Category Archives: Cognition

Autism Conspiracies That Will Never Die

Futuristic megaphone broadcasting data across a neon cityscape

The other day, I read a report from a new study that reassures us that circumcision does not lead to autism.

To be honest, I didn’t even know that was a concern, but apparently two studies more than a decade ago said it might be. And many have been worried about it ever since.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that this new scientific study will be enough to allay these fears. Male circumcision will continue to be one of the many things (on a list that includes childhood vaccines, the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy, environmental toxins and Wi-Fi radiation) that some will say is linked to the dramatic increase in diagnosed autism cases in recent years.

I’m not here to take sides on this debate. I will believe what I believe and you all will most likely do the same. What I’m interested in is how autism itself and its prevalence became such a hot topic in the current debate on healthcare, because it is a perfect example of the interplay between our current media ecosystem and how we chose to inform ourselves.

First of all, here are some facts we can all probably agree on. The diagnosis of autism has skyrocketed in the past few decades. The US Center for Disease Control now estimates that 1 in 31 eight years olds are somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Twenty-five years ago, the prevalence rate of autism diagnosis was one in 150. If you look at the numbers alone, that is almost a five-fold increase. It’s hard not to ask what might be causing this explosion in autism.

However, as Mark Twain noted, there are lies, damn lies – and statistics. If you look at these numbers the natural assumption would be that something has caused the explosion of autism in the past 25 years. There must be something to blame. But most professionals would agree that most of the increase, if not all of it, is simply due to the fact that we now recognize autism and diagnose it much more often than we used to.

In fact, saying that something is causing autism to explode would be roughly analogous to saying something in the last century is causing left-handedness to explode. One hundred years ago, the incident rate of left-handedness in the general population was less than 3%. Today, it’s about 11%. There are almost four times as many lefties today as there was in 1926. But the simple reason behind that statistic is this; today left-handed people are allowed to be left-handed. In schools 100 years ago, it was beaten out of them with a cane and by tying their hand behind their back and forcing them to use their right hand. Left handedness was thought to be an omen of evil. That is why Latin-based languages use some variation of the word “sinister” to refer to anything to do with the left.

But autism lives in a special place in the conspiracy-minded heart. It has all the prerequisites of something that triggers knee-jerk reactions. It is not well understood. The cause is not fully known. It is a thing that causes understandable worry on the part of a parent. And – perhaps most of all – based on the numbers alone, it appears likely that a system we should trust has let us down.

This makes autism the perfect battle ground for information vs misinformation. Science can – and has – tried to do its best to put the conspiratorial fears about the causes of autism to rest. Study after study has come out saying that there is no link between vaccines, or Wi-Fi radiation, or – apparently – male circumcision and autism. There may be correlation, but no causation has been found.

Unfortunately, this information is delivered through the same screen as the TikTok video damning the MMR vaccine as irrefutably being the cause of the autism explosion in the past few decades. There is no qualification, no vetting of source material, no threshold of reliability to cross over before the message is streamed to us. The 10-year observational study done with impeccable methodology is summarily dismissed based on a 30 second video done in the kitchen by a 32-year-old influencer with zero medical training but who happens to have 450,000 Instagram followers.

In fact, in terms of audience reach, there is no comparison. The most popular cognitive scientist I know is Steven Pinker from Harvard, a man with a 46-year academic career who has written 17 books, most of them on how brains operate. In fact, one is literally called “How the Mind Works.” He has repeatedly debunked the link between autism and vaccination, saying that, “Vaccines are one of the best things our sorry species has ever accomplished. But the link to autism is The Lie That Never Dies.”  

His Instagram follower count? A paltry 44,000.

It was never a fair fight.

Our Digital World is No Place for the Elderly

My family is discovering – firsthand – just how the world could care less about the elderly.

My stepfather just passed away. He was just a few months shy of his 91st birthday. For the past 10 years, my sister has been looking after the official side of Dad’s life – things like his income tax, pension, healthcare and other related needs. All these things have rushed online as local service counters and real, live humans whose job it was to assist their customers have virtually disappeared. The inner workings of these programs lie on the other side of either a website or a call centre. Neither of these things are designed for the elderly. They are barely functional for any of us, including those much younger than my stepdad.

For the past decade, as Dad has aged, it has become increasingly apparent that our world is not designed for the superannuated. In the last few years, his loss of hearing made it impossible for him to understand someone talking at a normal volume in the same room, let alone someone on a telephone call. This led to him being unable to follow the gist of most conversations. My sister, who has the patience of Job, acted as translator and guide for Dad but was constantly flummoxed by bureaucratic rules and privacy regulations that left no wiggle room for the elderly. A typical phone interaction (usually after waiting over an hour on hold) would go something like this:

My sister: “Hi, I’d like to ask about my father’s income tax return for 2025.”

Phone Agent: “I’m sorry, we can only give information to the person who files the return.”

“He’s here with me. I have his permission.”

“I’m sorry, I have to speak to him.”

“He can’t hear you. That’s why I’m calling.”

“I need to hear it from him. Can you hand him the phone?”

“He won’t hear you, but sure, knock yourself out.”

(Dad puts the phone to his ear, having no idea what’s going on. You can hear the person talking but Dad just looks at us blankly. My sister takes the phone back.)

“Your dad was unable to answer the security question I asked him to verify his identity.”

“As I said – repeatedly – Dad can’t hear. Can you ask me the question and I’ll ask him?”

“I need to hear the answer from him.”

“Is there an office we can go to and talk to someone in person?”

“No, all our support functions have moved online. You can use our website. Does your dad have an online account?”

“My dad has never touched a computer in his life. How would he have an online account?”

You get the gist. These scenarios always played out along the same lines but were typically spaced out so my sister had time to regain her incredible patience before the next episode. But when a person passes, suddenly all these things must be dealt with right away. Her days have been filled with circuitous phone calls trying to tie up Dad’s loose ends, stymied at every turn by the fact that while the system didn’t support him when he was alive, it’s doubly difficult now that he’s gone. Much as I’d like to help, I live in a different province and don’t have the legal authority to deal with these issues.

My Dad was caught on the far side of the grey digital divide. For the past few decades, technology has enabled companies and government services to offload the effort required to deliver their services or products from themselves to us, their customers. We now pump our own gas, do our own banking, configure our own phone plans, administer our own insurance policies and monitor our own pensions and income tax accounts. Programs and companies have gleefully eliminated physical locations and laid off customer support people to cut costs by transferring those functions to us. The only contact we have is either through a woefully designed website (I can tell you the Canadian Revenue Agency’s website is a usability nightmare) or a call center where one-hour waits are considered the norm.

Most of us, given no alternative, grudgingly jump through the hoops required to do what we have to do, which is what these agencies and companies used to do for us as part of their job. We struggle through archaic interfaces, learn new platforms every few years, constantly have to reset passwords and scramble through our various devices and authentication apps to sneak past the impenetrable security hurdles of two step verification. J.R.R. Tolkien made gaining access to Mordor look easy in comparison.

I understand that online fraud and identity theft is a real concern, but at some point, typically north of the age of 70, it gets harder for us to keep up. As our brains age, they tend to rely more on remembered strategies and routines because learning something new gets harder and harder. The world used to reward this accumulation of knowledge with age. Now it just kicks it to the curb like last week’s trash.

There are exceptions, of course. The elderly who are familiar with computers and technology can push the grey digital divide back substantially. But this was not my dad. In his life, he was a farmer, a sawmill worker and a chimney sweep. None of those things – especially in a time several decades past – required learning how to use a computer. The world literally passed Dad by. Just how far he was left behind has become acutely apparent to us in the last few weeks.

Through this all, we keep asking ourselves one very frightening question – If it was this hard for Dad, what is it like for those elderly who don’t have a person like my sister to help them?

What happens to them?

A Short History of the Long Legacy of Literacy

A man reading an old book with a quill pen and ink in a large, wooden library

Literacy has had a good run as a definer of social status. But after over 5,000 years, from ancient Mesopotamia to today, the ability to read and write and its role as a signifier of class power might finally be passé.

This is predictable, I guess. Once something becomes universal – or nearly so – it ceases to be special.

In the earliest days of days of scratching something down on paper (or papyrus) writing was the crucial link between royalty and common folk. Rulers issued edicts that required some type of record keeping. One of the first examples we have of this is from 3100 BCE and is a clay tablet that tracked beer allocation with symbols and tally marks. This type of record keeping was entrusted to scribes and priests, making them both the messengers and recorders of gods and kings.

For the next 4500 years, literacy remained a gift restricted to the few. In 1440 AD, fewer than 10% of the population in Europe could both read and write. But then, a goldsmith in Mainz, Germany was about to change the course of literacy. Johannes Gutenberg invented the first commercially practical system of mass printing using moveable type. The first mass medium was born. But it’s impact on literacy would take a while.

In perhaps the first example of media technology being well ahead of its market, the first books mass printed tended to be aimed at the same audience as before the printing press. Books were expensive, tended to be either religious or legal and were intended for clergy, universities and wealthy household. Printing would take a few centuries before it would bring literacy to the commoner.

The way this happened is fascinating to consider when we look at the impact of mass media on society. Literacy was always a way to maintain control and was historically concentrated with the church, universities and government. But the advent of mass printing began to loosen that chokehold. It began to put pamphlets and other printed forms in more and more hands, providing a printed communication infrastructure that allowed – for the first time – the questioning of authority rather than the preservation of it.

Between the Protestant Reform movement (1500 – 1600s), the Scientific Revolution (1600 – 1700s) and the Enlightenment (1700s – 1800s), the traditional seats of power were held up for scrutiny. These interlocking movements that transformed western society were all powered by the printed word. Eventually, the Republic of Letters emerged; an international society of thinkers, scientists and philosophers that reshaped how we looked at the world. And this free-form exchange of revolutionary ideas was all communicated through the written word. Literacy began to trickle down to the common people.

In the 1800’s, we began to strive for universal literacy. Public education instilled basic reading and writing skills in much of the youth of Northern Europe but was spotty in the rest of the world. Reading for leisure began to take off, now that there was a market for newspapers, magazines and novels. Writers like Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Jane Austin and the Brontë sisters became household names. Finally – it seemed – literacy’s day had come!

But now, after waiting in the wings for thousands of years, after two short centuries, literacy seems to be waning. In a recent Atlantic essay, Rose Horowitch cites some sobering stats from recent surveys: fewer than half of all adults read a book of any kind in 2022 (from the National Endowment for the Arts). And, according to the American Time Use Survey, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day dropped from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

It’s not just that we’re reading less. We’re also reading dumber. Books are simpler, sentences are shorter and vocabularies are shrinking. Books are following the leads of movies, TV shows and video games – more sensation, less intellectualization. Many of the books that do end up on the best seller charts are actually written for young adults – aimed at those with a grade 9 reading level.

Reading anything in long form is in danger of disappearing. What has happened in this market is that the middle of the market has been squeezed out to both ends. There has been an explosion of short form content, designed to be scanned quickly and digested in bite sized pieces, ala social media. But in a weird counter to this general trend, there is still a market for long-form essays in prestigious publications. In this market driven development, numbers might be down, but engagement is up, with readers spending significantly more time with longer pieces, giving more opportunity for publishers to push ads to them.

What is generally true across the board, however, is that the golden age of the printed word appears to be over. As I myself have seen in looking at the results of hundreds of eye tracking studies, we are instinctively drawn to content that instantly piques our senses: images, sounds, moving pictures. From there it’s a coin toss where we might go next – on to the next bright shiny object or to partake in that drudgery called reading, where we actually have to think about what we’re looking at.

The Joy of Truly Playing

Mars rover with four wheels and red wiry appendages on a rocky reddish terrain.

Meet Joe McGillicudy. Joe lives on Mars and has an upside-down nose, which is fine on Mars, because it doesn’t rain there but it is dusty. Upside down noses work pretty well on Mars.

Joe doesn’t have feet, instead he has tires. That makes him fast and very quiet, which is important because Joe likes to sneak up on you and playfully grab your ankle and has been known to slip in a quick tickle now and then.

Joe McGillicudy is a game I play with my four-year-old grandson. We have both contributed to the description above. The upside-down nose was my idea. The tires instead of feet was his. And if you think this all sounds ridiculous and is a waste of valuable time – well – that’s really the point. Playing is ridiculous, especially if you’re an adult. But we should do it more.

For the past half dozen centuries, humans have been focusing on optimizing our lives. This is especially true in the past century or so. Our singular goal is to do things faster, be more focused, maximize our efficiency and strip every scrap of waste from our lives. Unstructured play has been the victim in all this. Kids barely do it anymore. And adults certainly don’t do it.

But playing – of a certain kind – is important. It creates room for surprise. It engages our imagination in a low-stress environment. It allows us to fail without fatal consequences. Playing is a real-life sandbox where we learn how to be better people: more creative, more cooperative, more understanding and more resilient. Most of all, it reintroduces serendipity into our lives. It gives us the capacity to savor the unexpected.

But play of this kind has some specific requirements. It can’t come with preset goals or pre-made rules. You have to make it up as you go along. This type of play pries open our imagination and sets our minds loose to wander and free-associate.

In the case of children, it’s the type of play that used to fill our days: building a fort with left over lumber from your dad’s workshop and no plan, turning a mound of snow in a parking lot into a kingdom to be conquered, launching a safari in your back yard or creating an interstellar spaceship from a large cardboard box.

This type of play is incredibly important for childhood development. But many of the moments children used to spend doing these things are being replaced by time in front of a screen playing a game that has been predesigned and prepackaged by a corporation, often with a for-profit agenda. The child is no longer making the rules, they are just following a path that has been set out for them. And often, they are doing so alone.

In our obsessive quest for an optimized life, adults are even less likely to spend time in unstructured “play.” One of the best ways to do this is to really play with your kids or grandkids and try seeing the world through their eyes. Try taking them to a hardware store  or thrift shop where there is no intended purchase and let them be the guide. See what you both discover.

But there are other ways: just wandering with no set destination, making something without plans or a blueprint, doing some creative improvisation through music or art, trying experimental cooking, playing a sport you’re really bad at (I admit I still have childhood trauma about this one), popping into a store at random just to see what’s on the shelves, skipping stones on a lake or turning a shovelful of dirt over in your garden and seeing what crawls out. 

Even better, find ways to “play” with others: role playing games, telling jokes and stories, going dancing, tossing a ball around or having a snowball fight.

I know – all of this sounds like a complete waste of time. And again I say – that’s the point.

The goal is to engage your mind in a way it rarely gets to do any more. As we rush to be productive, our brain gets over-trained for task accomplishment.  If you looked at a brain “at play” it would look very different than one playing a video game or scrolling a social media feed. Completely different areas would be engaged. Many of the ways we currently choose to spend time with a screen “light up” the same areas of the brain that are engaged when we’re gambling or engaging in other addictive behaviors. Some “free time” screen activities have even been shown to trigger anxiety and depression.

The biggest difference between unstructured play and many of our current past times comes in the way we’re rewarded. With unstructured play, the rewards come from inside us. We are not collecting points, climbing to the next level or competing for a bonus determined by some external party. We are just doing whatever we’re doing for fun.

You might just find that wasting time is the best way you can spend time.

My Tentative Embrace of AI

Hybrid brain model with organic roots and glowing digital network

I have dipped my toes a little further into the deep, deep waters of AI (which this week promises to get deeper with the recently announced OpenAI IPO). Here, then, are my updated thoughts on Artificial Intelligence.

For the past few months, I have been doing post-production on a documentary. The footage has been shot over the past 6 or 7 years and I have been wading through hours of interviews and other footage, writing the script, building edit sheets and – for the past month – actually doing the edits. In the process, I have tried to use AI judiciously. My rule of thumb has been this:  If I’m going to use AI, don’t be obvious about it.

Because I use Adobe tools for things like editing and some special effects, AI assistance is now built into almost everything I do. It lurks beneath the hood on pretty much every menu item and tool selection that Adobe offers. This is not the type of AI I am referring too. This built-in AI is what I call covert artificial intelligence.

I am referring to overt AI, where I have made a deliberate decision not to use the limited processing power of my own brain and have unleashed the AI Kraken to do my bidding. In my case, that has involved gathering information for the script, creating soundtracks, some video special effects and some other technical aspects.

I will say I did stop short of using AI for some special video effects which – upon viewing an example – created an uneasy feeling in my gut. Something told me I had stepped over the threshold into the realm of excessive creepiness.  When you’re dealing with people’s memories, especially of loved ones since departed, you have to tread carefully. Just because AI lets you do something, doesn’t mean you should.

But here’s my point. AI couldn’t have made that call. It couldn’t replicate my intuitive understanding of my audience, even to the point of anticipating reactions from specific individuals who I knew would be watching. AI can’t make gut calls about human consequences.

In that, it bears a resemblance to Phineas Gage.

Unless you’re a neuroscience geek, you may never have heard of poor Phineas, but it’s one of the most famous case studies in science. On September 13, 1848, Gage was working with a railway blasting crew in Vermont. Due to unexpected explosion of blasting powder, an iron crowbar was driven through the left side of his frontal brain. Miraculously, Gage retained much of his memory, language and reasoning ability. What was impaired was ability to make gut decisions, using something famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio called “somatic markers.”  

It’s exactly these instincts, these abilities to predict the responses of others, that AI lacks. While it may be “intelligent” it is not necessarily “wise,” as wisdom requires judgement. It requires the ability to foresee reactions and to adjust your decisions accordingly.

When we look at the intersection of creativity and AI, it’s this human aspect that we should not be too quick to surrender to technology.

Take the writing of this post, for example. I did use AI to help me gather my thoughts. But the writing itself is – for better or worse – all me.  

I have been writing for pretty much all of my life. I have – I think – a human voice. My grammar isn’t perfect. I am Canadian, so my editor (the incredibly patient Phyllis Fine at MediaPost) has to “Americanize” my spellings. I started my career writing for radio, so my sentence structure can sometimes kindly be described as rambling. But all of this accurately reflects who I am. If I used AI to actually craft my words, I would have removed myself “from the loop.” Even as I write this text, my computer screen is littered with blue dotted underlines suggesting there may be better ways to word things.  I’m ignoring almost all of them.

I don’t know where the right AI-Human balance is. Even if I did know, it would be a moving target. The things AI can do today are a quantum leap ahead of what it could do even a year or two ago. But I don’t see AI gaining the ability to actually feel anything any time soon.

Asking Advice for a Friend

Diverse group of people sitting on wooden chairs in a circle in a room with wooden floors

I have a question for you, “Do you ask people for advice as often as you used to?”

It’s an important question, because the ability to exchange information is one of the most human of capabilities. It was that, probably more than any other factor, that sparked “The Great Leap” 50,000 years ago. Suddenly humans became more than slightly advanced primates and we started creating art, building advanced tools, forging long distance trade alliances and practicing religion. It was this cognitive revolution that started us on the path that led to where we are today.

Most anthropologists agree that while there could have been many factors that lead to the “Great Leap”, the most likely candidate was our ability – through the creation of symbolic language – to communicate abstract ideas and transfer complex skills. All the things that make us human came from this new ability to talk to each other: we could manage living in large groups, we could transfer knowledge from one person to the other, and – more importantly – we could pass information and skills from one generation to the next, ensuring our knowledge didn’t die with us.

So, yes, it’s important to ask if we still ask other people for advice. Because if we don’t, are we losing the ability to be human?

Now, I have a confession to make. All the stuff I just told you about the Great Leap came from A.I. I had the tiniest kernel of an idea and rather than share it with someone else, I typed the question into ChatGPT. I did reword its answer in my own words, but the above 3 paragraphs aren’t my ideas, nor do they come from any other human that I talked to. They were distilled from an algorithm. And here we have two intrinsically human strategies battling each other: the need to communicate, and the instinct to forage efficiently.

We humans are born communicators, but we are also natural foragers. We have an internal effort vs reward calculator that drives us down the most efficient path to get what we’re looking for. One of the dusty old UX concepts I used to drag around with me on the speaking circuit was Pirolli and Card’s Information Foraging Theory, which was formulated in 1999 at Xerox’s PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center, where I happened to have a wonderful visit with Peter Pirolli).

The theory may be long-in-the-tooth, but it’s still the single most elegant theory I’ve ever found to explain human behavior online. Simply put, we will expend the least amount of energy required to gain the information we’re looking for. That basic human tendency takes on new implications in our world of A.I.

If we’re looking for information, we will take the shortest path that will get us there. If the shortest path is asking ChatGPT, or, increasingly, using Gemini’s AI Mode in Google, then that’s what we’ll do.

So, I was just being human when I asked AI about the Great Leap. It took me 5 seconds to structure my query and 2 seconds later, I had my answer, impeccably reasoned and laid out in structured language. It did – in 7 seconds – what it would have taken at least a few hours to do the old way, by searching through words written by another human.

And heaven forbid asking another living, breathing human. That would have taken days, at least.

But if we stop asking each other for advice or information, we also have to ask ourselves, “what are we giving up?”  In our previous quest for information, we had to exercise two critical regions of our brain, our language centers (commonly called Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area), used to communicate with other humans, and the prefrontal cortex, where we synthesize information into a viable framework for action. If we were looking for the two areas of the brain that make us distinctly human, these would be two excellent candidates.

If we start using A.I. not just to gather information, but also to structure it into pre-made “thoughts”, we will inevitably use these areas of our brain less. And one of the features of our brain is that it automatically housecleans the least used parts of itself. It’s called synaptic pruning. Through it, the brain continually rewires itself to be best adapted to the tasks it does all the time.

If we stop doing the things that are instinctively human, like sharing knowledge, will our brain start trimming the very parts that make us human?

I’m asking for a friend.

Meta’s Social Media Battle Plan

My fellow Media Insider Maarten Albarda called it the “The Big Tobacco Moment for Social Media” in his post last week. Then, just yesterday, Steve Rosenbaum added that the K.G.M v. Meta Platforms case “signals a shift that cuts directly through the core defense platforms have relied on for decades.”

It was a seismic decision, and I’m pretty sure the various conference rooms of 1 Meta Way, Menlo Park, California have the doors closed as a bunch of sweaty lawyers and Meta staff are rolling out the whiteboards (or the Meta Quest virtual reality equivalent) and rolling up their sleeves to assess the potential damage and draw up a battle plan. Let’s take a moment to speculate about what they may be talking about.

In at least one of those conference rooms, Meta’s legal team is assessing one line of defence, which I’ll call Project “Hail Mary,” tapping into the current pop culture Zeitgeist. This involves an appeal to the $6 million decision. It’s not this case that’s worrying them. It’s the thousands waiting in the queue for the legal precedent to be set. The Meta Legal Team will be spending much of their foreseeable future in a courtroom. Even they know that chances for a successful appeal are slim. 

The second line of defence is to quantify the impact of this on Meta’s bottom line if the appeal is not successful. So let’s unpack that, because it deals with the elephant in the room, touched on in both Steve and Maarten’s post: Is this the beginning of a slippery slope that will lead to the dismantling of algorithmic ad targeting and the demise of the endless scroll for everyone, or just legal minors? 

If we follow the lead of Australia, the first country to implement a ban on social media, it will just be minors – those under 16. The legislation was passed late last year and the ban officially took place on December 10, 2025. 

There are several countries around the world looking at implementing a similar ban, including Canada. Most are watching to see how Australia implements and polices its ban, as there are several thorny issues at play here. The countries seriously looking at it tend to share a similar legislative sentiment with Australia when it comes to consumer rights and privacy concerns. 

The U.S., under the current administration, is the least likely to implement federal restrictions on social media. Still, that is not keeping several states from introducing their own legislation. What the K.M.G. v. Meta decision does do is move the debate from the arena of federally controlled media to that of state controlled online safety, privacy and mental health concerns. All will be watching the pending suits, which will likely fill up dockets in U.S. courts for the next few years at least. 

Given the international aspect of this, it’s instructive to look at how Meta’s revenues breakdown by region. 

The biggest share, 39%, is the U.S. and Canada, but 94% of that comes from the U.S. We’re a Meta rounding error up here.

The Asia-Pacific is the second biggest regional market – with 26.8% of global revenues. While the user numbers are huge, the revenue per user is much smaller than in North America. Several countries in this market are considering some type of age-based restriction on social media usage – largely driven by the academic concerns of parents and educators in China, Japan and Korea.

Next is Europe, with 23.2% of Meta’s revenue pie. If there is any jurisdiction likely to follow Australia’s lead, it’s the E.U., who have consistently shown leadership in implementing privacy protection legislation.

Finally, there is the rest of the world, which collectively accounts for about 11% of Meta revenues. When you consider this includes all of Africa, all South America and whatever else is left, you can appreciate that attitudes towards legislation will be all over the map, both literally and figuratively.

Still, let’s say that a significant chunk of Meta’s revenue – say about 30 to 40% – comes from regions likely to pass legislation similar to Australia’s. Still, that undoubtedly will be only directed at minors younger than 16, which today makes up less than 10% of Meta’s user base (between Instagram and Facebook). All those young people have gone to TikTok (where it makes up 25% of their user base). 

So, what Meta’s financial planners are probably talking about is the fact that – even in a worst legal case scenario – we’re talking about 3 to 4% of their total user base that may be legislatively restricted in some form or another. If you’re in triage mode, that’s not severe enough to consider major surgery or amputation. Probably a band-aid will do the trick. 

Walk with Me, Talk with Me

In Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed series, The West Wing, there was a recurring plot device. Characters, when faced with a thorny problem, often went for a walk and talked it out. The camera would capture it all in a long tracking shot.

Sorkin, who penned most of these scenes, used them to highlight the frenetic energy and pace of the White House. The characters exchanged rapid-fire, Sorkinesque dialogue while moving through spaces crammed with busy people buzzing in the background. The technique was – at the same time – both expository and transitional. It would move the story from location to location, often introduce additional characters as they joined the walk, then would veer off to do something important while it also furthered the story line with new details. It was the physical embodiment of multi-tasking, adding urgency to the pace, “There is so much to do and so little time to do it in.”

While Aaron Sorkin might not have intended it, there is also some solid neuroscience backing up the practice of walking and talking. And, as it turns out, you don’t even need to be walking with someone else to realize the cognitive benefits of a good stroll around the block.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Nietzche seemed to be on to something. To come up with something new, the brain must do two different types of thinking: divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking could be defined as “thinking outside of the box.” Convergent thinking would be gathering up all those divergent thoughts and stuffing them “back in the box” to analyze the best option. According to a 2014 study from Stanford University, walking gives a significantly positive boost to divergent thinking but is less effective with convergent thinking.

Walking appears to open up the brain to new ideas. There is a positive “mind-body” effect that comes from just being active while you’re thinking, but walking also puts you in a different environment with varying stimuli. In the Stanford experiment, some participants walked outside and some just walked on a treadmill. Those that were outside realized the greatest creative boosts. 

But what if you’re walking with someone else? That’s where the benefits of walking really kick into high gear for certain kinds of brain activities. First of all, both the walkers are benefiting from the creative boost that walking gives you. But it also appears that walking allows you to connect with your fellow walker on both a physical and psychological level that operates at the subconscious level. 

Another study (Cheng, Kato, Saunders, Tseng, 2020) found that walkers soon synchronize their walking and this creates a physical bond between them. Those that walked together each evaluated the other person more highly after the walk than those that simply sat in the same room together. And, in case you’re wondering, the two didn’t even need to talk to each other. In the case of this study, both walkers were specifically instructed to stay silent during their walk.

That’s the “walk” part. But what about the “talk” part? As it turns out, walking brings its own benefits to that as well, and it’s not just the multi-tasking saving of time that Aaron Sorkin showed in the West Wing. 

Think about where you’re looking when you walk. The person you’re walking with is beside you but you’re looking ahead. You’re not looking them in the eye. For some types of communication, eye-to-eye might be the optimal mode, but for divergent thinking, this combination of being physically “in step” with the other person but also being free to let your eyes and mind wander a bit, enticed by what’s happening around you, turns out to be a very effective creative incubator. Your flow of fresh thoughts are not restricted by picking up negative micro-expressions from the other person. You’re not picking up any body language that may cause you to repress any creative ideas for fear of rejection. Soon, you’ll start to riff off each other’s ideas, adding to the idea generation process. 

There’s one more thing about walking. If you do need to just think for a while to process a new idea, those silences are a lot less awkward if you’re walking than if you’re across from each other at a boardroom table.

How Seniors Get Sucked into Falling for Bad Information

It happened to me last Thursday. I was tired, I was jet lagged and I was feeling like garbage. My defenses were down. So, before I realized it, I was spinning down a social media sewer spiral. My thumb took over, doom scrolling through post after post offering very biased commentary on the current state of the world, each reinforcing just how awful things are. Little was offered in the way of factual back up, and I didn’t bother looking for it. My mood plummeted. I alternated between paranoia, outrage and depression. An hour flew by as my brain was hijacked by a feckless feed.

And I know better. I really do. Up in my prefrontal cortex, I knew I was being sucked into a vicious vortex of AI slop and troll baiting. Each time I scrolled down, I would tell myself, “Okay, this is the last one. After this, put the phone down.” And each time, my thumb would ignore me.

This is not news to any of us. Every one of you reading this knows about the addictive nature of social media. And you also know the pernicious impacts of AI generated content spoon fed to us by an algorithm whose sole purpose is to hog tie our own willpower and keep our eyes locked on the screen. I also suspect that you, like I, think because we know all this, we have built up at least some immunity to the siren call of social media.

But I’m here to tell you that social media has gotten really, really good at being really, really awful for us. I didn’t notice it so much when I was on my game, busy doing other things and directing my attention with a fully functional executive brain. But the minute my guard slipped, the minute my cognitive capacity shifted down into a lower gear, I was sucked into the misinformational sh*thole that is social media.

Being a guy that likes to ask why, I did exactly that when the jet lag finally dissipated. Why did I, a person who should know better, fall into the crappy content trap?  “Maybe,” I said to myself reluctantly, “it’s a generational thing.” Maybe brains of a certain age are more susceptible to being cognitively hijacked and led astray.

A recent study from the University of Utah does lend some credence to that theory. Researchers found that adults older than 60 were more likely to share misinformation online than younger people. This was true for information about health, but a prior study showed an even higher tendency to swallow bad information when it came to politics.

Lead researcher Ben Lyons set out to find why those of us north of 60 are more likely to be led astray by online misinformation. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t have anything to do with our brains slowing down or lower information literacy rates. It appears that older people can sniff out bullshit just as well as younger people. But it turns out that if that information, no matter how dubious it is, matches our own beliefs and world view, we’ll happily share it even if it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Lyons called this congeniality bias. I’ve talked before about the sensemaking cycle. In it, new information is matched to our existing belief schema. It it’s a match, we usually accept it without a lot of qualification. If it isn’t, we can choose to reject it or we can reframe our beliefs based on the new information. The second option is a lot more work and, it seems, the older we get the less likely we are to do this heavy lifting. As we age, we get more fully locked into who we are and what we believe. We’ve spent a lot of years building our beliefs and so we’re reluctant to stray from them.

Of course, like all things human, this tendency is not a given nor universally applied. Some older people are naturally more skeptical, and some are more inflexible in their beliefs. Not surprisingly, Lyons found those that leaned right in their political affiliations tend to be more belief-bound.

But, as I discovered this past Thursday, these information filtering tendencies are dependent on our moods and cognitive capacity. I am a naturally skeptical person and like to think I’m usually pretty picky about my information sources. But this is true only when I’m on my game. The minute my brain down-shifted, I began accepting dubious information at face value simply because I happened to agree with it. I didn’t bother checking to make sure it was true.

It sounded true, and that was all that mattered.

What Authoritarianism Gets Wrong

Like the rest of the world, my attention and intentions got hijacked over the weekend by what is happening in Minneapolis. I did not intend to write this post, but I feel I must.

What is happening right now is – plain and simple – authoritarianism. Some – like Jonathon Rausch in the Atlantic –  have used the word Fascism. Whatever label you put on it, it has the same flawed logic behind it – the belief that might makes right. It’s the same calculus of cruelty and coercion that the school yard bully uses: I’m bigger than you so do what I want you to do.

Here’s the problem with that formula. Resolve, resistance and resiliency aren’t things that can be consistently quantified. They are not static. The bewildering thing about humans when we’re faced with a crisis is this: the harder you push, the harder we’ll push back.

This is the reality of the red line. We accept adversity only up to a certain point. Past that point, individual concerns give way to that of the greater good. We join together into a coalition, dismantling the smaller walls that used to separate us to unite and fight a greater enemy that threatens us all. Rather than being beaten down by adversity, it raises us up.

We have always done this. Journalist Sebastian Junger documents one example in his excellent book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. During the London Blitz, Hitler believed he could bomb Londoners into submission. For 56 days he tried, dropping over 12,000 tonnes of bombs on the city, sure that it would break the will of Londoners. On one day alone, in September 1940, over 700 tones of high explosives and 86,000 incendiaries fell, killing 1,436 people. But the resolve of Londoners never wavered. In fact, it grew with adversity. They kept calm and carried on.

I’ve seen it firsthand in my own community. Our city, Kelowna, B.C., has been threatened with wildfires a number of times. In 2003, our city of 150,000 lost over 200 homes in one night and one third of the city was evacuated.

I have never seen this city come together like it did then. Neighbours helped neighbours. Those of us who weren’t evacuated opened our homes to those that were. In many cases, spare bedrooms and pull-out couches were occupied by total strangers. Crisis centers were swamped with offers of food, clothing, blankets and volunteer assistance.

This is how we’re wired. We band together in times of trouble. We are tribal creatures. As Junger found in his research, psychological health actually seems to improve in times of crisis. He cites a 1961 paper by American sociologist Charles Fritz, which opens with this sentence, “Who do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” Junger writes, “Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”

Humans evolved to join together to overcome obstacles. Our modern world doesn’t often ask that of us. But right now, in Minneapolis, that’s exactly what’s happening as thousands of ordinary people are coordinating protection patrols to document authoritarianism. They are using the encrypted Signal platform to communicate and direct observers to emerging trouble areas. They have established their own protocols of behaviour. It is, in the words of Robert F. Worth, again writing in the Atlantic, “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest.”

At least two Minnesotans have paid as much as they mortally can, with their own lives.

This is the wrench that humans throw into the crushing cogs of authoritarian behaviour: the more you crack down on us, the stronger we will become as we join together to push back against you.

Of all the places on Earth, Americans should know this.  I can think of one more example of this that is particularly relevant. It happened 250 years ago, when American colonists joined together to protest against the authority of the British Crown.

We shouldn’t forget that.