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same goal: your attention and your eyes onscreen. This is a battle for how you spend your time, but your time is a non-renewable resource, and technology must always be balanced in terms of how it ultimately serves us, not simply for a promised better life.

      Apprehending the myth of multitasking

      There is perhaps no better example of the purported benefits of screen technologies than the power of multitasking. Multitasking is a very misunderstood concept, and there has been much research on the neuroscience of attention; the overwhelming conclusion is simply that there is no such thing as multitasking.

      

What is often seen as multitasking is rapid attention-shifting and moving your focus in an alternating fashion. What this means is that you’re quickly shifting your attention from one screen or activity to another, and although it feels seamless and simultaneous, it isn’t. There is no way for the human brain to attend to and process two stimuli at the same time. So, the next time your teenager has a laptop, tablet, TV, textbook, and smartphone open in front of them (while they are listening to music) and then tells you they are attending to all of them at once, they are kidding themselves (and you!). They may believe they are attending to all these activities simultaneously, but what the research shows is that the amount of comprehension of each stimulus is basically reduced by a factor of how many other sources of input you have going on at once. So, if you are doing homework while doing other activities, it will simply take you longer to get it done and/or there will be less comprehension of what you worked on. Internet and screen technology does not actually increase efficiency; it increases the functional organization of how we manage information, but even this benefit must be weighed against the amount of distraction it creates along the way.

      Telling a social story: The net effect on people

The big question is this: How does Internet and screen technology affect human relationships and our overall health and well-being? From its early adoption, the Internet has been touted for its ability to connect people; initially social media was hailed as an important way to stay connected with our friends, family, work, and school. There is little argument that the Internet is a useful tool, and the COVID pandemic has offered further evidence of how amazing and useful this technology is. It has allowed us to continue our work and school from home and to shop and stay connected to our friends and loved ones. I am in no way debating the utility of this technology; what I am addressing is the quality of some of those activities and social connections made online.

      There is little disagreement as to the mixed quality of online social connection and questionable satisfaction (and efficacy) of attending school online. Why is that? Why is it that social behavior online seems decidedly two-dimensional? Why has online schooling during COVID been seen as a failure? Why is online intimacy and social connection generally rated as inferior to real-time interaction? Even Zoom, which may be one of the heroes emerging from COVID, can leave people feeling hungry for more real-time, physical contact and connection. From the COVID experience, we see that our children, who have been schooled virtually, report increasing depression, social isolation, and dissatisfaction from the online academic experience — and some are experiencing other increased mental health issues as well.

      These experiences aren’t a coincidence. They are reflections of some of the weaknesses of Internet interactions for social and academic communication. The Internet is best at connecting people with information and services, but it leaves people yearning for more depth and breadth when all is said and done. Perhaps it is best said that our expectations for a two-dimensional experience may be higher than what an Internet screen can deliver.

The Human Factor: The Internet as a Digital Drug

      People sometimes want to know how the Internet and digital screens can be addictive. After all, how can you get addicted to a screen behavior? Part of the reason for this question is that it evolves from the idea that addiction is about ingesting a substance and that it is the substance itself that creates the addiction through the body’s physical dependence on it.

The problem with this analysis is that it’s wrong. This isn’t how addiction really works. Yes, the body can become physiologically dependent on a substance (drugs or alcohol), but if that is what solely created an addiction, then once people detox from the substance, the addiction should be gone. However, this is not what typically happens. Addiction is the combination of many variables that involve learning, memory, emotions, social factors, physiology, behavior, and neurobiology. Often there are co-occurring psychiatric problems that contribute to an addiction, or the addiction may be a way to deal with emotional pain or negative circumstances. Let’s face it: Addictive behaviors can be an escape.

      With addiction, there is always a disruption of the reward system in the brain, but the addictive substance or behavior (in this case, Internet use) is not really the primary issue. It is certainly a factor, but the addiction process is as much about learning to deal with triggers and to manage one’s emotions as anything else, and what we see with excessive screen use is like what we see in many addictions: Addictive behaviors start out as a solution that then becomes another problem.

      

Being online is a pleasurable and stimulating activity that impacts the brain’s reward system and elevates dopamine; it has a similar potential to create an addictive experience as drugs and alcohol, although physiological dependence is less of an issue.

      Grasping the power of “maybe”

      The Internet is the world’s biggest slot machine. The slot machine operates on the power of maybe, and this explains the neurobiology of gambling, and most addictions, in some ways. So how does maybe work in our brains? When you pull the handle of a slot machine, your brain knows that it is going to win something. What it does not know is when and how much, but it does know that eventually there will be a reward of some kind. It learns to expect this reward. This system of reinforcement (or dopamine reward) is called variable ratio reinforcement.

      So why wouldn’t you just give someone a win each time they pull the handle or after they pull it a certain number of times? The answer is simply boredom (also called extinction). B.F. Skinner did groundbreaking research on operant conditioning and found out that unpredictable (variable) rewards create longer-lasting response habits (which is another fancy way of saying addiction). If a reward is given variably and unpredictably, then your brain engages in this activity like nobody’s business.

      So how does this work with Internet use? Whenever you go online (or on your smartphone), you never really know what you’re going to find or when you’re going to find it. This is true for email, information surfing, scrolling, gaming, social media, shopping, and porn; virtually anything you search for online has a variability to it — a maybe factor. In essence, the Internet operates on the same variable reinforcement schedule that a slot machine does, and people are neurobiologically conditioned by their devices without really knowing it.

Not only does the brain love maybe, but it also loves newness. Novelty resets our attention and interest. And there is perhaps no better source of information that provides endless variability and novelty than the Internet. Every time you go online (and in a sense, we are always online with our devices), it can feel like a new experience each time you click or tap through your latest impulse.

      Seeing how dynamic interaction keeps people coming back for more

      Dynamic is a way of saying changeable and interactive — and being able to interact with our devices puts some psychological skin in the game for us. It’s dynamic in that we are driving the interactive process by our clicks, and the cycle is complete when we are responded to by our screens. We

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