Do you suffer from digital alzheimer's? Are young folk wired differently? Does instant communications on many platforms impact productivity?

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing digital Alzheimer's. Chris, if you can start us off, are you a sufferer of digital Alzheimer's?

I certainly am yes and I had a good deal of sympathy for Rudy Giuliani this week who was mocked for typing just the word you into his Twitter feed and it's something that happens to me quite regularly is I can't quite keep hold of all of the different digital platforms I'm operating on from email to searching in Google to typing things into group messaging things like WhatsApp or Stride or Slack or all of these different tools that we are now using and I simply got too many browser windows open, too many tools I'm using, too many things I'm doing and I quite often find myself doing, being very confused by it all and doing things that are, yes, symptoms

of digital Alzheimer's. So getting confused and mystified by so many digital channels, all of which I think we've referred to as communication channels, right? That's what we're talking about.

Yeah, I mean some of them, I mean the point is it's like with Ed Ball's day where he was wanting to search for Ed Balls but he mistakenly typed Ed Balls into his Twitter feed so actually some of them aren't communication channels, you know, some of them you're actually looking for something or trying to do something else but my brain just can't seem to keep hold

of all of these different... Okay, so we're going to throw this open to the minds of Aleph. I guess, I mean the first thing that springs to mind is we're all of a certain age and I wonder if it's if you're, you know, some 16-year-old kid that you just look at us all and go, what do you want about granddad? It's, you know, it's all pretty simple. Is that an avenue we want to pursue for the moment,

Peter or Nick? Well, there is some evidence about the effect, well, the effect of engaging with digital platforms, particularly through smartphones and things on cognitive tasks, so on how good people are at doing cognitive things. But, well, I don't know if we want to talk about that immediately. I feel like we haven't really covered, we should cover the symptoms in a bit more depth. Okay, so what are the symptoms? Help me, doctor. Well, I've got, so all the things that Chris was saying, I mean, I just, I did a bit of a personal kind of attempt to survey how much, how many different channels and how often I use them, you know, per day and I reckon I get about 30 emails a day I need to sort of read and about 20 personal emails a day on top of that. Then I have usually get a few messages a day through Facebook, which obviously I want to look at. LinkedIn I check rarely, but, you know, occasionally just see if I've got any messages there. And then we have these instant messaging channels for the business, you know, so we have Glip for sort of informal activity. We've got Stride for, you know, business, strictly project-related business activity. And then we also have Slack for communicating with various people outside the company. And then, you know, there's sort of the bane of my life, which is text messages of which I probably get one or two a day, but which are a nightmare because I can't, they don't, none of my sort of task management involves looking at text messages. That's just comms channels. And then there's a few other things which have a sort of communication dimension. So things like, you know, Reddit or Steam or YouTube or, you know, the BBC where you kind of feel like you want to check and see what's going on, you know, where there's sort of regular updates. And I think what this does, and I notice it amongst myself, notice it with myself, is that you're constantly operating on short-term memory. And there is that constant feeling of opening up a browser, looking something up, finding something out, typing something else in somewhere else, and never actually stopping and thinking about anything. And, you know, so I'll be watching something on telly, or on YouTube, and then someone will mention something. And I think, oh, I must look that up. Who was that actress who's in that thing? And then you look that up, and then you get distracted by something else. And then you realize you've forgotten what's been going on on telly, because you haven't been paying any attention to it. And it really feels like that's sort of normal now. It doesn't feel healthy at all. Okay. Do you use WhatsApp? No, I've resisted getting I've got WhatsApp on my phone, but I'm not in any groups. I hate the idea. I cannot be doing one more thing to have to read, you know,

load of banal messages from people. And then on top of this, also, you've probably got mobile telephone calls. And you may even have actual landline telephone calls. It's always a scammer in India. Right. Okay. Okay. So I think we sort of, as you said, we've defined the symptoms.

Peter, would you like to wade in at this point with an observation or take us in a new direction? I think I'm probably the most like that millennial 16 year old. Certainly in looks. True. Definitely an age between the group here. But I also suffer a bit from this. And this is quite a big admission from Peter. I know. He's normally telling all of us that we're our fault. I would normally say it's your fault and there's an app for that. You just haven't found it yet. No, but yes, it is. It is a problem. So I, you know, coping, I've developed coping mechanisms. And if they do feel like coping mechanisms, rather than kind of progressive management mechanisms. So rocking in the corner, rocking in the corner is definitely the last resort. But turning off notification, I've got something I need to do a block of time, I'll block out a big block of time and turn off all the notifications to put my phone in the other room or just so I don't get distracted. Because there's no way. There's no way around it really. It is totally distracting these pings going off all the time. And and yeah, if you've got a big thing to do, like a important email to write them to be some thought, then it goes in the diary as a block of time that I will everything else gets ignored when I'm when I'm working on that.

I mean, what you're saying there reminds me of some Russian bloke who about five years ago wrote a book, kind of on exactly the same this very subject, and his solution was to lock all his devices into a cupboard for a few hours. Every day, he had his locked in the cupboard, you know, time slot every day. So you had a similar approach to yourself. I think, you know, two things occur to me. One just returns my initial question, are we just a bunch of grumpy old men? And just can't quite sort of cope with this and getting the TV remote control mixed up with our phones? One, that's my first question. I mean, if we were sitting with a bunch of let's say people who've entered the workforce, which could be 18 year olds, let's say working in an office environment using this kind of stuff. Do you think they feel the same? One, because we're, we're at that kind of, we're at a time and place where all of us were born in more or less a pre computer world, more or less. And we witnessed this massive change in comms, let's say, in digital comms over the last decade or so. So is it that we're struggling to adjust? That's my first question. And I can't remember my second question. But let's, actually, as I'm answering your first question, I've just remembered my second question, rather than moaning about it, and sort of saying, well, look, it's all operating on short term memory, there must be, you know, in what way, let's say our professional lives have been enhanced by these various different tools. So take one or two of those, Chris.

Yeah, so I think, in answer to your first one about whether or not it's, it's, it's our problem. And, and, you know, whether our brains have lost plasticity, and the ability to adapt to this new world that's, that's burgeoning, I think there's some evidence for that from sort of analogy, you know, so if you look at other, if you look at professions where information overload is a real problem, so things like air traffic control, you know, in those professions, they like to take their people quite, quite young. So even though it's a highly skilled profession, they like to start sort of indoctrinating people into the way that job is done at sort of 18, as opposed to waiting till they're a postgraduate or something like that. And the reason for that is they like to sort of mould their thinking early on and get them used to the task early on. So I think that that sort of, that speaks, speaks to, you know, the idea that there is some sense of, you know, the way we have learned to deal with the world is kind of a bit, a bit set now. And, you know, possibly, younger people are better able to adapt to, you know, the wide range of information.

But do you think young people feel overwhelmed in the way that we do?

Well, I mean, there's obviously evidence about, you know, more sort of social anxiety caused by some of these tools about, you know, the fear of missing out and, and also, you know, social ostracisation caused by these tools. But whether they feel stressed by the very, you know, the very problem of information overload or not, I don't know.

Well, there's a lot, there's a lot of evidence looking at the effect of sort of smartphone and smartphone usage on various things, on cognitive tasks, on academic performance, on various other things. Some of it's quite mixed. And there's no, there's no long term studies either. So we don't know whether or not people are being negatively affected in the long term in terms of their cognitive development, particularly, because there hasn't been time to measure that. But it seems to be fairly robust, looking at, there's a meta-analysis by Wilma Sherman and Chine last year, looking at dozens of studies, and there's an agreement that use of sort of social media has a definitely negatively impacts academic performance, both sort of strategically in that when schools have taken, sorry, when schools have taken smartphones away or banned them in classrooms, academic performance goes up. And also, you know, in between students, students who use social media more, get lower grades. So now there's, it could be a causative, causation might go the other way, like maybe stupid people are more likely to use social media, we don't know. But, but anyway, it's enough to be, to kind of say that there's probably some sort of cost in terms of academic performance. Now, obviously, you have to make the judgment about whether that cost is worth the benefit. Ultimately, though, what is the benefit? Like, what do we get out of using social media? Because in order to decide whether this is a problem, we've got to decide whether or not the whatever it is that we get from using it is worth whatever costs it might be giving. Now, this is where I, you know, I'm not, I'm not sure whether or not it's not, it's not just a sort of big social arms race where we've all ended up worse off. You know, in that, I think, you know, the effort involved in social interaction is very high. It's something that, you know, where we've obviously, it's very tiring for people to interact with people. It's particularly tiring to do code switching, you know, when you're when you're interacting with different groups, where you have to switch between, you know, if you're with your friends, you talk in a different way to if you're with your parents or your girlfriend's mom or whatever. So you've got to perform that, get that task right. Now, the problem with multiplicity of different platforms and channels is that all of them have different, different sort of language forms associated with them and different behavioral norms. So, you know, one minute you're on email, and you've got to send a, you know, business email to someone, the next minute you're on Facebook, and you're being jokey and sarcastic, you know, and then you're on Reddit, and you've got a different personality.

And not only that, you know, between the channels themselves. So on something like WhatsApp, you would have your, your, you know, conversation group with your friends, and you would have your conversation group with your families, and never the twain shall meet, except it's not always immediately, you know, it's very easy to type, you know, the wrong thing into the wrong conversation stream.

And so you've got all of that, you've got the stress, cognitive stress associated with all this kind of different types of social interaction. And then layered on top of that, the inability to escape from it. That's what we've done. We've allowed, we're constantly on show. Now, it may not be true. Yeah, we can put our phone in a cupboard. But our brains don't know that, you know, our brains, as far as they're concerned, we're still in the, you know, the center of the village in the middle of all these conversations.

And without, and disarmed from the physical cues of like, when you're talking to your family, in reality, you know, you can see your family and you, your state of mind is affected accordingly. But when you can just switch instantly from being among, you know, friends to, you know, being alongside, you know, an elderly relative or something, it's, you have none of those other cues that you normally get.

Okay, Peter, I'd like to hear from you. Yeah, absolutely. What I find most frustrating about this is I can imagine a better world where actually you do only have a smaller number of channels and they are better designed to be more integrated with each other to allow you to only have one browser window open that does all of your communications. And you have a unified instant messaging and email system that's all in one place.

This is the one ring to rule them all sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, obviously the problem with getting to that stage is at the moment, all of these providers of platforms are in competition with one another. So they're all trying to be that one ring to rule. You know, we'll integrate with such and such. And that's why you get all these notifications. And that just makes the problem worse. Then you've got, you know, one of your communication things telling you that you've just received communications on something else. And then that one telling you back again.

It's really an XKCD cartoon, which wonderfully sums it up. So it goes along the lines of character says there's too many standards, we need to make one unified standard. And then they ultimately just means that the number of standards is incremented by one after assertion. But yeah, no, but yes, you're right, Chris, that is a problem that all these platforms. So just take these sort of instant messaging messaging apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, I won't list them all. But they're all doing the same fundamental job. Why aren't they able to talk to each other? So I don't have to have all five of these apps on my phone. But just because that's what happens to be what the group of people I want to talk to happen to use. Why aren't they just one app that does them all? And I just see these as different conversations within one app.

I mean, do you say if we were to make a prediction, then? Do you think in the future, then there'll be a move toward there'll be a sort of a, what's the word of coalescence? Is that the right word? Where it all comes together? Or do you think there'll be further diffusion fragmentation?

Well, yeah, I like to think that might be in the same way that there was with things like email. So in the early 90s, when you signed up to AOL, you were able to send emails to people who are on CompuServe because they use fundamentally different standards. But the corporations with their particular standard, their proprietary standards, realised that there was more benefit in having the same standard because there's more utility in the greater network effect you get with having more users. But there's a danger that it might not. It might just proliferate and you just end up getting more and more apps because it is an important part of many business models. So Facebook Messenger, for example, getting lots of users on Facebook Messenger is a way of capturing their attention and feeding them content that you as Facebook are being paid to deliver to users and being freeing them up from that is going to cost.

I mean, professionally, I think Google does some sort of nice sort of bringing stuff together.

Yeah, I've got a really nice example. And I don't think people talk about it enough. There's a thing called Google Wave, which was sort of an experiment. Wave. Wave. Okay. Sort of an experiment, not ways phrase. Yeah, I was going to say. Wave as in surfing. And it was a tool, it was sort of part experiment, part product that they tried to launch. And Google do this a lot. They would launch a product as much an experiment, see how much people will bite on it as much as it's a product they fundamentally believe in. And Google Wave was one of these. And it was a really interesting new take on the way that communication worked. It was a sort of blended, it blurred the lines between writing a document, writing emails, and doing instant messaging. It kind of did all three all at once. And it was, yeah, I mean, I tried it. And it was very interesting, but lacked anybody, enough people being on it to make it useful and enough people on it to sort of really adopt. So it failed for sort of programmatical reasons rather than technological reasons. But that was a really interesting way of doing things.

I mean, I feel like these technological solutions might slim down the experience without getting rid of the fundamental problem, which is the fact that it's always there. And as far as our brains are concerned, if it's there, we want to be part of it. And the volume of it and the number of just the number of different people we might be talking to. It's not so much that, you know, oh, Facebook's on one tab and email is on the other tab. It's that I've got to switch between Facebook mode and email mode. And, you know, when I'm thinking about what kind of communication to deliver. And, you know, and so when we say what when we think of what's the what's the point, right? The problem is that we are sort of we have an urge to be constantly looking at these things. That's and we know it's an intrusive urge. If you put a smartphone in front of in front of someone, they'll perform worse, even if it's not their smartphone. They'll perform worse at things. I have discovered that I need to move my phone out of off the coffee table and behind me onto the back of the sofa when I'm watching a film. Because otherwise I'll experience this urge to check it. Right. So there is that's not a rational urge. That's like that's something that I've evolved the need and it's something to do with the need to be sociable and to get approval from your peers. That's not that's not going to be affected by changing the experience of receiving these communications, particularly. So I think there's something and the problem is that a lot of the advice is unrealistic. It'll say, oh, well, just don't turn your leave your email off. Turn it on at midday, you know. Well, no one's going to do that. Right. It's like saying to someone who's obese. Well, all you've got to do is not eat until, you know, until you're hungry. Well, it's just completely unrealistic. This is not it's not operating at a rational level. And I and so I sort of wonder if the answer is that, you know, if we all agree that this is an unhealthy set of norms, and I think it is, you know, and if you studies have been done where they've where they've deprived people of, you know, access to things like smartphones and social media, they always report that they feel happier, less stressed, more productive. So, you know, if all that's true, we have to conclude it's not healthy. So we've got to think of some other thing to do, which doesn't just involve switching off notifications.

So talking of to conclude, we need to move towards a conclusion. We're getting short on time, Chris.

Yeah, I was just going to say the comparison with eating and obesity is a good one, because, you know, effectively, what we've done in society is break down all of the barriers that used to exist to communication. If you wanted to talk to somebody and have a conversation, you had to be in the same places and you had to go and see them or arrange to meet up. If you wanted to send somebody written communication, you had to send a letter, you know, and you had to put a stamp on it. And there was a time delay and all that kind of stuff. What the technologies have done is effectively completely you can talk to anybody at any time, send them informal communications. There is no barrier to that. And therefore, we just turn turn the taps on on on everything without without contemplating our ability to consume it, just as you know, in society now, food is effectively free and you can eat as much of it as you like whenever you like. And we've got an obesity problem. I think what we are facing now is the the equivalent of, you know, communication obesity.

OK, I mean, it's all just so attractive and appealing and satisfying, isn't it?

Well, we've never evolved in the same way. We've never evolved a desire to stop eating because we've never evolved. We didn't evolve in a circumstance where food was abundant enough for that to be worth doing. We haven't evolved any off switch that says, right, I really don't want social interaction. Our brain is always looking for social interaction.

Information and food both used to be scarce.

And I think I agree. I agree with Chris. I think there'll be a sort of normalization. There'll be a mature in the use of these technologies. This is a new thing. This is like suddenly we've discovered how to make tobacco, you know, as it happened in the West. Not everyone started smoking. People resisted it. People didn't, even though it was kind of available. It's maybe not such a great analogy, but we eventually realized it's actually quite bad for us. And so we're stopping. We're doing it less and less and less.

I think it's nice that you two are so hopeful and this rosy view of the world and human nature. But I'm not sure if I agree. And I like the analogy that you put with, you know, with food. You know, we all know that eating so much food is not great for you, but it's so nice. And we still have got obesity.

What deters people from obesity? It's not wanting to look fat, right? It's social shame. More and more people are obese. Well, sort of. But actually, there's also more and more of a culture of being obsessed, certainly with men, of being obsessed with what you look like and going to the gym. Is that good? I don't know. Separate podcast. But I mean, the point is that it at least deters people. It acts as a deterrent.

As with my hope for the use of communication technology with obesity, we'll learn new ways of socially managing that. I want Diet Facebook. Yeah. However, whatever it looks like. So maybe some blockchain solution. I'm going to try and find a blockchain solution. But yeah, so at the moment, we're kind of reacting with social shame. I need to look good because I want to be attractive and therefore I must not eat too much. But there'll be other, you know, there might be other ways of managing that.

Okay. We need to stop there. Just before we do, one of the things I like least about messenger platforms is how to finish a conversation. That's what I find difficult. That's the point. They never finish. They never finish. But I found a way to do it actually, which is I employ the thumbs up signal. Okay. Which is kind of, you know, the emoji, whatever it is, which is just a sign. Okay. We're done. I'm really happy. This is goodbye. Thanks. That's it.

Yeah. I like it. Well, apparently when the phone was first invented, there was quite a long time before people knew how to end phone conversations or even start them. Apparently the standard greeting was ahoy when it was first invented. Hello was invented as a telephone word.

To whom it may concern.

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay, chaps. We're going to stop there. Thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare, Chris Wragg and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Thanks. And until next time, goodbye.