This Week in SLEKE: Issue #2
This Week in SLEKE: Issue #2. A UC Irvine professor sheds light on how our devices affect our brains.
Happy Friday Everyone,
This week, we are recommending the tremendous work from an author and researcher in the Attention Span space. Gloria Mark has a PhD from Columbia University in Psychology, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction. She writes a great newsletter here on Substack titled, The Future of Attention. The below quote is from one of her recent pieces titled, "Our brain is shaped by what we feed it: How a TikTok habit rewires our brain."
, PhD, Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine."Our brains are built for growth. Every day, new brain cells emerge with the potential to expand our memory, sharpen our thinking, and help us adapt to an ever-changing world. But just like seeds need the right conditions to grow, these new neurons require stimulation to survive. When we spend hours passively scrolling through social media, we're not getting that deep stimulation, and the brain's growth potential stagnates. There's a reason why mental habits formed online can crowd out richer, more reflective modes of thought: they literally rewire our brains."
She is doing yeoman’s work in her research on the effects of our devices on our attention span and critical thinking faculties. As the smartphone nears two decades since its invention (the iPhone in 2007), we are starting to get a much clearer picture of the deleterious effects these devices have on the User. Due in large part to the findings and research of people like Mark.
Mark’s findings align well with the rationale of our philosophy at SLEKE: If our brain is shaped by what we feed it, we need to be more discerning about which devices we allow to feed us. That’s where our phone comes in: It's built intentionally to encourage communication and utility-based usage only. It enhances productivity and operates as a sort of Swiss Army knife, equipping the user with everything they need to succeed in their highly connected lives, but that's the extent of it. It is a tool to help facilitate real life.
Back to Dr. Mark’s piece, she highlights the concept of the cell assembly vis-à-vis memory, how we learn, and how we form habits. A concept from Donald Hebb, considered the father of neuropsychology and neural networks.
“When specific receptors in the brain are activated, then they will slowly form a group, or assembly. When a person perceives something—say a face, then it activates a group of neurons in the brain. When these neuronal synapses fire together repeatedly in close temporal proximity, they eventually form a network of synaptic connections that strengthen with more firing.”
Mark gave the example of meeting a music promoter and having a lively conversation with them. You see a photograph of them in a magazine a week later and immediately recognize them. That’s because “the original memory formed a cell assembly”.
These cell assemblies also help to explain our behavior and habits. Specifically, we can look into how they illuminate our habits with smartphones and social media. As most of us have had these devices in our pockets for the past decade or more, our repeated exposure to notifications created a very clear reward system. Somewhat unbeknownst to us, we’ve been on the other end of a quasi-Skinnerian reward reinforcement relationship with our devices. This is especially true regarding applications like TikTok, which serve up posts that are meticulously crafted to be emotionally charged. One moment you might be laughing, and the next moment you might be watching a sad story about an animal. It can be pretty disorienting, but it reward us with novelty and emotional resonance, however shallow it may be.
This, consequently, affects our brains. As Mark continued in her piece:
"Eventually, just seeing the notification—or hearing the ping of a text—activates the entire reward-related cell assembly. These embedded patterns become habits: reaching for your phone, clicking on TikTok, reacting to a post—all sometimes before you're fully aware you've done it."
Because of the work of researchers like Mark, we as Users are now armed with more information to inform our choices. We know that smartphones incessantly pull at the threads of our attention. We also know that the addictive elements of modern mobile devices are intentionally designed. Many of these features have been engineered by sophisticated behaviorists with one goal in mind: keep the user on-screen for as much time as possible. Our attention has been monetized and commoditized. The more time on a given app, the more advertising dollars.
At SLEKE, we believe part of the remedy to this problem is in the design of the device. Just as important as what you include on a device is what you omit. There are countless articles full of strategies, tricks, and tips to help ensure your smartphone isn’t keeping you over-engaged or shattering your attention span. It’s almost a cottage industry at this point and the tips and tricks are all the same. That’s not to say these strategies aren’t helpful and well-intentioned. But with the SLEKE phone, none of these tricks are necessary. The device itself is the remedy. We believe this is a more elegant and effective solution.
This belief drove our founders, Brennan and Austin, to create SLEKE in the first place. "We started SLEKE because we were frustrated by the endless pings and digital noise that make untangling functions from distractions so difficult to navigate on existing mobile platforms," said Brennan. "With OdysseyOS (the OS on SLEKE) simple phones, we filtered out the clutter to create a pure and purpose-driven mobile experience in between a smartphone and a dumb/feature phone."
Luckily, we have savvy people like Gloria Mark, and a host of others, who have pinpointed the areas where our smartphones and other devices undermine our attention. With that knowledge in mind, we can engage in the intentional design of a product that explicitly does not do those things.
“Hello World,” says the SLEKE phone.
We believe it's important to highlight good work on these topics as they directly relate to the SLEKE philosophy and why our phone was built in the first place. This research validates what drove our founders to create SLEKE. And the more awareness we can create, the more empowered the User can become.
At SLEKE, we see the stark reality that is our current smartphone environment as an uplifting opportunity. There is a gap in the market that we hope to address. We can show Users that are frustrated with the current smartphone paradigm that they have another choice as a consumer. Instead of wrestling with our devices that are addictive by design, we can simply opt out. We can reach for something that is designed with intention. A device that respects the User and their humanity.
Thanks for reading and we will see you next week!
Do Cool Stuff.
~SLEKE
P.S. Please subscribe and share if you feel that our message is valuable. We’d also love to hear from other creators in the intentional tech space. Let’s build a new tech stack that elevates the User rather than monetizing our attention.
What We’re Reading and Watching
One of our founders, Brennan, is highlighting this compelling piece of research from MIT Media Lab. The paper itself is quite long, and it looks into how ChatGPT and LLM’s lead to “cognitive debt”, which can significantly reduce brain connectivity and cause impaired memory recall. For example, one finding was that 83% of LLM users couldn’t correctly quote from their own essays vs. only 11% in other groups. Long story short, this is another area where we must use discernment when deciding how we use our minds!
This may be a bit of a hyperbolic headline, but it’s a great follow-up to the research piece from MIT. The talk features two prominent experts in brain health and computational neuroscience. They discuss the MIT research as well as the merits and risks of using ChatGPT and other LLM’s. It’s also available here on YouTube.
Reclaiming Conversation in the Age of AI
In the same realm of the research from MIT, this is a preface to the 10th anniversary edition of Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation. Turkle warns about the dangers of AI chatbots replacing human interaction. We have, as a people, undergone a colossal shift in communication norms. The last two decades saw phone calls and in-person conversation shift meaningfully towards social media and texting. Are we at risk of going further away from others with the rise of AI companions? Turkle argues that in doing so, we risk losing essential human capacities for empathy, self-reflection, and authentic connection. At SLEKE, we definitely believe that the call to Do Cool Stuff includes getting out in the world more with our fellow human beings. Less phone, more life.