The link between Talking and Love

While building Barnluren I have been thinking a lot about relationships and how they are built. I just finished reading the excellent book Wired for Love by Stephanie Cacioppo which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to understand more about how the human brain works, how the brain has been shaped by Love, which has in turn shaped how society functions. So I was struck by this passage and how it relates to our mission:

Imagine how different our teenage arguments with our parents could have been if we had been armed with the latest insights from the emerging field of social neuroscience. “Actually, Mom, I don’t have to get off the phone. Studies show that, by building and maintaining salutary social connections, I can literally grow my brain and am better able to focus on cognitively challenging tasks, like school. So Mom, pleeeease! Butt out!”

One of the major conclusions I have drawn from the book is how important all the close relationships in our lives are. Stephanie makes such a compelling case for how Love is able to supercharge our brains and protect our physical health.

Stephanie's book also highlights how loneliness has the opposite effect on people, leading to much worse outcomes in many areas of physical health. Loneliness is growing and can be contagious - people have never been so well connected but somehow loneliness has only increased. As a parent, this is something I am thinking about often. How do you support healthy social development for your children?

Imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed, and self-centred, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality. Imagine too that in industrialised countries around a third of people are affected by this condition, with one person in 12 affected severely, and that these proportions are increasing. Income, education, sex, and ethnicity are not protective, and the condition is contagious.

One of the factors that has led to this loneliness epidemic is how the advent of ever more powerful technology is impacting our brains, often in negative ways which we don't fully understand immediately. Thanks to the research by people such as Stephanie Cacioppo, society and governments are waking up to the damage caused and starting to act.

As I have said before in this blog (link https://barnluren.com/en/blog/why-we-built-barnluren), the key motivation for building Barnluren was the observation that my daughter had no agency over her social life outside of school and regular activities. This burden has somehow either been funneled to parents or delegated to smartphones and algorithms. Thinking back to my own childhood and the insight that so much of my social development happened on the telephone was the inspiration for Barnluren.

With all the research now done on how the reward systems of modern technology are hijacking the brain we are hopefully in a position to change things. I learned a lot as I went through the journey of Social Media from its inception - being in tech I was very early to adopt Facebook and nearly every platform that followed. Only when I realised that a lot of my activity was actually distracting me from living my life fully did I quit every platform, except for LinkedIn which I treat more as a rolodex these days. And I have to say I feel much better without them.

Social media is the perfect recipe for kids to become addicted to their smartphones because it's hijacking a normal part of human development. So between the ages of 10 to 12, our brains as humans become more wired for what we call social rewards, which is a natural part of development. It actually helps children start to turn outward from their immediate family unit to really value the approval and feedback of their peers and other people. And it's supposed to help us form relationships with friends, with our communities. But the sensitive period of brain development where literally the dopamine receptors in our reward pathways are multiplying is being completely hijacked by social media because now social media is providing these artificially high bursts of dopamine and making children increasingly sensitive to the kinds of social rewards that social media delivers.

As we become more aware of the impact of technology, I believe its worth looking to the past to see what has been truly useful and improved our lives. As I write this I am thinking back to how much a fixed landline with voice only shaped my relationships while growing up, I remember all the long conversations. I would not trade those for anything and I hope the next generation gets the same opportunity.