Neuroscience News: ‘I Don’t Even Remember What I Read’: People Enter a ‘Dissociative State’ When Using Social Media

“There are multiple types of dissociation, including trauma-based dissociation and the everyday dissociation associated with spacing out or focusing intently on a task.”

“Dissociation is defined by being completely absorbed in whatever it is you’re doing,” Baughan said. “But people only realize that they’ve dissociated in hindsight. So once you exit dissociation there’s sometimes this feeling of: How did I get here? It’s like when people on social media realize: ‘Oh my gosh, how did 30 minutes go by? I just meant to check one notification.'’

“The team designed and built an app called Chirp, which was connected to participants’ Twitter accounts. Through Chirp, users’ likes and tweets appear on the real social media platform, but researchers can control people’s experience, adding new features or quick pop-up surveys. “

“Researchers asked 43 Twitter users from across the U.S. to use Chirp for a month. For each session, after three minutes users would see a dialog box asking them to rate on a scale from one to five how much they agreed with this statement: “I am currently using Chirp without really paying attention to what I am doing.” The dialog box continued to pop up every 15 minutes. “

“The problem with social media platforms, the researchers said, is not that people lack the self-control needed to not get sucked in, but instead that the platforms themselves are not designed to maximize what people value. “

“But social media platforms are designed to keep people scrolling. When we are in a dissociative state, we have a diminished sense of agency, which makes us more vulnerable to those designs and we lose track of time. These platforms need to create an end-of-use experience, so that people can have it fit in their day with their time-management goals.”

“Many people have experienced mindlessly scrolling on social media. We investigated these experiences through the lens of normative dissociation: total cognitive absorption, characterized by diminished self-awareness and reduced sense of agency.”

“We found that designed interventions–including custom lists, reading history labels, time limit dialogs, and usage statistics–reduced normative dissociation.”

Read the full article here. #SocialMedia #Dissociation #Cognition

My Take:

Admittedly, I don’t have much of a personal frame of reference towards this article because I unplugged from social media years ago due to a severe lack of personal interest. Using/watching YouTube occasionally is about as close as I come to using the platform.

But, from looking at the people in my circle (literally and metaphorically), I’ve definitely seen, in-person, the kind of dissociations this article talks about. I do believe that whether it’s social media, or just apps on our phones, that pretty much everything these days is directly engineered to eat away at our time and attention.

About four of my friends are currently working on making things in their lives “singular events.” In that, they all struggle to do (and pour all their focus in) one task at a time. And sure this anecdotal, but those friends all mentioned their social media/smartphone usage as being a possible reason for their struggles. Anyway, take this for what it’s worth.

And as a question for you all:

Do you have any personal thoughts, either way, on your social media usage? If you do, have you ever noticed yourself zoning out to any degree (perhaps to the point of a kind of dissociation)?