As an expert in child development, I have been vocal for years about my concerns regarding the role of media and social media in adult’s and children’s lives—especially the potentially detrimental effects on all our brains.   Please go to www.gurianinstitute.com to read Part I of the series.  Part III will be published soon.

Because Part II continues where Part I left off, I hope you will read Part I before reading Part II.

 

Reality Cloaking as a Way of Empathizing

 

The examples of reality cloaking I will use in this blog come from across the political spectrum.   In Part I, we began to look at how the events of January 6 could have occurred.   The attack on Congress occurred, I argued, in large part because of social media–as millions of short burst words/images hit the brains of millions of people, the reality of the lost Trump election got cloaked, and a new systemizing frame, “Stop the Steal,” inculcated in the brain to make these brains feel safe.  As often happens in situations of reality cloaking, the feeling of safety is temporary; gradually, situations can become unsafe and even lethal.

To cross the aisle toward a more Left leaning issue (I have promised to be fair to all parties in these blogs, so that we can look at the brain without taking political sides):  How did the tragic personal reality of a policeman murdering a vulnerable black man, George Floyd, become the reality cloak in millions of minds that “everyone white is racist, police are racist, if you don’t think you’re racist you are racist, we need to defund the police?”

Feeling safe (self-protection) is one of two primary reasons our brain cloaks reality by systemizing complex and overwhelming stimuli into a quick burst pattern of phrases and images that profligate through social media mimetically (“Mimesis” is the Greek root for imitation).  “White people are racist, police are racist, police must be defunded” was constantly imitated in social media with short burst words/images that shocked the amygdala and other mid brain emotive-sensory functions; in response, many of our brains created rumination loops by which to cloak reality, feel safe, and empathize.

When we saw George Floyd murdered, we did not just “see” it a thousand or more times—we had an experience of it in the insula, the part of the brain that creates mirror neurons–such that  our insula filled up with mirror neurons so that our brains could feel the insula-based pain of both George Floyd’s death and the pain of all the vulnerable and beaten young black men (then, with Breonna Taylor, black women, as well).  In this way, our mirror neurons combined with the brain’s protective need to systemize overwhelming stimuli by enhancing rumination loops that both quieted our fear and empathized with the fallen.

On the surface, we might say, “if something helps us empathize, it’s got to be okay.”  But just as we can hyper-systemize patterns in our brain and end up attacking Congress members, we can also hyper-empathize.   In the case of the attack on Congress, the brains of the attackers empathized for only those who fit their systemizing frame.   In the case of systemic inequity in police misconduct, our empathy for the 278 black males last year killed by police in America and hundreds of others who have been harmed by police became an attack on whole groups (police) and a whole race (white people)–while our empathy became identified with a smaller group.  It is normal for our brains to limit our empathy, especially when brains are traumatized, but this brain activity can lead to rumination loops that often lead to significant loss of empathy.

When we talk about “us” vs. “them” in contemporary politics and life, we are talking about limited empathy.  Elsewhere you’ve likely heard this limited empathy called tribalism.  It often grows in the human brain concomitant with rage at other people who appear as enemies to us inside our systemizing frame.  In all times in human history we have perceived enemies to our own tribe–this is nothing new–but the constant proliferation of stereotyped enemies inside social-media-driven reality cloaks is new, and must be dealt with soon–recognized for at least some of what it is:  a result of social media bombardment and trauma.

 

Reality Cloaking in Someone Else’s Hands

 

While the powerful documentary The Social Dilemma was not produced to specifically study the human brain, it ends up doing so by pointing out the algorithmic effects of social media on our neural networks.  As social media’s short burst images/words bombard us, the producers of those social media bursts express hidden algorithms by utilizing some aspects of truth-seeking but, often, more aspects of fiction-creation, including stereotyping.   We may think of media/social media as a journalistic place for “truth,” but they are, to a great extent, set up to be more fiction than truth because their empathy development and systemizing frames always or nearly always project villains and enemies through stereotypes inside the rumination loops the bombardment creates.

In the election cycle last year, we saw the algorithms at work.   While all politicians use reality cloaking, Donald Trump was perhaps the acknowledged master of its practice via Twitter and other social media.  Much of what he said on social media projected an enemy stereotype.   Seventy four million people voted for him in 2020 in large part because they agreed with him on certain issues; if you are a Trump voter, please do not hear me stereotyping you.  You had many reasons for voting for him and many of them did not involve reality cloaking.

That said, I think you might also agree that much of what Trump put on Twitter carried a Machiavellian intention toward “end justifies the means.”  One end he sought was his own election so that he could run the country in a way that fit his approach.  To stay in control, he mastered reality cloaking and stereotyping via social media.  When challenged in real time to prove assertions he made, he used social media itself as proof–pointing followers to the cloaks, frames, and ideologies in social media.   This intentionality on his part was clear–he did not seem to hide it–making it useful as we study the influence of social media on the brain.

An example:  while the Trump court cases around election irregularities were moving through the courts in November, I talked with a friend who is a Trump supporter.  Two dozen of the Trump lawsuits had been dismissed by the time of this conversation.  I asked my friend what he thought about this and he answered that there were millions of votes involving dead people voting, and Trump would have won the election if these “dead votes” had not been counted.   He said his proof was that “it’s all over social media, we all know there was fraud, it’s clear the election was stolen from President Trump.”  When I pushed for actual proof, he said, “President Trump has the proof.”  For him, the person who stimulated the reality cloak could give the proof but had not yet done so.  The Trump supporter adhered to social media proof as proof even when the same social media had provided no proof.

Similarly, “proof” for the idea that “defund the police” was needed came from social media promotion of anti-racist intentionality.  Proof was not offered for the efficacy of this radical strategy, and when polled, the majority of African Americans said they did not want the police defunded.  They also said they did not see all white people or all police as enemies, though they did see some white people and some police that way.   But like the “election fraud/stop the steal” cloak, the “we are all racist” cloak became systemized in many people’s brains.  This may have happened at first for the purpose of empathy, but soon, the projection of a stereotypical racial enemy, white people and police, took over the reality cloak.  Without social media bombardment, this kind of reality cloaking would have been very difficult to pull off, if not impossible; with thousands of social media words/images bombarding our brains, we are susceptible constantly to it everywhere on the political spectrum.

 

The Systemizing Frame as a Potential Brain Disorder

 

As we noted in Part I, systemizing is normal in our brains and can become hyper-active as bombardment trauma creates rumination loops in our brains between the amygdala and other brain centers that cloak reality to help us feel safe.  This cloaking loop and its attendant brain activity become a systemizing frame out of which we begin to act and react to new stimuli.  Because of overstimulation from social media, the trauma causes our brain to enter dual empathic and protective responses that often require reality cloaking, so much so that the reality cloak and systemizing frame replace reality.  In this way, the brain creates hard loops that allow it to act, in part, like an autistic brain.

Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Pattern Seekers is a profound read for deep analysis of autistism.  One of the traits of the autistic brain, as Baron-Cohen notes, is it’s decreased reliance on contextual cues in actual reality around it.  Because of the de novo mutations that occur at conception and in utero, an autistic brain loses neural pathway activity in and between centers that specifically encounter and process social-emotional reality.  This loss depletes its ability to pick up what is actually going on inside other people’s emotional structures.  To compensate, the autistic brain relies heavily on systemizing activity—encountering reality by cloaking social cues in framing structures that allow it to encounter reality as best it can and feel as safe as it can.

Many abilities in the autistic brain are marvels rather than disabilities, as parents of autistic children know.  Autistic children are often beautifully unique in their way of thinking and doing.  If you have an autistic child, you have seen how his/her brain creates compensations for certain lacks by enhancing certain talents.  Many autistic individuals are, quite simply, geniuses.

At the same time, it can be useful to study ourselves in the face of social media trauma via the microcosm of the autistic brain. As our own or our children’s brains are bombarded with social media cues, we cannot realistically take in all the contextual social cues in social media, so our brains pick and choose adherence to various systemizing frames, often the ones that bombard it most heavily and often.  Not just autistic brains, but all brains can end up doing this.

 

The  Group-Belonging Paradox

 

As our individual brains invest personal, emotional, intellectual, and moral energies in stereotypes and frames like  “defund the police” or “stop the steal” or “all people who voted for Trump are racist” or “Biden voters are socialists who will destroy America,” actual reality gets cloaked, but the brain still needs a hold on reality and this “hold” exists in the constant expansion of the ideological framing system that grows from selected cultural influences.   The media/social media bombardment becomes traumatic enough that we must select or fall into (especially if we focus on social media bombardment from one tribe or camp) our tribe or group that helps temporarily calm the traumatized brain with a sense of belonging.  All brains yearn for this belonging and social media, as we hinted earlier, algorithmically capitalizes on the need.

To use political phrases from the 2020 election cycle as examples:  in reality, most Trump voters are not racist and Biden voters are not evil, but the systemizing frames that emerged on social media tribes were so persuasive for many brains that tens of millions of people ended up thinking the 74,000,000 Trump voters must be racist and the 80,000,000 Biden voters must be Socialists.  The brains that accepted the stereotype allowed illusions to prosper in rumination loops in large part because the systemizing frames of “racist” and “socialist” felt ideologically safe within group belonging.

Popular culture calls this “group think.”  Often, of course, thinking along similar lines as our friends or family is a good thing.  But ideological group belonging based in reality cloaks has a price.  As our brains ruminate on the reality cloaks and ideological frames, chicken and egg both get lost.  In our belonging-group we repeat “Trump voters are racists” and “Biden voters are socialists” as if these stereotypical ideological frames were true not reality cloaks.   What began as a simple reality cloak became a systemizing frame then a systemized set of stereotypes shared in a group.  The human sense of belonging in the group became dependent, for many people, on sharing together the stereotyping inside the rumination loop rather than on seeing reality together as a fluid process that needs our help holistically in group belonging.

The present culture-danger of “acute polarization” emits from this base.   Acute polarization and the inability to talk with others outside our own systemizing frame is inherently dangerous to a democracy, to say nothing of the friendships lost in our homes and communities, livelihoods ended in riots such as those in Portland last August, and lives lost in cruel and frightening actions such as the January 6 insurrection.   Social media/media bombardment trauma places our brains into a paradox we often cannot solve, one that debilitates us and our culture, in which our natural will to belong and thrive in community ends up imprisoning us in a group that exists within a reality cloak.  Like the other traumas I have already described, this paradoxical trauma debilitates us.

A signal that you or yours are experiencing this trauma can appear in what I call, perhaps awkwardly, the “enemification” of your or your family member’s life experience.   The stereotyping of enemies in the reality cloak happens in seven stages and as it does so, charges the brain with impulses toward confrontation and conflagration.  I will explore the hormonology and neurology of this even further in Part III.  For now, I ask you to think about your own emotions as you experience media/social media bombardment trauma.  Remember a time when, having experienced the constant fear of enemy in yourself, you tried to change course, stop using social media, discuss it with colleagues, or protect your teens by warning them off social media.

At the water cooler or the dinner table did you hear back, “But Twitter only constitutes a tiny group of Americans and I know that.”  Did your teen argue, “I know social media really does not matter to my self-development, I don’t care if people like me on social media.”  Did you look across the dinner table at a spouse (or see yourself in the mirror) interrupting your loving relationship to check social media “just this one time”?   In all these responses, your brains, the brains of colleagues, and your family members’ brains missed, even longed for, the sense of belonging that comes concomitant with use of media/social media.  You-we–could not keep away from social media.

I hope these blogs help you to point out to everyone around you the paradox of belonging–that social media “belonging” is by nature a limited framework and can ultimately lead to such narrowed belonging that we only keep longing for more belonging in a thin group, not a real family or tribe.  When we hyper-utilize social media, we likely will not be able to avoid the cloaked reality and its damage, nor the false belonging.  You have seen this perhaps especially among teens who think they are immune to social media trauma but in spending many hours on social media, obsess about being “in” or “out,” often to the point of increasing their depression, anxiety, and other brain disorder diagnoses.  You might watch them and think they are addicted to social media.  In a sense, they are–and so are we, potentially, much more than we realize.

 

Social Media Frames as Limited Empathy and Increased Agitation

 

A recent study out of both Trinity University and Hebrew University, “Looking on the Dark Side:  Rumination and Cognitive-Bias Modification” helps us all to point out the trauma to colleagues and family members.  The researchers studied rumination behavior in teens and young adults, including rumination loops that grow from social media use.  The researchers discovered that too much emoting on dark things, even when emoted with a shared group, can increase trauma, anxiety, depression, and agitation rather than decrease it.  Some sharing of our feelings is a good thing, of course, but this research, which has been corroborated by many others (for more detail on this please see Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls), constant sharing of our feelings is detrimental.

Why?  Because while pop psychology and social media tell us that the more you ventilate your feelings the better you will feel, the brain does not generally work that way.  Some ventilation of feelings is very good for brain growth, but too much ventilation, especially via social media, increase negativity bias.  Negativity bias is one of the reasons that social media is linked to increased depression and anxiety in our mental health interventions among teens and adults.  Ventilating, telling their friends how they feel, promulgating cloaks and frames and generally trusting via social media that their feelings, no matter how often expressed, are useful to them and others in their group, they (and we) don’t notice that the rumination loops often increase bias toward “negativity” about themselves, enemies, family members, and others.  That negativity cripples them personally and is dangerous socially in the long term though it can feel good to a teen (or us) to ventilate in the short term.

Negativity bias grows from rumination loops that go on too long in the brain and thus paralyze or negate the brain’s ability to problem-solve, survive, and thrive.   Overuse of social media plays right into this, increasing your teen’s anxiety and anger via rumination loops that limit their empathy to themselves or a small group, focusing rumination on “in” and “out” groups and often linking brain activity to stereotypes which pull the teen even further away from reality than they were before they began to incessantly ventilate.  Ultimately, these loops increase agitation as the brain goes deeper into a reality cloak so removed from real life that the teen’s brain cannot actually make progress against it because it is somewhat unreal.  There is no “there” there, which further frustrates the brain.

This is the “dark side” of cognitive-bias modification, the dark side to the limited belonging.  You can feel yourself in that dark side when your own bombardment trauma and your concomitant rumination increases your own anxiety, depression, and agitation.  As we feel these increases in ourselves, we are challenged to see that the group we belong to lives in a somewhat fictional world now, sensitized to empathy only within the stereotyping and projections, not fully empathic outside the frame; social media bombardment trauma is keeping our agitation and anxiety front-and-center as our own rumination loops just grow and grow even despite (in part because of) our small group belonging.  As anxiety and anger grow in us, we are not healed, nor is the world.

This process in ourselves and our social media dependent teens occurs neurally as the bombardment trauma forces blood flow back down into the amygdala and other anxiety centers in the mid brain.  Researchers in the Trinity and Hebrew University study found, not surprisingly, that test subjects’ heightened anxiety and anger levels directly paralleled their amount of time on social media.   I believe we saw all this this happening in the defund the police movement that occurred in the summer and fall of 2020.   Media/social media bombarded our brains not only with horrific images of George Floyd (and other African Americans) harmed by individual police, but also by short burst words and images that appeared to justify any form of protest, including riots, looting and violence.  As “defund the police” became a crashing wave on our brains, in ways similar to the “stop the steal” bombardment a few months later, our brains were affected.  “Defund the police” was a result.

When people of color were polled, however, the vast majority said, “This defund the police concept is not our concept—we don’t want the police defunded, but we do want police reform.”   We began to see that “defund the police” was more a Caucasian concept than an African American concept.  I believe what happened in this extreme defund the police concept was an empathy paradox created in large part by the traumatic bombardment of images and words in social media.  A reality cloak ensued quickly in which “police are racist, white people are racist, destroy the system, defund the police.”  The people who promulgated these stereotypes created a systemizing frame to protect against the trauma, limited their empathy to a certain group, and yet, still, did not speak for most of the people they believed they were helping.

When empathy becomes this limited, mistakes get made.  National empathy now leading to police and criminal justice, as well as racial justice, is welcome to all of us who have been battling on this front for decades.  Fortunately, it continues to be strong across the racial and political spectrum and will be, I hope and believe, from now on, and to some extent, we can thank social media for this necessary evolution in American life.  But” defund the police” remains a good example, I think, of media/social media bombardment trauma on the Left.  To belong with black people, some white people made the mistake of systemizing a frame that most black people themselves did not want.  Many of these defund the police supporters are still locked into a systemizing frame by which their own agitation increases every day.

Social media is that powerful.  As brain-bombardment trauma, it can so powerfully cloak reality that large groups in our nation don’t see the paradoxes, the limitations, the potential long-term difficulties we join or create in our frames.  Many of the people who attacked the halls of Congress also convinced themselves they patriotically empathized with all Americans when, in fact, their small group belonging made them dangerous actors against nearly everyone in America, even other conservatives and people on the political Right.

 

The Irony of Social Media:  New Anxiety and Anger

 

Passionate anger in favor of a cause is not a bad thing.  It is often a very good thing.  I vividly remember my parents, both of them academics, who were active in social justice causes in the 1960s taking me, my brother, and my sister on peace marches.  In that era, the Vietnam War caused so much anger and anxiety that marching for peace felt like the only way to calm our fear and give voice to what angered much of our nation.  At the same time, my family and my parents’ colleagues did not attack or belittle American troops.  And the march for peace was not a small group empathic response to a reality cloak in which even the Viet Cong were the enemy.  The enemy was an unjust war.  As we marched and protested, our anger and anxiety dissipated for a time, then passions rose again and a new march was planned and executed.   No one in our cohorts became violent against others.

I remember the anger and agitation vividly and many of you do, as well, if you are a baby boomer or older.  Is there a difference between defund the police, stop the steal, and marching for peace in the 1960s?  In some ways, no, but in some ways, yes.   On the yes side, the lack of media/social media bombardment in the 1960s meant that our own emotions of anger and agitation were not a trauma bombardment layered onto our passion.   Millions of short burst images and words did not attack our brains, then.   Our collective passions were moved a little bit via TV, but a lot through relationship and face-to-face conversation.  There was no internet, obviously, and no social media to bombard our brains so we did not need to reality cloak to defend our brains. Our systemizing frames were more data based than fictional or half-fictional and though we were deeply ideological in a lot of our Liberal and Conservative framing, our first instinct was not necessarily to project a stereotype and base our passions on that enemy.

Racism existed in America then even more than now–it was not a perfect time nor is that my point; my point revolves around the bombardment and the anger that bombardment trauma causes our brains to generate.  This anger is a clue or trail you can follow as citizen scientists in your own and your children’s brains now.  Watch your own and your children’s moods in the face of social media.  If you or they are becoming:

*more depressed

*more anxious

*more agitated

*more enraged or angry

you or your teen could be participating in reality cloaking that is debilitating or will do so.   Your teen’s passion about a racial, ethnic, gender or other cause may well be a very useful passion and something to encourage, but months of mood change even in the face of that righteous cause may be an indication of trouble, especially if the feelings of sadness, agitation, and anger are relatively new.  If so, you may be seeing social media trauma.  Your teen may now be inside the reality cloak, inside the systemizing frame, and inside the small group empathy that may seem to the teen to have promised less anxiety and anger but cannot keep the promise.  Instead, the teen feels more bombardment, ventilates more toward negativity bias increasingly, loops and ruminates more than before, and ultimately reinforces its own brain trauma.

If your child or you is in this neural paradox, there is little choice but to turn off the most dangerous media/social media for a period of time, probably for one to three months, in order for the brain to test out the accuracy of the reality cloaking theory in its individual neural network.   There is no tip or solution better than that cold turkey shut off.  To justify the shut off, you might discuss the reality cloaking “disease” with your teens as they notice their own anxiety, depression, agitation, anger, or other debilitation.   Perhaps a bit of social media can remain active on a device, such as connection to family members, but the rest gets shut off.  This is a citizen science experiment anyone can begin at any time.

In Part III, the final part of this series, I will provide the seven stages by which reality cloaking damages our brains and, thus, stages the dangerous outcomes we experienced nationally, for instance, on January 6, 2021 in our nation’s capitol.  My goal will be to help you protect your own and your children’s brains—not from political ideologies you find worthy but from the rumination loops that can harm you and your children.  I’ve hinted in Parts I and II about ways in which reality cloaking is an actual disease.  I will finalize that argument in Part III.