Brain Hacking

sixty minutes rewind have you ever wondered if all those people you see staring intently at their smartphones nearly everywhere and at all times are addicted to them according to a former Google product manager you're about to hear from Silicon Valley is engineering your phone apps and social media to get you hooked he's one of the few tech insiders to publicly acknowledge that the company is responsible for programming your phones are working hard to get you and your family to feel the need to check in constantly some programmers call it brain hacking and the tech world

would probably prefer you didn't hear about it but Tristan Harris openly questions the long-term consequences of it all and we think it's worth putting down your phone to listen this thing is a slot machine how's that a machine well every time I check my phone I'm playing the slot machine to see what did I get this is one way to hijack people's mindset create a habit to form a habit what you do is you make it so when someone pulls a lever sometimes they get a reward an exciting reward and it turns out that this

design technique can be embedded inside of all these products the rewards Harris is talking about or a big part what makes smart phones so appealing the chance of getting likes on Facebook and Instagram cute emojis and text messages and new followers on Twitter there's a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using for the product for as long as possible yeah what are what kind of techniques are used so snapchats the most popular messaging service for teenagers and they invented this feature called streaks which shows the number of days in a row

that you've sent a message back and forth with someone so now you can say well what's the big deal here well the problem is that kids feel like well now I don't want to lose my streak but it turns out that kids actually when they go on vacation are so stressed about their streak that they actually give their password to like five other kids to keep their streaks going on their behalf and so you could ask when these features are being designed are they designed to most help people of their life or their being designed

because they're best at hooking people into using the product is is Silicon Valley programming apps are they programming people inadvertently whether they want to or not they're shaping the thoughts and feelings and actions of people they are programming people they oh there's always this narrative that technology's neutral it's up to us to choose how we use it this is just not true technology's not neutral it's not neutral they want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time because that's how they make their money it's rare for a tech insider to

be so blunt Tristen Harris believes someone needs to be a few years ago he was living the Silicon Valley dream he dropped out of a master's program at Stanford University to start a software company four years later Google bought him out and hired him as a product manager it was while working there he started to feel overwhelmed honestly I was just bombarded in email and calendar invitations and just the overload of what it's like to work place like Google I was asking when is all of this adding up to like an actual benefit to my

life and I ended up making this presentation it was kind of a manifesto and it basically said you know look never before in history have a handful of people at a handful of technology companies shaped how a billion people think and feel every day with the choices they make about these screens his 144 page presentation argued that the constant distractions of apps and emails are weakening our relationships to each other and destroying our kids ability to focus it was widely read inside Google and caught the eye of one of the founders Larry Page but Harris

told us it didn't lead to any changes and after three years he quit and it's not because anyone is evil or has bad intentions it's because the game is getting attention at all costs and the problem is it becomes this race to the bottom of the brainstem where if I go lower on the brainstem to get you you know using my product I win but it doesn't end up in the world we want to live in we don't end up feeling good about how using all this you call this a race at the bottom of

the brainstem it's a race to the most primitive emotions we have fear anxiety loneliness all these things absolutely and that that's again because in the race for attention I have to do whatever works it absolutely wants one thing which is your attention now he travels the country trying to convince programmers and anyone else who listen that the business model of tech companies needs to change he wants products designed to make the best use of our time not just grab our attention do you think parents understand the complexities of what their kids are dealing with when

they're dealing with their their phone dealing with apps and social media no and I think this is really important because there's a narrative that oh I guess they're just doing this like we used to gossip on the phone but what this misses is that your telephone in the 1970s didn't have a thousand engineers on the other side of the telephone who are redesigning it to work with other telephones and then updating the way your telephone worked every day to be more and more persuasive that was not true in the 1970s how many Silicon Valley insiders

are there speaking out like you are not that many we reached out to the biggest tech firms but none would speak on the record and some didn't even return our phone call most tech companies say their priority is improving user experience something they call engagement but they remain secretive about what they do to keep people glued to their screens so we went to Venice California where the body builders on the beach are being muscled out by small companies that specialize in what Ramsey Brown calls brain hacking a computer programmer he now understands how the brain

works knows how to write code that will get the brain to do certain things Ramsey Brown studied neuroscience before co-founding dopamine labs a startup crammed into a garage the company is named after the dopamine molecule in our brains that aids in the creation of desire and pleasure Brown and his colleagues write computer code for apps used by fitness companies and financial firms the programs are designed to provoke a neurological response you're trying to figure out how to get people coming back when should I make you feel a little extra awesome to get you to come

back into the app logger the computer code he creates finds the best moments to give you one of those rewards which have no actual value but Brown says trigger your brain to make you want more for example on Instagram he told us sometimes those likes come in a sudden rush there's holding some of them back for you to let you know later in a big burst like hey here's the 30 likes we didn't mention from a little while ago so though all of a sudden you get a big burst of Lights yeah but why that

moment there's some algorithm somewhere that predicted hey for this user right now who's experimental subjects 7 9 B 3 and experiment 231 we think we see an improvement in his behavior if you give it to him this bit in this burst instead of that first when Brown says experiments he's talking generally about the millions of computer calculations being used every moment by his company and others to constantly tweak your online experience and make you come back for more you're a part of a controlled set of experiments that are happening in real time across you and

millions of other people we're guinea pigs you're Kenny thinks you were guinea pigs in the Box pushing the button and sometimes getting likes and they're doing this to keep you in there the longer we look at our screams the more data companies collect about us and the more ads we see ad spending on social media has doubled in just two years - more than 30 1 billion dollars you don't pay for Facebook advertisers pay for Facebook you get to use it for free because your eyeballs are what's being sold there so that's a way to

look at that you're not the customer for face you're not the customer you don't send a check to Facebook but coca-cola does brown says there's a reason text and Facebook use it continue with scroll because it's a proven way to keep you searching longer you spend half your time I face with the scoring to find one good piece worth looking at it's happening because they're engineered to become addictive you're almost saying like there's an addiction code yeah that is the case the since we've figured out to some extent how these pieces of the brain that

handle addiction are working people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps dinner-table could be a technology free zone while brown is tapping into the power of dopamine psychologist Larry Rowe and his team at California State University Dominguez Hills are researching the effect technology has on our anxiety levels looking at the impact of Technology through the brain Rosen told us when you put your phone down your brain signals your adrenal gland to produce a burst of a hormone called cortisol which has an evolutionary purpose cortisol triggers a

fight-or-flight response to danger how does cortisol relate to a mobile device a phone what we find is the typical person checks their phone every 15 minutes or less and half of the time they check their phone there's no alert no notification it's coming from inside their head telling them gee I haven't checked in Facebook in a while I haven't checked on this Twitter feed for a while I wonder if somebody commented on my Instagram post that then generates cortisol and it starts to make you anxious and eventually your goal is to get rid of that

anxiety so you check in so the same hormone that made primitive man anxious and hyper aware of his surroundings to keep him from being eaten by lions is today compelling Rozen students and all of us to continually peek at our phones to relieve our anxiety when you put the phone down you don't shut off your brain you just put the phone down can I be honest with you right now I haven't paid attention what you're saying because I just realized my phone is right down by my right foot and I haven't checked it in like

10 minutes and it makes you anxious I'm a little anxious yes we found out just how anxious in this experiment conducted by Rosen's research colleague Nancy Cheever so the first thing I'm gonna do is apply these electrodes to your fingers well I watched a video a computer tracked my new changes in my heart rate and perspiration what I didn't know was that Cheever was sending text messages to my phone which was just out of reach every time a text notification went off the blue line spiked indicating anxiety caused in part by the release of cortisol

oh that one is yeah that's a huge spike right here and if you can imagine what that's doing to your body every time you get a text message you you probably can't even feel it right because it's it's such a it's a small amount of arousal that's fascinating their research suggests our phones are keeping us in a continual state of anxiety in which the only antidote is the phone is it known what the impact of all this technology use is absolutely not it's too soon this we're all part of this big experiment what is this

doing to a young man for a teenager well there's some projects going on where they're they're actually scanning teenagers brains over a 20-year period I'm looking to see what kind of changes they're finding the story will continue after this here's the reality corporations and creators of content have since the beginning of time wanted to make their content as engaging as possible Gabe zickerman has worked with dozens of companies including Apple and CBS to make their online products more irresistible he's best known in Silicon Valley for his expertise and something called gamification using techniques from video

games to insert fun and competition into almost everything on your smartphone so one of the interesting things about gamification and other engaging technologies is at the same time as we can argue that the neuroscience is being used to create dependent behavior those same techniques are being used to get people to workout you know using their Fitbit so all of these technologies all the techniques for engagement can be used for good or can be used for bad Zukerman is now working on software called onward designed to break users bad habits it'll track a person's activity and

can recommend they do something else when they're spending too much time online I think creators have to be liberated to make their content as good as possible this idea that the idea that a tech company is not going to try to make their product as persuasive as engaging as possible you're just saying that's that's not going to happen asking tech companies asking content creators to be less good at what they do feels like a ridiculous ask it feels impossible and also it's very anti capitalistic this isn't the system that we live in Ramsay Brown and

his garage start up dopamine labs made a habit breaking app as well it's called space and it creates a 12 second delay what Browne calls a moment of Zen before any social media app launches in January he tried to convince Apple to sell it in their App Store and they rejected it from the App Store because they told us any app that would encourage people to use other apps or their iPhone less was unacceptable for distribution in the App Store they actually said that to you they said that to us they did not want us

to give out this thing that was going to make people less stuck on their phones you