Tech companies hire rooms full of highly intelligent people to figure out how to best design their product to exploit the features of your brain’s reward systems. Their mission is to cause habitual addictive behavior. This process is called reward prediction error (RPE) encoding and features a neurotransmitter called dopamine. In a 2018 interview, former…

Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how Instagram was affecting teen mental health. In particular, some internal studies at Facebook (which owns Instagram) appeared to confirm that when teen girls used the site, they suffered poorer body image and were at increased risk for depression and eating disorders. But is social media…

By Mariel Otero del Río How addicted are you to your cellphone? How much time do you spend in front of a screen? Would you let your children do the same? Steve Jobs thought it was not a good idea, so he did not let his children use iPads and iPhones, and technology in general….

By Mariel Otero del Río How addicted are you to your cellphone? How much time do you spend in front of a screen? Would you let your children do the same? Steve Jobs thought it was not a good idea, so he did not let his children use iPads and iPhones, and technology in general….

“I don’t want to go to school today,” my 10-year-old son whined. Jacob was the most naturally curious of my three children. He loved going to school. His words were a warning that something was amiss. “Why don’t you want to go to school?” I asked. “What’s wrong?” “I don’t have any friends.” His face…

Are you feeling burned out on social media or suffering from screen fatigue after a week of online meetings? Do your hands feel cold after hours of typing or get brain fog when working next to a Wi-Fi router? If so, it may be time to give your body a break from technology.  A digital…