Six seemingly disparate elements stimulate this analysis:  the assault on Congress at the beginning of January and its connection to election results and an election-fraud movement; the murder of George Floyd last year and the concomitant defund the police movement; the pandemic responses nationwide over the last year that have resulted in school shutdowns; media and social media coverage of gender and sex issues; the Queen’s Gambit series about a female chess prodigy on Netflix; and Cambridge University researcher Simon Baron-Cohen’s newest book, The Pattern Seekers.  

Disparate elements, you might say.  But they do connect, I promise.  Please read on.

In Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls, I ask readers to become citizen scientists who trust experts, yes, but meanwhile, do their own research in the world around them and, thus, check experts’ results with reality.  Being a citizen scientist is especially crucial when children’s lives and futures are at stake.  No one knows better the needs of children around you than you and the other adults in your community.  Using this blog as a tool, I hope you will practice citizen science again now, utilizing my nexus of elements to help you help your children survive and thrive in our social media driven era.

Connecting Six Elements into One Pattern

Simon Baron-Cohen is a sex/gender brain research expert who also specializes in the study of the autistic brain.  In his new book, The Pattern Seekers, he confirms that most autistic children and adults are male, and he connects autism with the roots of human invention.  “Some of the genes associated with hyper-systemizing (the brain-pattern males favor) are the same genes that code for autism,” he writes.  “(In our research) we also found that strong systemizing appears to come at a price, most recognizable in autism:  the more your brain is tuned to seek such patterns, the less you can engage the brain’s parallel circuit for empathy, another important and uniquely human capacity.”  Please store this finding away as I add others into this three-part blog.

To my mind, reading Baron-Cohen’s newest book comprises the sixth element, chronologically, in an internal process of late 2021 citizen science.  My fifth element is the Netflix show, The Queen’s Gambit in which fictional Beth Harmon beats the best chess players in the world in the 1960s while battling her own brain–a brain that tends both towards addiction and the gray matter ability to see patterns so often and so obsessively that she nearly destroys herself.  Beth Harmon exemplifies Baron-Cohen’s pattern of systemizing-brains that can sacrifice, to some extent, empathic responses.  Combined with the election-fraud conspiracies, school shutdowns, gender conversations, and defund the police debates, six pieces of a puzzle came together in my own “systemizing” brain.

They came together as I studied the way media/social media negatively affects our brains.  By the end of this three-part series, I hope you will clearly see a pattern of systemizing that grows out of our present-day brain activity akin to trauma response—a hyper-systemizing pattern caused in some large part by our trauma-infused (overstimulation-prone) reliance on media and social media for information and community.  Our trauma response and over-stimulation is creating “reality-cloaking” and that reality cloaking is potentially dangerous to our children and ourselves.

Pattern-Seeking in the Brain

To explore pattern-seeking and systemizing activity in the human brain, Dr. Baron-Cohen and his team studied more than 600,000 people, 36,000 of whom were diagnosed with autism.  This research confirmed that the human brain possesses a natural pattern-seeking drive by which to systemize reality.  It further confirmed that the more autistic your brain is on the brain spectrum, the more likely you are to hyper-systemize.  Hyper-systemizing includes decreased direct empathy and involves greater focus on pattern-activity in the brain.

In the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit, Beth Harmon does not receive an autism diagnosis, but she does have a hyper-systemizing brain linked with less direct empathy—”more pattern, less people.”   From any brain’s viewpoint—wherever our brain fits on the spectrum–the basic drive to systemize disparate stimuli in “reality” helps us feel safe.  Beth feels safest when she systemizes.  Similarly, if you think about religion and faith for a moment:  people of faith systemize thought and emotion toward God (Universe, Higher Power) which is a universal pattern so systemized in the brain as to potentially become unquestionably intimate–a pattern of Oneness that leads to a sense of safety even beyond death.

Systemizing and pattern-seeking occur throughout the brain like music acts in the brain, reaching multiples brain centers throughout the cerebral cortex at once.  At the same time, just like a great deal of faith activity is localized to the temporal lobe, a great deal of systemizing in the brain happens in specific parts like the temporal.  Among these parts, also, are rumination loops between the amygdala that experiences our stress/fear and the anterior cingulate cortex–an attention/focus part of the brain.

The loop works like this:  the amygdala feels danger and creates fight, freeze, flight, tend, befriend, and other internal emotive responses to the perceived danger.  These responses move blood flow in the brain to the cingulate cortex–the focus center–then the blood flow checks back into the amygdala to see if the systemizing pattern created internally in our brains and projected onto the world around us by which to manage the danger is actually confronting the source of the fear, quieting the anxiety, and achieving the goal of safety.

I mentioned social media before and will keep prodding you towards looking at your relationship with it, because twitter and other social media force the brain to hyper-systemize in response to danger.  Media and social media words/images work on our reward chemistry (dopamine), danger circuits (amygdala), and focus/attention (cingulate and precuneus) with so much stimulation that our brains cannot avoid systemizing the data; then, seeking to develop patterns by which to process the stimulants.  If our brains did not try to put the millions of stimuli into patterns we would be constantly overwhelmed.  Our brains must categorize, ruminate, systemize patterns to regain control.

This is an important brain fact.  Constant use of social media pushes us toward hyper-systemizing at out baseline, but also, constantly increases our sense of danger because these media often utilize fearful stimuli.  You have likely seen yourself boil up with emotion in response to social media posts during the election cycle and as the election fraud conspiracy developed and was propelled by social media.  Similarly, right after the George Floyd murder and well into the Black Lives Matter movement, you may have felt the constant fear.  Similarly, throughout Covid 19 and the upheaval created in all sectors, including school shutdowns, media/social media worked in fear responses every second of every day.

Your children, too, can feel overstimulated and in-danger if they spend significant time on social media.  Research connecting rises in depression and anxiety among children and teenagers, well documented for about 10 years now, reflects the danger: our children’s brains experience constant short and long bursts of hyper-stimulation (many of them patterned towards personal and collective fear) that accumulate over time and trigger internal anxiety, depression, and other brain disorder mechanisms.   The National Institute of Health (NIH) has now officially linked teen depression to social media use and is joined by researchers from all over the world who use brain scan equipment to watch the trauma in the brain. For more specific information on social media use and the brain please see my own Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls and IGen by Jean Twenge.

Reality Cloaking

The new point I would like to make for you now, in these blogs, involves the reality cloaking our brains do as they systemize.  This has not been identified by researchers previously and I would like to identify it with you.  By the time this three blog series is completed, I will arm you not only with analysis but also with strategies you can use immediately to protect yourselves and your children.

Reality-cloaking is my term for a process our brains have developed to try to ensure safety—not just in 2021, but throughout history.  When reality was too complex in 2,000 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. or a hundred years ago, human brains often turned away from the reality in front of them to project new visions, new ideas, new hopes for progress and, in nearly every era, invisible beings, entities, or ideas to overlay on reality—angels, gods, monads, ideals, God.   Many of these were inventive and led to great progress.  All of them were or seemed real in their own way and many still do.

In 2020 – 2021, we are doing the same thing we’ve always done, but in hyper-drive.

Remember, for a moment, how your brain felt when George Floyd was murdered.  Remember the intense month of social media after that murder.  Do you remember the fear you felt?  Do you remember how your brain tried to find some sort of pattern to battle the feelings of disquiet and danger?   Or think back to how you felt when you saw the assault on Congress repeatedly on and after January 6, 2021.  Inside your own head, your brain quickly developed amygdala-cingulate rumination loops by which to process the trauma.   In the three Parts of this blog, I will analyze examples of reality cloaking from across the political spectrum because what I am getting at goes beyond partisan politics.   In Part I, because of the recent January 6 insurrection, I will analyze how the 2020 election and election-fraud accusations led to reality cloaking and, ultimately, the assault on Congress.

Regarding the January 6 attack, notice how rumination loops cloaked reality before and since the November election so that the brain could to feel safe again for approximately half of Americans.  If you are a Trump supporter, the election loss was likely frightening, especially because the fear level rose as media/social media presented the President himself and others making dire statements about what the world would become without Trump as president.  Quite quickly, the social media bombardment of “election fraud” and “stop the steal” became safe concepts in the rumination loop.  Actual reality, in which 60 courts and the Supreme Court looked at the evidence and did not find any significant fraud, were discounted by the brain as the brain looped the reality cloak of election fraud between amygdala and cingulate.  The reality cloak made the disappointed and frightened brain feel safer than a Trump defeat would feel.

Reality cloaking, then, is a rumination loop that we develop as we try to systemize complex reality.   In showing how this works I am not saying that voting for Donald Trump happened because of a reality cloak.   Seventy four million Americans voted for him for various reasons, many of them regarding policy rather than cloaking.  My point here is not political, it is more primal.   We all cloak reality to survive and thrive.  While votes for Donald Trump themselves are not examples of dangerous reality cloaking, after Trump lost, the reality cloaking around the election results became dangerous, as Trump supporters attacked the Capitol building.  Real people were put in real danger, lives were lost, and our democracy was, for a moment, destabilized.

When people argue that there are no consequences to social media use, I hope you’ll disagree.   Perhaps we can say looking at a single text or a tweet is not dangerous, but when media/social media bombardment creates trauma response, all of us will likely fall into some form of reality cloaking to protect ourselves.   Some of the reality cloaks can lead us to do dangerous things.

What is Reality?

Before going further into how the brain reality cloaks, let’s define “reality.”  Most importantly, let’s define reality from your and my human brain’s viewpoint, rather than from a philosophical or theological definition.

From a neuroscience perspective, reality comprises external and internal phenomena empirically processed by the brain’s intimate embrace of lived experience.  “Shared reality” is the brain’s collective embrace of empirical experience and data through common sense processing. 

You as an individual live in your own reality by your intimate, sensory, and cognitive embrace of the people, places, and things around you.  Our communities, regions, and nations live collective realities by embracing what is happening around us in groups that meta-process data sets.  In this way, we personally live in the reality around us while processing data presented to us about realities we may not live in.  About these latter, we tend to assess reality application of common sense to our cognitive and emotive measurement of the data and validation of that other, non-proximal reality.  In normal situations, our brains hum along relatively peacefully as they systemize their assessments of reality, apply common sense as they think out the systemizing, and with personal and collective values in tact, respond to other people’s emotions and needs.

But when our brains are traumatized, they can work somewhat differently.   Heightened stress hormone levels can heighten the use of simplified reality cloaks and what we cal systemizing frames by which to see reality; not just “see” it, personally and collectively, but act.  This systemizing frame–an internal logic model that we loop from amygdala through cingulate cortex to the frontal cortex (the thinking and executive decision-making part of the brain–can trigger actions from us that appear, in the reality cloak, to alleviate our fear and stress but will in fact personally and collectively create more fear or danger.   We can follow how this worked in a number of brains by following the loop formation from inception to the attack on Congress as the fear of a dystopian future without Trump promulgated in social media and bombarding constituents led to, first, a reality cloak for millions of people in which the election was stolen,  then, second, to a systemizing frame (“overturn Congress, Stop the Steal”) to the physical and cultural attack on Congress.

The attack on January 6, 2021 is a good tool for tracing back to the reality cloak as well as seeing how the rumination loop that houses the reality cloak connects to various parts of the brain that can seek action from the brain and body.  In the people who attacked Congress, I believe the frontal lobe directed the action despite that the actions growing from the election fraud cloaked reality and its systemizing frame was illegal and immoral.  Still, those individuals attacked the Capitol building, and the Representatives, Senators, and staff themselves.  Once the rest of us saw these actions, we were shocked and disgusted, yet the actions were an outgrowth of the rumination loop and, within it, the reality cloak, and within that cloak, the new systemizing frame that made the reality of Trump’s loss not “real” but instead a projected cloak and frame of “Trump won, stop the steal” that some people actively and lethally engaged as they entered the halls of Congress.

The Reality Cloaking Dilemma

As Baron-Cohen elucidates in The Pattern Seekers, our brains see patterns for good reasons—survival, thriving, safety, social progress, family love.   We are built to see reality through patterns we discover in that reality.  But because media and social media are built to present reality in short-burst images and words, these media and social tools are inherently unable to provide viewers or readers with reality itself because reality is too complex for a few words or images to capture and analyze.  With thousands and millions of short burst words/images hitting our brains, we veer towards defensive reality cloaking.  The systemizing frames resulting from the cloaking are themselves simplified patterns, quite often, and stereotypes that fit the short burst modality of the media.

The powerful new documentary The Social Dilemma shows the hidden danger of social media algorithmically. In the documentary, you will be intrigued, I think, to see that even when we are aware of the reality cloaking, we might be unable to shut off media and social media for days and weeks of our lives, despite that, as we allow too much social media into our own and our children’s lives, we create a familial atmosphere of trauma and relinquish our own and our children’s development to rumination loops that may appear real but may, in fact, be dangerous to us and the people around us.

The title of this series of blogs is Reality Cloaking:  A New Social Disease?  Is this title meant to just be incendiary, or can social media trauma be part of a new social disease?  For more analysis and for an answer, please read our next installment.  And as promised, and for the sake of fairness, I will take an example in the next blog from the political Left, the defund the police movement.

Overall, to avoid “short bursts” and, thus, avoid the disease of reality cloaking, I am writing longish blogs in three parts for you.  They will appear on www.gurianinstitute.com in the coming weeks.  My hope is always that more well-chosen words rather than too few words and images will best reflect our human brains’ reality as we help each other educate, parent, and mentor the next generation.