How Social Media Hacks Our Brains

Because our attention is a limited resource, at any given moment our brains need to determine what is important. The “salience network” of the brain, which includes the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, helps us do that. When the salience network is activated, we are alerted to threats and opportunities. Acting as a kind of circuit breaker, the salience network signals when the brain should direct its resources to some new, external source. 

Notifications (vibrations, red dots, flashing lights, banners) constantly trigger the salience network, effectively fooling us that something new but trivial is urgent. Of course, there are occasions when we get an important notification that needs to be highlighted, but most of the time, social media notifications act as false alarms, compromising our ability to attend to what is important. ‍‍‍‍

We want things and when we get them, we enjoy them. However, the brain circuit involved in wanting (mesolimbic dopaminergic system) is much more powerful than the brain circuit involved in enjoyment. The feeling of wanting something can be so strong that even when we find what we want, we don’t get much satisfaction. Sometimes, the wanting networks in the brain become hypersensitive and we get addicted: endless loops of seeking. In addiction, what we want becomes dissociated from what we enjoy. 

Technology often capitalizes on the potency of wanting, providing endless possibilities for seeking but few experiences that satiate. We might find fleeting pleasure, but no enduring satisfaction. Our “tolerance” increases, and we need more to achieve the same effects. The result: we keep clicking and scrolling, mindlessly consuming content, often with minimal oversight from cognitive control regions of the brain. Ultimately, this behavior depletes us, but feeds engagement-based business models.

Two decades ago, researchers wrote an influential paper where they famously concluded: bad is stronger than good. Negative information garners more attention and shapes emotion and behavior more powerfully than positive information. Our brains process negatively valenced information – especially fear-related stimuli – more quickly and thoroughly than they process positive information. This makes evolutionary sense: in the pursuit of survival, the potential loss involved in a singular experience of threat outweighs the gain involved in singular experience of pleasure. It is unsurprising that social media content generating fear, anger, and disgust spreads much faster than positive content. We marinate in this negativity and it propels deeper engagement. Fear and outrage become the norm and can erode our sense of goodness and shared humanity. 

As social animals, we naturally evaluate our own worth by comparing ourselves to others. The medial prefrontal cortex in our brains prioritizes information about ourselves. Self-esteem involves an ongoing process of affirming ourselves and fighting off threats to self-worth. 

Our habit of measuring ourselves against others sometimes inspires us to achieve more, but comparisons more commonly lead to negative emotions: envy, shame, anxiety, or conceit. Social media dramatically escalates the scope and stakes of our comparisons. It floods us with highly curated images featuring people in select moments showing only what they want you to see. Influencers establish standards of excellence and we tether our self-image to those ideals. Our ‘likes’ – which activate powerful reward circuits in the brain – become a commentary on the deepest part of ourselves. This is a recipe for compulsive comparison, self-doubt, and egocentric melodrama. 

Our brains are exquisitely sensitive to social exclusion. Social rejection hurts in the same way physical pain can hurt. Consequently, we experience strong pressure to conform. Software algorithms learn about our preferences, customizing and curating the information we receive. In our online bubbles, deviating from the party line carries serious social risk. When we become invested in a particular view, we celebrate supportive information and dismiss contradictory information, a phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.” Taken to an extreme, members of different segments of society find themselves subscribing to different versions of reality. When algorithms tell us what we want to believe, we become more polarized and lose a sense of ourselves as a cohesive social group with shared understanding.