are you asking enough of your brain?

scrolling addiction is actually a sign you're desperate to learn new things

Woman Reading 1634, Rembrandt van Rijn, from nga.gov

People make big claims about AI. And maybe those claims are vastly overblown and we’re in a hype cycle (Ed Zitron is very entertaining to read on this). Maybe they’re not but we won’t get to properly intelligent AI until 30 or 50 or 100 years from now through another route (Gary Marcus thinks something like that). Maybe some kind of superintelligence is actually right around the corner. Always be suspicious of people who claim to know the future.

Something we can tell for sure is: there is a range of cognitively challenging tasks that people used to do themselves which many are increasingly farming out to large language models. Students are using them to write essays, businesses are using them to do copywriting, lawyers are bloody using them to write briefs, in which they totally invent cases!

This post is not an argument against any of that per se (although the lawyers thing is terrible, especially given what lawyers charge, they should be struck off for doing that). It’s not even a post about what this is going to do to us as a society, although those are very interesting questions which James Marriott has written this very good post about.

It’s a question about what happens to us individually, what we can do about it and why we should. There’s the very obvious parallel with the invention of motors and engines and mechanical transport: the industrial revolution and then the electrical revolution. People went from having to use their bodies a lot every day to basically just get about and do their jobs to having lives where you could walk to the train station or the bus stop, and instead of lifting heavy things in your job you had machines to do some or most of that.

This was, just to be extremely clear about it, in many ways very very great. My granddad was a ‘packer’ in Covent Garden Market, a very tough job of carrying heavy boxes all day and though some exercising can leave you healthier it’s also possible to be physically overworked which a lot of people were. Dickens’ novels show us enough people who were broken by a job but had to keep doing it, coughing and exhausted, cold and soaked through to the skin. Sorry but the little forklift trucks are better. (Also I am childishly delighted by how thrilled this salesperson sounds by the mini forklift.)

But also obviously we did then have to start thinking about ‘how to get enough exercise’ which was a previously very rare problem (the much more common problem for let’s say the Elizabethans was ‘how to get enough physical rest’.) And we came up with a lot of answers: gyms and daily walks and swimming baths and running clubs and calisthenics and Barrecore and Soulcycle and step counters and salsa classes and yoga and kettlebells and pilates and ultramarathons… and all the rest. (Indeed, I make Zombies, Run! which is an answer for geeky people about how to make exercise less boring.) There is no one right answer for everyone, for most of us the answer is not the same thing every day of our lives but a mixture, adapting to where we happen to be, making sure not to push beyond our limits but also - and this is what I’m getting to - making sure not to ask too little of ourselves.

There’s for sure no point trying to go straight into running a 5k if you haven’t run ten steps together in 20 years. But there’s also a pace that it is kind of physically painful to go at because it is too slow. That thing where when you walk around a museum very very slowly you end up feeling sore, or where it’s quite difficult to go slowly down the street with a toddler because the pace is too slow for you?

Right so, I think it’s possible to do that with your brain. I think that a lot of scrolling behaviour encourages it. I think it’s not just “oh you’re not getting enough exercise” but that you’re actively making your own mental muscles ache by not giving them enough to do. And if we’re starting to do that with AI, we’ve been doing it for a while in terms of the kind of online content we consume.

A lot of the internet is what we used to call ‘light magazines’ (as opposed to ‘serious magazines’ which had long articles in them), and pay £5 a pop for. Light magazines are totally, totally fine and lovely, the point I’m making is that we used to have a limited supply of them. You’d buy a magazine for a train journey, or on a Friday to enjoy over the weekend, and you’d have a great time reading celebrity gossip, or sports reports, or funny stories from readers’ lives or lovely pictures of animals. (There are ways to talk about all of those topics in a very thoughtful way, but that’s not what a light magazine does, and why should it?) And then you’d get to the end of it and have to stop. If you wanted more of that charming light content you’d have to pay another £5. What you could get for free were proper books from a library which used - believe me, I remember this! - to be very common buildings, not denuded of books but instead well-stocked with classic literature and recent intelligent non-fiction. Also free TV did in fact use to be more highbrow, look at this amazing woman talking about what it was like when TV came to the East End and they all watched the plays by ‘young Ken Russell’¹.

But on the internet now in general what you have to pay money for is the serious, long-form thoughtful stuff. You pay money for access to much of the well-respected serious thought out there and you pay a lot of money for access to research databases. (I just saw yesterday for the first time an academic book which you cannot buy, only subscribe to, or pay for ‘lifetime access’ which means ‘five years’.)

The serious stuff tends to be expensive. The light content is free and literally never-ending.

(I suppose there are a few reasons for this. The one that occurs to me right now is that the kinds of things ‘readers’ sent in to magazines - “you won’t believe what my six-year-old came out with, he’s wiser than his years” - and got paid £5 and given Letter Of The Week for is now of course the kind of thing all of us can post anywhere at any time as user-generated content. And the internet is providing a kind of massive lottery where at any point ‘that thing your six-year-old came out with’ can end up going viral and you get a $1m sponsorship deal over three years. Which is of course much more incentive to keep on posting it.)

Alright well look. We’re not living through a bit of history where the only thing to watch on the new exciting platform is an opera and a Play For Today. We’re in a world now where the stuff that is most pushed by the most addictive platforms is not challenging enough for - I’d guess - the vast majority of us. We’re all reading the snippets in boxes from the Reader’s Digest all day long. That is what’s going on with what people call ‘brain rot’. You’re being pushed toward looking basically always at stuff that is much too easy for you, so very much too-easy that you are keeping on going for the occasional glimmer of something interesting, swipe, swipe, swipe. I actually think constantly engaging with stuff that is too easy for you is demoralising and exhausting. It is tiring trying to think down to a level that’s beneath you.

I honestly, genuinely wonder whether a lot of what people call ‘procrastination’ or ‘can’t focus’ or even sometimes ‘feeling burned out’² can be to do with constantly having wading through slop that is much too easy for your brain, that doesn’t give it anything to chew on. Like the way you’d get exhausted if all you had to eat every day was mushed up rusk.

My strong contention is that if you are constantly scrolling that is because your brain is crying out to learn something new, something that is hard enough for you and you’ve been manipulated by the tech companies to feel that you can get that for free from their handheld machines but you can’t, you can’t. Sadly the free obviously-accessible stuff now is too easy for you, and the stuff that is hard enough either costs money (though, often, not lots) or isn’t being advertised at you.

Under the line:

• what does it mean for things to be hard enough for you?

• how does it feel when things are hard enough for you?

• how can you find some stuff that is hard enough?

What does it mean for things to be hard enough for you?

• you can’t understand it all the first time. You have to go back, sometimes read or listen or watch it four or five times in a row (or more!) before you start to understand. Like children do when they’re watching the same episode of Bluey over and over - because they’re learning new things each time.

• you’re generating questions. You need to know what that word means. You have no idea what the political treaty they keep referring to is. You have to go and look it up. Looking it up generates further questions.

• you’re feeling excited and curious. There is something fascinating here, sometimes you get hold of the edge of it and you feel thrilled. Why is this character in the novel behaving in this way? What on earth do they mean that those two historical events were inextricably linked? This movie seems to be referencing something but what is it, what is it?³

• you find yourself thinking “I must just note that down somewhere” so that you can arrange your thoughts.

• you find yourself wanting a teacher, wanting to speak to someone who has more expertise in this than you so you can ask all the questions you want.

God! I cannot tell you how good it feels to make sure you’re working at your intellectual edge for at least a good portion of the day! We think it’s going to feel bad and difficult because maybe we remember feeling humiliated at school when we answered a question wrong. But it doesn’t feel like that as an adult, it feels as great as going for a walk or a swim. It’s movement for your brain. I don’t know what your edge is and I don’t know what your special interests are but I know you have interests because you are a human being and I also know that we do not live in a world that is pushing most of us to find out what our brains are capable of anymore.

I am definitely not a person whose body would be capable of incredible feats if I pushed it - I can count the number of roly-polys (head-over-heels) I did even as a child on the fingers of both hands, I am just not physically very gifted. But I can do better at swimming if I work on my stroke with a teacher. And I feel the way about brains that those inspirational trainers feel about bodies: you get one life and you need to find out what your brain is actually capable of while you’re here.

So look, just off the top of my head, if any of this has resonated with you and if you feel like “god yes I want to really stretch myself not sit here spooning more pap into my brain” here are six things to try out. I have loads of these. This is what I do all of the time, it is what I care about. I think I could write a whole post on each of these at some point - a series going into more detail about how to squeeze the intellectual pips out of it.

• listen to an In Our Time on a difficult subject (it has to be something that actually interests you not bores you, but don’t mistake fear ‘I think I won’t be able to understand this’ for boredom). Listen to it three or four or five times until you really understand which bits you don’t understand. Follow up with some of the additional reading. Write it up as a Substack post!

• read a legendarily difficult novel. It will probably not be as hard as you think, but maybe it will be! In which case you can google for short courses that will help you understand it. This, eg, is a very well-regarded online course on Proust which I am eyeing up, smiling flirtatiously.

• take an Open University course. Or if you can’t afford one, then identify one you’d like to take and buy the coursebooks online on eBay. AND find a tutor for yourself - you could even google the names of the OU tutors and see whether any of them take private pupils. Or find someone on an online tutoring site. Tell them you need a monthly lesson, and that way you have someone to ask if you get stuck on anything.

• think about stuff you were OK at, at school - maybe not amazing, but OK - and which maybe you dropped because at school you had to focus on stuff that you were going to be able to get good grades in. We don’t need grades anymore. For this it’s better if it’s something you really do like but which is challenging. I am not naturally a good artist. I am not a natural musician. But I bloody love trying at both of those things. I have taken up the piano at my advanced age and I love being not good at it but slowly seeing myself get better. It’s the trying that brings the joy and the feeling of “thank goodness, this is difficult enough for my brain”.

• what language are you OK at? Like, maybe you did it years ago and you can’t remember much but you can do a little bit? Find a podcast in that language on a topic that interests you - or even better, a pappy TV programme, Masterchef or something - and watch it or listen to it in that language. This is the place for the brain rot. If you’re going to scroll for a whole evening, scroll in Italian or Spanish or whatever.

• stare at some nature and really try to notice what’s going on. (It is fine to stare just for the ‘ahhhhh’ feeling, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) I did this once for a whole afternoon watching rabbits on a lawn in Norfolk. To start out with they just seemed to be moving randomly from time to time. Eventually I worked out that there was one dominant rabbit which was asserting itself by nipping at the others if they didn’t move quickly enough. General Woundwort! We clearly obviously evolved to pay very close attention to the natural world and it is really really intellectually satisfying to do it.

Ugh, this is another thing where I really think that working below your level can make you feel really lonely, you know? Like if you have lots of deep feelings and you only ever read superficial fiction (sometimes it’s fine! sometimes superficial is what you what! I’m talking about only ever) then you start to feel like you are the only person in the universe who ever had a complex feeling or idea. It’s just lonely. You don’t need to feel like that. Stop pretending you’re less than you are. Be all of you.

Woman reading in the studio c1868, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

1. you can actually test for yourself the hypothesis that TV has dumbed-down by looking at eg whatever is on BBC2 this evening and using the BBC programme index to look at what was on BBC2 40 or 50 years ago today.

2. Burnout is real. It is a very real thing that has to be looked after. I am just talking about *considering* whether the feeling of ‘I’m burned out’ (rather than actual clinical burnout) can sometimes be a consequence of just being exhausted by too much stupid shit. If you are really burned out, or getting close to it, please speak to someone professionally trained to help with that.

3. That curious feeling is the feeling that addictive games use to keep you clicking. They give it to you for “ooh I wonder what I’ll get if I complete this level in 8 moves?” That question, my friends, is absolutely fine for a bit of time at the end of a long day (or a long year, or illness, or grief, there are times in everyone’s life when it’s fine including every day for a *bit*). But it is a question that is, in general, beneath you to spend hours and hours and hours on.