin.

• 55:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then in July, I'm in Sheffield at the Crossed Wires Festival, at the Sheffield City Hall, I believe, on the, it's the 5th of July, over in Sheffield. And then, English tour, England, Scotland and Wales tour there in October. I'm chilling the fuck out for the summer, I'm gonna, I booked too many gigs for the introductory months of 2026. Alright, I booked way too many fucking gigs. And I'm experiencing pretty hardcore burnout from the sheer volume of social interaction and masking that I've had to do. So, I've got a lovely break coming up.

• 56:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  I won't be doing any more Dublin gigs, I'd say, until 2027. And my next big tour is October, where I'm doing England, Scotland and Wales. And I'm gonna begin that on the 18th of October in Brighton, then on to Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London at the Barbican, which is sold out, I believe. Glasgow, think that's sold out too. Gateshead and then Nottingham, alright. Now, back to the chat with the wonderful Dr Michael Keane, where, this is where we start speaking about the neuroscience of doom scrolling.

• 57:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what's fucking absurd? So, I'm technically not, alright. So, tonight is technically a play and we're both playing characters and therefore legally, I'm allowed to vape on stage. That's actually a theatre rule. But technically, you're not allowed fucking vape. And then, that smoke machine is just a giant vape. That's what it is. I had to bring a can out because the dressing rooms in this venue are very depressing. It's just...

• 57:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know, I know, but what's bothering me is I can feel the ghosts of people in showbands having sex.

• 57:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what, just the vibe of the, not the venue, but the dressing rooms are very...

• 58:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was there with my fucking laptop, going, Joe Dolan's arse has been on this fucking table, without a doubt. Joe Dolan's bare arse has been here and I'm typing. So, ah, fuck.

• 58:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  So how are you getting on, Michael?

• 58:21Speaker 03

  All good, yeah.

• 58:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  I had questions there. Now, you wouldn't see Ryan Tovary doing this.

• 58:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  These are questions for a different guest.

• 58:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  So when you left the IRA...

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Actually, I haven't left it.

• 58:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  What, is there any study into the, like, what we're doing to ourselves with social media recently, right?

• 59:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is there any study into the impacts of social media on our brains? I mean, just the level of, I don't do it, right, but the temptation to wake up first thing in the morning and go, let's, let's see what Sky News has to say there as I just wake up, instead of looking at the sunset and going to look at Sky News. Like, that can't be good for our brains.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  No, it's not.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  And the interesting thing is, when we're doing it, we know we shouldn't be doing it. And there's nobody sitting on Instagram for six hours thinking, this is good for me. But we kind of get drawn into it.

• 59:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's the doom scroll.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And of course, there are a lot of things at play, but even the concept of doom scrolling, we have... We're in a world now where we accept that there is no end to what you're looking at. So for all of our existence, there's been an end to things. We have the capacity now to sit. It started with 24-hour rolling news. You didn't have a news section and then you waited for more news. At the same time tomorrow, you got the 24-hour news and then we got this idea that we had endless content that we could scroll through. And I mean, that's an absolutely wild phenomenon. Somebody had to think of that. Let's not put a bottom on this.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Let's just keep it rolling. And the design of the thing is designed in large part by people like me, who understand how brains work and understand what keeps them engaged. And what keeps you engaged when you're there? And if you get away from it, what can bring you back? So if you think about what keeps you there when you're there is reinforcement. So you're obviously getting reinforced. You're in some way getting some reward from this. But it's not consistent. It's not predictable. Okay. Reward.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  And this is the key element of it. It's not predictable. It's intermittent reinforcement. It's a key fundamental part of behavioral control. Like gambling. Gambling is intermittent reinforcement. So if you put side by side predictable and intermittent reinforcement and look at what happens to behavior. So predictable reinforcement is your cigarette machine. So you put in the money and every time you put in the right amount of money, you expect a reinforcement. You expect the cigarettes to drop. If they don't, so in the absence of reinforcement, your behavior goes to zero. You're not going to put in another 20 euro or whatever it is, right?

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  A slot machine, on the other hand, works on a different principle. It works on the concept of reinforcement, but unpredictable reinforcement. So this time, when I put the coin in, I might get reinforcement, but I might not. In the absence of reinforcement, the likelihood of me doing something again is still very high. And that the likelihood of that behavior stays high for a long time in the absence of reinforcement. And then, just very slowly, the likelihood of you doing it decreases until you get a reinforcement. You win. The likelihood goes right back up to the top again. And social media is like that.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  I mean, and it's not just-

• 1:02:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Reels in particular, but since we moved from TikTok to reels, that's 100 million.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  And look, everybody loves that statistic. They only need to know eight things about you or 10 things about you, and they understand you. So, okay, if they understand me so well, why is every single video I'm presented with not the perfect one that I love? Why not? Because then, you're, the behavior would decrease very steadily because there's no unpredictability. You have to get the bad ones, the ones you're not interested in, that you can flick past, and then get the good ones, because that creates the unpredictability. And that drives your reinforcement pathways crazy.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  That floods your mesolimbic pathways with dopamine. And dopamine is not primarily a neurochemical of reinforcement. It's a chemical of motivation and pursuit. It tells your brain, this is something worth pursuing.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  The outcome of that, of course, is being a reward. So when you get intermittent reinforcement in your pocket, that is exceptionally addictive. I mean, it is exquisitely addictive. It takes advantage of the fine architecture of your reward networks. And it's deliberately not perfect, the reels thing. Some of them, yes, okay, some of them are about testing what you'll watch. But there is a deliberate dilution of the perfect algorithm for you to create unpredictability.

• 1:04:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  And that's why you

• 1:04:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Using the perfect algorithm.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's why you pick it up in the morning. I mean, it's an addiction. It uses all the same mechanisms of addiction, neural mechanisms of addiction that we know from any other addictive behavior. It's all the same mechanism.

• 1:04:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then, so a buddy of mine, right? He came to me like a month ago, basically saying, this reels shit. He's like, he's in the doom scroll, can't stop going at the reels. He's saying to me, I need to delete Instagram. I just fucking can't do it. And this was a conversation we had about a month ago. Since then, he got a job that gives him a good sense of meaning and he's at it all day long. And then I said to him, how are you getting on with the reels thing you were talking about? He's like, oh, that's not really a problem anymore. And I took from that that something gave him a sense of meaning and purpose. And that allowed him to go, no thanks. I mean, is there something there?

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's easy, it's soothing. It is

• 1:05:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's the thing, do we need something to soothe? Does it feed upon people who are in pain?

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  What is distracting and it's easy and it's nice. And it interestingly, you don't feel good when you finish.

• 1:05:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  No.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  After an hour, half an hour.

• 1:06:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  It is and then judgment and shame comes in because it's like.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  This is a key thing.

• 1:06:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  What did I just do there for the hour?

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  You feel guilty, you feel ashamed of yourself, you don't want people to see you're doing it. So what does that do to you? It causes that that stress response. So what does a stress response do? If you think about the way your brain works in fairly simple terms, there's always a balance between limbic system, kind of non-conscious emotional brain areas and more conscious language based frontal cortex, executive function, planning, organizing, all that. There's always a balance between the emotional parts and the logical parts, right? So you get really terrified, the logical parts go offline, they're taken offline by the limbic system.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Your limbic system activates, your attention narrows, you get the fight or flight, we're all familiar with that.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  And over time, you can get your logical brain areas back online and you can soothe the limbic system or whatever. And that's happening to us all the time. And the limbic system is quicker, it's stronger, it's non-conscious, it happens before thought. And it's an extremely strong driver of behavior and it's not conscious.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  When you are stressed out, so you do your scrolling, you feel a bit guilty about it. What happens? Remember, your brain doesn't differentiate where information comes from internally or externally.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  So you feel the shame, you feel the guilt. You say, ah, Jesus, I've wasted another hour or sitting on my arse here, I should have gone for a walk, whatever. The limbic system activates, the prefrontal cortex goes offline. Once your prefrontal cortex goes offline, your capacity to inhibit responses diminishes. All of the good stuff goes offline. So your capacity for social control, for forward planning, for thinking to the consequences of actions, for inhibiting responses disappears. So what do you do?

• 1:08:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go back.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Ten more minutes.

• 1:08:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, and how I would experience, so like, like, I'm assuming there's a lot of, you're all resonating with this, yeah? Yeah. I experience, so if I wake up in the morning and I decide to go for 20 minutes of reels is the first thing I do in the morning, then I know afterwards I'm going to be irritable. I'm gonna be not be, I'm not gonna be happy. I'm not gonna be able to regulate my emotions as best as I would have if I didn't. Like, it is measurable. If I make that choice in the morning, no, fuck off, phone. See, it's tough. It's my job, you know? And same with you as well. You, you started posting reels recently. So when it's your job, it's really like, if I, if it wasn't my job, I simply wouldn't have it because I can see how destructive it is, but I fucking have to be there in the algorithm.

• 1:09:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  But like,

• 1:09:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  what I'd love to know about is, is like, I, I keep looking for the patterns, like,

• 1:09:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  post pandemic, when we entered the reels era, right? TikTok and reels. That's not the social media we knew from five, six years ago. That wasn't great either, but this is a new thing, that this continual fucking scroll. When I look at things like,

• 1:09:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  like Limerick City Centre is, is empty. Now, there's a few reasons for that. Online shopping destroyed everything. But also. I just remember being younger and when your neighbours were bored, they would just stand at the end of the driveway hoping that they could talk to someone. You don't, but like you don't see it anymore because that person is looking at reels now. I'm just wondering how much, and here's another fucking mad one now, but. So how long has Tinder been around for? Like what, 10, 10, 12 years, right? So there's, there's children born and the parents met on Tinder.

• 1:10:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  So does that mean the algorithms are going to change human evolution? Sexual selection has been handed to an algorithm. And now a child is born because an algorithm decided that's sexual selection. Whereas it used to be a nightclub.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  I mean, you can argue the merits of whether the nightclub is better or worse than Tinder.

• 1:10:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  The nightclub is better because you had to overcome the fear of speaking to someone.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jesus Christ, you had to fucking dance. I'm sure they've had a few teenage dances in this room, yeah? Yeah, and you remember that. Girls here, boys there, and then some very brave person stands into the middle. That was very important, do you know?

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  And it was that in the flesh thing. And just going back to the thing about the first thing in the morning, I think it's really, it's a really interesting phenomenon. If you think about.

• 1:11:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's that fucking noise? Hold on. Sorry, it sounded like a small beetle on the microphone. Sorry, Michael, go on.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Oh, it's all good. Um, he's back.

• 1:11:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it when you talk?

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:11:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Say the word postman.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  Postman.

• 1:11:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  I hope it's not like MI5 or something trying to hack the microphones. Go on, sorry.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all good. Um, the phone thing, first thing in the morning. You know those, the fairground attraction things where you hit the bell, where you hit the thing with the sledgehammer and it reaches a certain, the thing moves up and reaches a certain point. If we think about our, our reward system like that.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  And we are built for, there's a lot of things in your day.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Which will give you reinforcement. And, you know, natural things. When you start with your phone, because it's, it sensitizes your, it's like a drug. It sensitizes your reward networks. Remember, your reward networks evolved a hundred thousand years ago.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  So they're being presented with this new external source of extreme reinforcement. So you're hitting that target and the bar is going way up to the top.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  Now you get up then and you get engaged in all of the normal things that activate your reward network. They're not getting anywhere close to that.

• 1:12:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I, if.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  So you're always feeling, you're coming up short all the time. Because your reward network, like in the case of, of exogenous sources of dopamine that you get from drugs. Your reward network gets sensitized. So you need more reinforcement to get the same feeling. And you simply cannot get that from the, the normal sources. You're hugging your children or whatever it might be.

• 1:13:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  If someone walked in there, that's what people who get addicted to coke talk about. People who I've listened to who come out of cocaine addiction. They are like, I don't use anymore, however, it's fucked up my pleasure. In other things like, so this morning, for instance, I didn't go for the phone. And I got, I walked out and I got to experience the beauty of the first proper summer's day of the year. Which is the best when it's a fucking summer's morning and it's cold and you can smell the good weather in the air. And it was just healing and magnificent. And I noted, that is the opposite of looking at Instagram reels.

• 1:13:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're both pleasurable, but this one here, this sets me up for the day. This is like eating porridge with my mind.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  It's wholesome and it's natural and it seems to tick boxes that you didn't even know were there.

• 1:14:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, and it feels right and there's no guilt and it's the opposite of guilt. It's like excellent, you got up early in the morning and enjoyed the sunshine and listened to birds.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  And it's the same at night time.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  Again, it's one of the reasons I started doing some videos is there's a lot of talk about the phone and blue light. And the evidence is emerging now that the amount of light that comes from your phone isn't enough to to activate the cells in the back of your eyes to activate the

• 1:14:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because that's the thing for years, it's like, how can you sleep if you're looking at a phone and that you think it's daylight and your brain can't go into sleep mode? Is that a bit?

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  And yeah, yeah, there isn't the lux, there isn't the amount of brightness required for you to activate those cells, to activate the suprachiasmatic nucleus, to reset, to tell your brain that this is the daytime. It's not brilliant, but it's certainly not enough. The magnitude of the effect is very small and inconsistent. Relative to the blame that's put on it by people in general. The issue with being on your phone at night time is what it does to your, to your thinking. It's agitating. It gets the wheels in motion. It gets you angry with the other crowd or whatever it might be. And a really interesting sort of observation in that respect, when you think about the algorithms, is

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  we love this gotcha stuff. That's really good social media stuff, particularly political stuff. So you will get, somebody will attend a political rally. They will give the attendee a quote or they'll try and kind of back them into a corner relatively easily. And then they'll do a, you know, they'll shrug their shoulders at the camera and say, imply like, what a loser. And the idea of watching, when you watch that, there's a certain amount of pleasure in that, right?

• 1:15:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  And the interesting thing about that is that you or I deriving pleasure from that is, that's confirmation bias. So you're paying particular attention to information that confirms your bias that all these people are X, Y and Z. Right?

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  You're watching confirmation bias, right? You're watching somebody being caught and they're exhibiting this confirmation bias. They're supporting this guy. They're only looking at the evidence of their politician that they like and they're ignoring all the bad stuff. But I, deriving pleasure from that, I'm exhibiting the exact same psychological bias. And it's extremely satisfying. And you are presented with that 11:20 at night time.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  And it simultaneously aggravates you about how stupid this other crowd are and gives you a self righteousness about how right you are to think that they are so stupid. Wouldn't it be better if more of the world was like me? So when you're getting that 40 times or 100 times before you go to sleep and you put the phone down, you can't sleep. It's nothing got to do with the blue light. It's got to do with that cognitive overload that you get from that extreme. I mean, in the normal circumstances in a day, you're rarely ever going to encounter that level of confirmation bias.

• 1:17:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  In real life.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  In real life.

• 1:17:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Never, yeah.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  It's part of our daily diet now.

• 1:17:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  But not only that, something I think about, if we think of the genocide in Gaza, right? We all witnessed violence. We all saw horrendous things happening to innocent people. And I saw so many butchered people and butchered kids. And I thought to myself, I'm not sure in human history, people didn't see this all the time. Or maybe if you were unlucky enough to see that, that that was exceptional. And now all of us were bombarded with that type of. Like even when the internet came about, there were gore videos. There were videos of people dying, but you could stay the fuck away from it.

• 1:18:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Every person in this room has that experience years ago where you went to the internet and saw the dead person and went, oh my God, that's awful. I never want to see that again. I'm staying the fuck away from that. And then the past five years, someone took it out of our control and now you're confronted with death. At Twitter or X in particular, I just took it off my fucking phone. That's nothing but gore videos now. That's not nice. And eventually I desensitized to it. That's what I didn't fucking like. Do you know what I mean? It's like, oh, okay, there's the seventh dead person I've seen today. I don't give a fuck anymore.

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  It's part of the, it's part of that big sort of process that's beginning to happen is that you're just being fed this constant

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  news. And it's generally like, if you take news, for instance, it's generally not the good news. It's somebody said something terrible or somebody did something terrible or 158 people were killed. And it's just, yeah, okay, move on to the next thing and move on to the next thing. And you kind of are desensitized and then you are slightly robotic. But remember what's happening is it's, it is, it is distressing. So you're, and, and this is going to sound slightly like a conspiracy. But you are slightly stressed and remember that balance you have. When you are stressed or anxious or afraid or lonely or ashamed or guilty.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  Cause you, you're watching this from the comfort of your lovely home and your lovely safe life. And you feel terrible about that and you have to ignore it. You have to go back and complain that your pillow isn't plump enough.

• 1:20:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  Or that the room is slightly too warm or I probably ate a bit too much dinner. And you have to square that in your head. And you do that then by basically, that's really stressful. So your, your limbic system, your emotional centers get activated by that. Your prefrontal cortex, your thinking stuff and gets slightly disempowered. And you're a sitting duck then. Because what's the best thing to get you out of that? Is, is soothe yourself with something. More social media, alcohol, buy some useless thing on Amazon. It's a, it's a, it's just, you don't have to do it much to a person.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  You just have to do it a tiny bit to a lot of people. And you'll push behaviors in a certain way. So it's a, it's a very subtle. It's a very. Population based way of changing behaviour ever so subtly. And you're giving people the tools to do it to themselves. And the, and of course, th- this sounds very dystopian and it is. And I would talk a lot about when I was doing those talks on trauma. And I spent the first half and talking about all these braids and all the people who've been through different traumas in Ireland and famine and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  And, and I would always say before the half time, I'd say it does get better, like, you know, that there's going to be an inflection point here. We want to talk about a hope. The, the interesting thing about all this is we have all the tools. In here. To sort that, if it's just, if you're just talking about the problem with social media and phone addiction and all the time we lose to it and how bad we feel. We have all the solution.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  In here. Readily at our disposal. And a, a sister Stan used to say about mindfulness. It's simple, but it's not easy. So we, we do have all the tools. So in the same ways, we paint a dystopian picture.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  When we understand how our, our brain and body interact and how much we can actually take control of things with some simple, very simple basic practices.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  It's actually quite empowering then.

• 1:22:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what I wanted to get at because. So like you did that scan on my brain like a year ago and we're going to do another one when we get the opportunity soon. But when you gave me that scan, scan of my brain and I saw, Jesus, a lot of stress going on in my brain. I knew, okay, I'm going to make meditation daily practice, not just something I do occasionally. To sit down to meditate with purpose for 15 minutes a day. And then the other thing I did was. I cycle in and out of work. So I just simply said, I'm not going to listen to music on this cycle. Every cycle in and out of work every day is going to be a mindful cycle. And what that means is with intent and purpose, I just focus on, I am cycling,

• 1:23:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  I notice a bird, I notice the sky, and checking in with all of my senses and diaphragmatic breathing the whole time. And I've been doing that and I'm waiting to see eventually, will that show up as a difference in my scan? Now, I know I'm less irritable since I started doing that. I had a very powerful thing happen to me. After about three weeks of just 15 minutes of meditation a day and a purposeful mindful cycle, as opposed to, I'm going to listen to music and worry about what has happened and what might have happened. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  And not hear the music.

• 1:23:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And not hear the music and arrive home and forget the entire cycle, you know? So when I do it mindfully, that can't happen because I'm redirecting all the time. I'm ruminating, no, no, no, you're cycling. What does it feel like here? What does it, what does the ground sound like? Notice when you go from tarmac to cobbles, oh, that feels different, that, all that type of thing. After about four weeks of that, I cycled home and the sunlight hit a certain pink and I experienced what I've now learned is called a glimmer. So a wave of intense, an intense feeling of love and safety came

• 1:24:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  over me, which some people would call that a spiritual experience. I went, no, you've been meditating for three or four weeks, Salit. My brain felt safe. And when the sun was beautiful, I went, wow, isn't that amazing? And then it was like I just got a shower of love. It was beautiful. It was amazing. But that's called a glimmer. What's, as a neuroscientist, what's going on in my brain there?

• 1:25:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, who the fuck else am I supposed to ask?

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  I mean, you're describing, I mean, that very easy to describe process, right? This kind of mindful activation, right?

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  And again, without boring people to tears about the kind of the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  When, they're not mutually exclusive, but certainly if you think about post-traumatic stress. So, you know, when we were growing up with the eighties, it was kind of the Vietnam Vet.

• 1:25:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or their nerves are at them.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  That person, their nerves are at them.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  The nerves are gone.

• 1:25:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  A schoolteacher was after hitting me. No, his nerves are at him.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  The limbic system's capacity with trauma. Yeah, this limbic system gets hyper-activated and its capacity to take the prefrontal cortex offline is increased dramatically. Why? Because the limbic system responds to things quickly. It's black and white thinking. It's extremely fast. It keeps you safe. It has a negativity bias. Brilliant. It'll keep you safe, right? So that goes online very quickly. The prefrontal cortex, which is slow, it's thinking, it's ponderous. It's thinking through lots of different options. It's way too slow in an emergency.

• 1:26:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that when we're in the shower and we get good ideas?

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  Slightly different, but

• 1:26:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, sorry.

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  Your limbic system being activated and your prefrontal cortex being offline, that's kind of traumatic response. Or that's stress or fight or flight, or whatever you want to call it. With mindfulness and meditation, mindful meditation, what you do is you strengthen the capacity of the prefrontal cortex. Physically, you strengthen its capacity to reach down to the limbic system.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  And deactivate it. What it doesn't do is it doesn't take away pain and fear and anger and worry and thinking about the future and thinking about the past and all the terrible things you did and shame and guilt. It doesn't take those things away. We should never try to chase a life without those because the limbic system is so quick.

• 1:27:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And suffering is inevitable part of human existence.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. It's the step after that that's not inevitable. So you talk, interestingly, you talk about cycling and your mind jumps to the past or the future and you have to grab it and bring it back. That's a function of the prefrontal cortex. And the more you meditate, the stronger its capacity gets.

• 1:27:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  It's, it's not that you don't think about things or you don't feel pain or fear or anger or disgust or whatever. It's, it's never not about feeling emotions, ever. It's about feeling them and say, okay, right, that's, it's Homer Simpson stepping on the nail, you know, hmm, that will require a tetanus shot. It's kind of looking at pain and saying, oh, that's exceptionally painful. And then allowing your prefrontal cortex to say, okay, that's an interesting experience. I'm back to cycling and feeling my bum on the saddle. And the more you do that, the more you allow, because if you ignore your

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  limbic system, of course, it's going to shout louder. The more you do that, the more you bring your prefrontal cortex online, the stronger it gets. And then when you are learning to, as my father-in-law very eloquently described it, defang the tiger. When you defang that tiger, your prefrontal cortex comes online. These then are the conditions that John Cleese talks about, Ken Robinson talks about, that we're talking about here around in the podcast. It's under these conditions. They are necessary, not sufficient, but these conditions are necessary.

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  For the diffuse activation of what we now know as the default mode network and other networks, these conditions need to be met for all these other networks to activate. And what you're experiencing then in this context is the limbic system is having its say, it's being soothed by the prefrontal cortex, you're not ignoring it, you're strengthening your capacity to deal with it and say, that's fine, that's okay. Get to that point then, now you've laid the conditions for your normal, natural, inherent, inbuilt curiosity, wonder

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  of the experience around you. The religious person will call it God, the spiritual person will call it spiritual, every person calls it a different thing, but you experience it as this kind of whole body joy or the glimmer of it.

• 1:29:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  The whole bodiness of it, it wasn't just a happiness.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  You could nearly cry with that.

• 1:30:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. And afterwards, the reflection I had on the cycle home, because it was so powerful, is I then experienced a sadness and the sadness was, fuck it, I haven't felt that since before the pandemic. That was the sadness. So, and I knew that fucking pandemic fucked me up, needing to be, when it got to the point where, oh, here's some groceries, better disinfect them, you know what I mean? And we were all doing that, we were all fucking disinfecting groceries. When you're conducting yourself in ways that would be seen as mentally unhealthy in any other context, that was like, I had agoraphobia when I was 19 and

• 1:30:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  I overcame agoraphobia. And when it got to the pandemic, I had to behave as an agoraphobic person because it was the appropriate response to the situation. That fucked me up. It's, oh, I'm supposed to be afraid. Oh, there is something outside that's dangerous. Oh, you know what I mean? And I couldn't parse it. It's like, this is actually a reality. And I coped and coped and coped until it left me in what I would say a hypervigilance. So by about a year into the pandemic, if a postman came to the door in the morning and knocked, I would wake up with in a jump scare. A knock on the door meant someone was kicking it down to kill me. That was my immediate response,

• 1:31:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  you know? I mean, are we seeing any data from the pandemic about, I think it's fair to say we all have a little T-trauma from it. And then the people, of course, obviously who lost someone have the big T-trauma. But for the rest of us, for all that shit we were dealing with.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know the literature, or if anything, if we've, what the data is, but we, even if there is, whatever data is there is not going to be sufficient, I think, now. It's too early for us to see. We'll, I think we'll only see the effects of it as time goes on.

• 1:32:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just to take it into context, too, one thing I used to think about during the pandemic is, imagine if the pandemic just happened to one person. That would have been like this massive news story. It's like, there's one person and they're not allowed to leave their house for a year and they have to do this. Everyone would descend and, oh my God, isn't that terrible? But because we all experienced it together, that somehow possibly flattened the context a bit.

• 1:32:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I mean, I think the pandemic did different things to different people. I mean, I was working in the Mater Hospital at the time and of course, you know, there was a lot of, you could see the immediate sort of, you know, acute medical effects, I suppose, of it. But I remember the funerals of people in, from down home, the first funerals in the pandemic, when there were only 10 people allowed to, to get into the church or whatever. And.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  I remember the

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  the phenomenon of people saying, okay, we we have a formula for funerals here, right? And when I reflect on my own father's death, for instance, four years ago. And it was in May of 2022. And he died on the 26th, that was a Thursday. And on the Saturday, he had the removal. And then, obviously, I remember the dates very readily because my father had died. But the other reason the date sits in my mind is it was a Champions League final. And Liverpool were playing in it.

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  And the removal was at five o'clock and it went on until, or it was five o'clock, I think it went on until 11 or it went on half the night. And I remember friends of mine who were Liverpool fans standing in the queue. And the Champions League matches on in the pub there and they didn't go over. They stood and they kind of inched forward for three or four hours, kind of watching the match, you know, with the phone down at the side. And to talk to you for four seconds, to kind of mumble something out.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  Because we know that in that moment, there is some ritualistic kind of healing that happens. When somebody has stood in, stood there and shook your hand and walked out the door. Or stood at the front door of the house or ate a triangle sandwich or whatever it might be. There's a ritual, there's a healing in that ritual.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  And the thing that stands out to me most was that the people who missed that.

• 1:34:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  The funerals with only 10 people. And on our way, what people started to do was as the remains would be taken home, people would stand outside their house or stand at the end of the road. And we've retained that tradition now, actually, at home, that people will come out. So I'll, I'll sometimes go home. And my mother will say, we'll go up to the head of the road, such and such one is passing.

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  And the hearse will come by and we'll stand there and kids will have a little candle or whatever. And so we've had this incredible kind of trauma. And I don't think we know the effects of that on us as individuals. And it had disproportionately large effects on some people. Say you talk about like having agoraphobia. I mean, that's the pandemic is kind of like a tinderbox for that. Then it just sets the whole thing off. And then you can go down through the layers of things that we missed. And the people who are traumatized and re-traumatized by it. And the things that they're missing.

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  And I use the funeral example just to to point to something really subtle that we take no notice of in the day to day. But when it was taken away from us, you realize, oh, Jesus, this is a huge part of who we are and what we do. And it has a huge meaning and it has a huge significance in the moment. And I can't do it now. And now I don't know what to do. Do I send them a WhatsApp? Sorry if you're lost. It doesn't seem to have the same effect when you send a GIF instead of standing to just shake hands and say, sorry to hear about Tom and move on to the next one and the next one and the next one.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  So I think the layered loss will only come with time. And it has affected different people differently, certainly. And it has affected the different generations. I think that's the thing that we're going to see is the people who are in school in those formative awkward teenage years, where you have to learn the hard way to be sort of embarrassed by your voice and your body and your awkwardness and your inability to speak to people. Well, you know, we've a generation of people who've not been forged in that kind of horrible environment, which ultimately can often benefit you. I don't think we'll see the effects of that for a time.

• 1:37:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even now, if you look at the manosphere discourse that's happening at the moment and the explosion of young men going towards horrendously toxic influencers. And some people are contextualizing that with the age of these young men. Eighteen, nineteen, what age were they during the pandemic? You know? And before I take questions from the audience, like one thing that always jumps out at me is.

• 1:38:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  People were radicalised during the pandemic, right? If I'd have sat in front of this audience in 2018 and said, "You're gonna lose your uncle, your uncle won't be invited to Christmas dinner because he won't shut the fuck up about how much he loves Trump." People would have just, "No fucking way." But everyone lost somebody to complete polarisation. Someone became a hardcore conspiracy theorist or a fucking racist and you just had to not deal with them anymore. And that's a very common story. And we saw it happening with a lot of people and it was a pandemic thing. Was that, do you think that was a trauma response?

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  I think it's partly got to do with the fact that you could amplify that signal very readily with the phone and social media. Those radical people have always existed. In the same way as violence has always existed.

• 1:38:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  And the horrendous treatment of each other by us has always existed. The difference is, of course, we're like with violence, for instance, and wars, we are being fed it constantly, constantly, constantly. And similarly with the, you know, the people who won't shut up about Trump or whatever.

• 1:39:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or even flat earth.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just has a, it has a platform now. It's easy to get it out there.

• 1:39:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  One thing I witnessed is, so I did a podcast recently, basically, I've been using the internet for 40 years, 1996. So I've seen it all and I remember like mad, crazy racists and shit used to exist 15 years ago on the internet, but they were a small circle of loud people. Something that changed was when Facebook groups became a thing. So when people found themselves in a group where they're, they're being rewarded and amplified within this group for extreme beliefs, that's when you start, it started to emerge and you saw it on the streets. And you start to see people you know who it's, "I can't have a chat with them anymore." You know what I mean?

• 1:40:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Nothing I can say can get through to them. They're fully radicalised and they think that I'm the opposite of them and I have to just stay away. That 2014, like impossible to think of that happening.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  They didn't have the in-group.

• 1:40:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it, it's the in-group, there's something about the group thing, the online group.

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, even in the most positive circumstances, we are,

• 1:40:36Speaker 03

  we are subject to the forces of the in-group and the out-group. You know, with your children, you know, they're my in-group, those other children are not in my in-group. And, and even things like oxytocin, everybody loves talking about oxytocin as a love hormone, right?

• 1:40:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it bullshit?

• 1:40:51Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it's partly true.

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Like the difference between men and women is related to sensitivity rather than amounts per se.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  But oxytocin increases the in-group, out-group dynamic. So it makes you care more for these.

• 1:41:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  We can get oxytocin from pets, from dogs. I mean, it is that when you make that little connection, there is oxytocin and that's the love hormone.

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, I mean, and that's certainly one way.

• 1:41:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even when you're having pints with your mates, there's a bit of oxytocin.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. It's just that men are slightly less sensitive to it than women are. And, and it drives pro-social behaviour in the, but in the in-group, not in the out-group. So, so we are, we are sensitive to these kind of forces. But then we are presented with a universe in which anything is possible, in which you can find anybody and you can say anything. And under normal circumstances, if you think just purely in terms of reward and punishment, absolutely wild ideas or racist ideas or homophobic ideas or whatever, would typically, typically, I mean, now not always, but would typically find very little reinforcement

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  in, in, in typical environments.

• 1:42:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, yeah, in real-life sort of situations.

• 1:42:11Speaker 03

  Somebody would say, look, please, you know, please, or you'd be excluded or whatever it would be.

• 1:42:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you did it in the fucking pub. You know what I mean? If you go to the pub and decide I'm gonna nail a fucking swastika to the wall.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, somebody will take you aside, or somebody will punch you in the face, or, you know.

• 1:42:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it's true, it's true. There's so much shit that you see online, even.

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  If you don't have that reinforcement online, you have other people like you.

• 1:42:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even someone, I don't know, fucking Jedward get a lot of hate. I have no problem with Jedward. I love Jedward. But if you look at comments under Jedward's videos, you stupid fucking pricks, I hate you.

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you said that in a pub, someone's gonna go, what's the problem, man? It's just a pair of heads.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, relax.

• 1:42:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what I mean? What's the problem? Why are you getting so angry?

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's no immediate punishment, and also then there's amplification and reinforcement, and there's identity, and there's camaraderie, and then there's connection, and then there's identity, and then there is something against which I can, I can exist in relation to my opposition to these people. And that's an identity piece I have. And interestingly, you know, you talk about not having social media, whatever, and being able to find joy in all these other things. It's, it's being able to, the difficulty, which is, the thing which is simple but not easy, is to try and establish an identity which exists in and of itself, as opposed to

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  in opposition to something else. I hate that crowd, or I don't like this person, or that fellow's, or whatever. That identity is way easier. And it's really, like we're talking about with confirmation bias, it's very satisfying to have that identity, to be anti-Trump. It's a satisfying identity. And it's extremely easy to form it, because you can listen to things and say, I don't like those things, and look at all these other people who don't like them. So I can, we can all share this dislike.

• 1:44:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  As opposed to nuance and disagreement and thinking.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, a- a- as opposed to having an identity of what you actually stand for or who you are or whatever it might be.

• 1:44:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, right. As opposed to something internal.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  My identity.

• 1:44:22Speaker 03

  And the musician, I see, okay. And the nuance is, the fact is, most people are reasonable people. Most of the time. Most people are genuinely lovely. If you were stuck for something, most people will help you out. Most of the time. We, we all experience that and know that.

• 1:44:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  The example that I use for that a lot of the time is if you're driving in a car and you almost bump into someone, you go, yo fucking prick, you stupid cunt. And the other person does the same thing within that car. But if you're in the streets and you accidentally bump into a stranger, you have this lovely, happy, empathic dance where you go, ooh. And you, but it's true. And you make a little mini friend with a stranger.

• 1:45:10Speaker 03

  You do.

• 1:45:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  The same thing has happened. It's just when you're in the car, you have that, the disinhibiting effect.

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's a protection between you and.

• 1:45:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  A protection thing, you know. So I, I, I love thinking of that example of, now I understand with cars, there's money involved and shit like that. But still, we all love that little, you almost bump into a stranger and make a mini friend.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  And, and there's also a bit of identity in the car as well, don't forget.

• 1:45:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's true.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  Because I have this one.

• 1:45:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:45:36Speaker 03

  And you have that one.

• 1:45:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  And I have, I have grouped all of you people who drive that type of car.

• 1:45:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a big thing. That's a big thing. Um, Dr. Michael Keane, I could fucking chat to you all night. This has been absolutely gorgeous.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  Um. Thank you.

• 1:45:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Really enjoyed that.

• 1:45:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Galway, you were absolutely lovely. Thank you so much. And thank you for coming along, even though I got the chicken pox on my balls.

• 1:46:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dog bless. Go in peace.

• 1:46:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck it. I'm not even gonna add context. I forgot about that.

• 1:46:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm not even gonna add context to what I said at the end of that podcast. I'm not, I'm not even gonna explain it. You had to have been in the wrong. I forgot I said that.

• 1:46:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  All right, look.

• 1:46:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was a wonderful chat with the magnificent Dr Michael Keane. Check him out, all right? I'll catch you next week with a hot take. In the meantime, rub a dog. Genuflect to a swan and wink at an oar arm.

• 1:46:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dog bless.

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