Name: Your brain wasn’t built to hold this much information | Richard Cytowic
Uploaded: 2026-02-16T18:06:38.000Z
Duration: 19 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Everyone agrees that our attention spans have gone to hell.

Adverbs of degree

I call it the tyranny of attention because there's so many demands on our attention coming from so many different directions that we are simply overwhelmed and we don't have the mental bandwidth to cope with it.

I'm Richard Cytoic, professor of neurology at George Washington University and an author.

Coping with Digital Distractions and and Sensory Overload.

Your Stone Age brain in the age of screens, Washing machines and appliances change every five or ten years.

Evolution doesn't say, oh, it's time for another memory module or time for another language module.

The modern brain is no different than that of our distant Stone Age ancestor.

That is, once the brain arrives on a solution that's good enough, it keeps it and then adds on new features.

Sort of like a New England add on house where you add one room after another and it looks sort of funky, but

Working memory is like the mental scratch pad where we hold whatever we're focused on at the moment, whether it's remembering a short grocery list or trying to remember an access code for an app.

And it's limited in what it can do, how much it can hold.

Everything that we do costs us in terms of energy expenditure.

And ATP is the fuel that fuels every cell in the body.

Creatures all over the animal kingdom all rely on ATP.

It's like the bedrock of energy transformation.

So for example, if you have to go take a test, you're not doing anything, you're just thinking.

But at the end of three or four hour section, you're really beat, you're tired because you have expended a lot of mental energy.

You want to be careful not to waste your attention or spend too much.

It's like a bank account that can go into the, into the red very easily.

The brain operates within a fixed energy limit bandwidth.

And there's no amount of diet, exercise or Sudoku puzzles that can increase that.

So we have to learn to live with the amount that we have.

Listening to one person speak takes up about half my bandwidth.

And trying to listen to two people at once is impossible because then we've exceeded it.

Now you might think that as you're scrolling or swiping that you're not really doing much, but

because that bandwidth is so small and narrow, there's not much left over.

And most of the energy goes towards maintaining the physical structure by pumping sodium and potassium ions across membranes.

And that leaves very, very little left over.

A great example is the Oscar fiasco in which they named the wrong Best picture for best picture.

Just as Emma Stone was walking off the stage, Cunanan took a picture and tweeted.

And that's the exact moment that he should have been discarding the envelope and lining up the next one.

Basically, he flooded his working memory.

That's what led to them announcing the wrong best picture.

The brain and the peripheral nervous system is really one big changed detector.

That is, it responds to any change in the current environment.

Now, back on the savannah, things didn't change very much except the constellations overhead and the seasons.

Now, of course, we're, we've got change everywhere bidding for our attention now, I mean, take in terms of attention and distraction.

I often say that the screens are like secondhand smoke.

And so in the fact that whoever's in the line of sight is affected by it.

And we've all experienced this in waiting rooms and airport lounges, those huge monitors with their moving images, they demand to be looked at.

And trying not to look costs energy as much.

I think the only way around that would be to put in earplugs and put on a blindfold so you're not distracted by this stuff, this what I call forced viewing.

Is it ironic that you're looking at me on a screen and the answer is not if you're just focused on my talk right now.

But if you're trying to do three things or five things at once, then your focus is really shot.

I think the term, you know, dopamine reward is being thrown around too loosely.

It's sort of a shorthand for anything that feels good.

So, I mean, it's, we're getting, we're getting these, these squirts all day long.

But there are two pleasure circuits that exist in the brain.

One related to wanting and reward, and the other to pleasure and liking.

The two systems differ in how easy they are to trigger.

Now, the wanting and reward system is very easy to trigger.

Its network is diffused widely throughout the brain and basically in every crevice.

And this is the basis of the hedonic treadmill.

As soon as we get something that we want, we want something else.

Even Aristotle pointed this out long ago on the Other hand, the opioid system is smaller in its expanse in the brain, is harder to trigger.

And this is the basis of addictions, really.

Studies show that behavioral addictions, such as excessive swiping at your screen or TikTok addiction, activates the same brain areas as do physical addiction.

So alcohol, cocaine, other kinds of drugs.

This has been shown in many experiments where the anxiety level rises minute by minute as you take their phone away.

The tech giants know that there's only 1440 minutes in a day, and

so they fight ruthlessly for our eyeballs.

And they want to keep us glued to their platform as long as possible because that's how they make their money.

I mean, Reed Hastings of Netflix said it long ago, he said, sleep is their biggest competitor.

Not Amazon prime, not Hulu, not the other streaming services.

They have become expert in exploiting positive, intermittent reinforcement.

yet when I see that next episode in five seconds, it's like, okay, what time is it?

This is the same mechanism that's used by slot machines in casinos to keep us playing.

That is, we scroll and we get a hit or something interesting or a good piece of news, and

And so we said, oh, let's get another one, and we keep going.

But the rewards come infrequently and on an unpredictable schedule.

So you are physically addicted as well as behaviorally addicted.

Well, the most effective thing would be to turn the phone off.

But that also turns out to be the hardest thing for people because they have what's called nomophobia, a fear of being without their phone.

To the whoosh that happens when a text message comes in.

We really have trained ourselves like Pavlov's dogs.

When these stimuli come in, the screen lights up, we get the whoosh.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Your brain wasn’t built to hold this much information | Richard Cytowic

sort

fatigue

essential

mental