Protecting My Attention At The Dopamine Carnival
What the hell is going on with our brains? It seems like the algorithms have already taken over and the scientific literature is catching up with the actual impact technology is having.
Here are some of the more surprising results I’ve read:
- Having your phone in the same room while doing cognitive work reliably drops your memory, attention, and overall cognitive performance.
- People are forgetting their intentions when scrolling, with TikTok being the most effective at doing this. It takes 25 minutes to get back to focusing on a task, but only a few seconds to lose that focus.
- You can reverse up to 10 years of age-related cognitive decline simply by blocking mobile data on your phone for 2 weeks.
- Using ChatGPT on cognitive tasks can reduce your brain connectivity by up to 50% and reduce your ability to recall information about the task by 8x.
- Developers actually take up to 19% longer when coding with AI than without it, but self-report that they were able to complete tasks 20% faster.
What I’m doing:
- I avoid checking my phone 1 hour after I wake up and 1 hour before bed.
- I don’t take my phone into the bathroom.
- 10 minute app timers on any problematic apps.
- I count to 120 while laying down or sitting with my eyes closed every day. Yes, this is basically a very low commitment meditation session.
- I don’t rely on “willpower” or “discipline” - I try to design each day with intention, the day before and utilize pen/paper + calendar blocks.
- Centaur guardrails for AI: The same study above on ChatGPT usage did not find a neural drop-off but maintained 40% increase in quality when users decide in advance the subtasks for the LLM.
- I can imagine a similar benefit for coding if you are actually learning from and critically reading the output (ie. NOT doing what people are defining as vibe coding)
PS. They call it centaur guardrails because it’s AI on the bottom, human on the top. Nice.
PSS. I stumbled on this elegant box you put phones into and it blocks all radio communications. You can also buy a dupe on Amazon without the blocking features and just a lock instead.