The Blindboy Podcast - A Neuroscientist explains what Doomscrolling is doing to your brain

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Dr. Michael Keane is a medical doctor and psychologist who holds a PHD in behavioural Neuroscience. We chat about creativity, trauma and social media use  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Greetings, you bandy-legged chandeliers. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast. And if you're a regular listener, if you're a 10-foot deckling, a steaming queva, then you know the crack. You're familiar with the lore of this podcast. Let's begin this week with a poem.

We haven't had a poem in a very, very long time. This piece was submitted to me. by the actor Daniel Day Lewis. And this poem is called, Is it a priest or a seagull? Is it a priest or a seagull who has his hands inside my mouth? Is it a communion or a feather

that bleeds into my soul? Is it a priest or a seagull who has vandalized my bin? Do my eyes hurt from the sunlight glinting on your plumage, did the raindrops stay in your colour? Say your mass into a can of fanta. Bless my shin bones with your claws. Is it a priest or a seagull who is shitting in the wind? That was, is it a priest or a seagull by Daniel de Lewis? I wrote a treatment for a

fucking sitcom years ago and submitted it to RTE where it was a puppet show about Daniel de Lewis wanting to shrink himself

so small that he could be intravenously injected into Gabriel Barn and needless to say that was not commissioned by radio telephish airing but it was it was revisited in my 2018 collection of short stories Boulevard rain.

I wrote a short story called the Skin Method inspired by the work of J.G. Ballard was the book Gabriel Byrne snorting bags of his own skin to revisit earlier versions of himself like

system restore points. He would save bags of his own skin from when he was younger and snort them. And this then created an online trend amongst young men where they all started to engage in in body modification and snorting bags of their own skin to achieve eternal youth and beauty. And when I published that, the Irish Times wrote a review. The review was so bad that the Irish Times argued.

that I shouldn't be allowed write any more books which really hurt me at the time but now I'm actually very proud to get such a strong reaction to get a review so powerful that the Irish Times would argue that I shouldn't be allowed to write anymore

and I wrote it as an absurdist satire but in 20, that was 2018 in 2026 now where the Manosphere is heading with these cunts like clavicular smashing themselves into the heads with hammers. I ended up inadvertently predicting that that's where things were headed.

I'm going to be having a conversation with a neuroscientist this week. I had a conversation with a neuroscientist in Leisureland, which is a real sentence in the English language that describes events that actually happened. I usually don't do two interviews in a row, but

Oh fuck it I spoke to a guest at the weekend in Galway a neuroscientist called Dr Michael Keane and it was really really wonderful a wonderful conversation and it's incredibly impartinent to to write now

to get to speak with an expert we speak about what the internet is doing to human brains what things like doomscrolling is doing to the human brain and the condition of humanity. The reason I'm mentioning my strange, some of the strange short stories that I've written is that's how I came to meet Dr. Michael Keane. He's a medical doctor who has a PhD in neuroscience and he scans brain

activity via E, EG scans. And Michael Kean read one of my short stories once, and after he read it, he was struck by how odd the story was and kind of went, I'd like to scan this fella's brain, I'd like to see what's going on in his head, because this is very odd. So he got in contact with me and he scanned my brain. But while he was doing it, we had a cracking chat, and I soon realized, fuck it, I really, this is a very interesting person, I click with him, really get along. I need to have him on the fucking podcast. I need to have him on the podcast for a chat. That's what this is. If you want to check him

out, he's Dr Michael Keane.com. And I'll also, I'll tag him on Instagram. When I post this, I'll tag him on the Instagram post. And that's at my Instagram, Blind by Boat Club. The weather in Ireland is gorgeous and sunny at the moment. We're all going for lovely long walks. So this is a long podcast. I think this comes in it about two hours long. But the beauty of a long podcast, it's not fucking TV, it's not the radio. You don't have to listen to it all in one go. You can if you want. But you don't have to. You can stub it out, put it in your pocket and take a few pulls off it all week long, if you like. That's that I do. I love podcasts that are three hours, four hours long. I love that because then I've got a week of content. I dip in and out of it all week.

I love doing that. We don't just speak about the impact that doom scrolling and social media is having on the human brain. We speak about creativity in the human brain, trauma and the human brain.

Michael also does chats on the neuroscience of Irish trauma, intergenerational trauma. He's fascinating. So about further ado, here's the chat that we had. Can you tell us what it is you do? Yeah,

um, scanning brain. I think pretty much sums it up. So my background's in neuroscience, psychology and medicine. You're a medical doctor too. Yeah. And it has always brought me back to understanding

what brains do. So when you're, it's interesting reading the short stories, that's what got me interested in talking to you. That's what I meant to say. So you had read a short story of mine and it was so strange you thought,

I want to scan this man's brain. Correct. Pamela Fags. Pamela Fags was the story, which is actually weirder than that one. I can attest to that.

And I have a brother whose name is Declan and there's a wet Declan in the he's a great hound. So I thought, yeah, it's a... Declan is just a great name though, isn't it? It is, yeah.

And that was enough got in touch then to see what was happening. And... And... but it was you gave me an EEG scan which was very interesting I just had to sit down while you put wet things on my head for about 10 minutes

and the results were interesting you said something to me which I found fascinating was you looked at the results and you said there's something going on in my brain that some people need to take psychedelics in order to get and I just seem to be walking around like this Yeah. It was the, I mean, the genesis of it in reading the stories, as in a lot of good literature or poetry or whatever, is to your point about sitting down in a linear fashion to write an interesting thing. And your process is obviously different to that. For a lot of people, the kind of linearity exists and the world kind of reinforces that. But it's not really that interesting. But when you,

get people who can connect random ideas together in interesting ways or who can see a situation from a different perspective or whatever it might be what we might call kind of lateral thinking is what people describe it as for a lot of people to get to that point it takes a lot of work or a lot of effort or a lot of practice or you ingest substances to do it or whatever it might be and yeah when we were looking at your brain data so we put the EEG on and from that we can build up

a 3D functional model and we can look at connectivity and we can look at networks in particular we were interested in some of the networks in your brain and seeing how those networks switch on and switch off and for a lot of people

they switch on and switch off in a predictable fashion and you have to do an awful lot of work to get networks which don't normally communicate with each other to communicate with each other. And this is a process that, you know, people talk about creativity or whatever.

And people in corporates go away on retreats. Yeah. And they spend so much money creating the conditions to get you out of your normal way of thinking in order to come up with the big idea. And when we're looking at your brain, your capacity to get there is very ready. the difficulty of course with that is

is when you have to do kind of mundane Matt's homework that's the thing that thing is acting wanting to generate mad ideas what I would say about my scan right is so I've always

naturally been that kind of way I've always had a propensity towards lateral thinking but also it's a daily practice Like, someone who really changed things from me when it came to the act of creativity, when you become a professional artist, every professional artist, whether it's a musician, comedian, fucking paint or whatever, you're handy at it in school. And then you get paid and it's like, shit, how do I do this all the time in order to serve as capitalism?

And I used to just get good ideas in the shower, we'll say. And then as I got older and it's like, fuck, I have to write a script. next week for telly or whatever. I started, I discovered a fella called Chicks and Mihai. You've heard him of you? So he is the psychologist who coined the phrase flow

and Chicks and Mihai had, he studied a bunch of artists and by looking at artists and creative people and how they did their thing and how they achieved this state of flow he managed to break it down into paths that you could follow

and that's what I do. What he called it was the closed mind and the open mind. So he said the goal of you know, if you want to write a short story, if you want to get to the flow part of your brain, everyone has a good idea in the fucking shower. You have a fucking shower

and all of a sudden something unlocks. If you're a professional artist, you have to figure out how can I make the shower part unlock when I'm sitting at my boring desk? So the first step is you agree upon a time. So for me, it's like 90 minutes.

So I'm going to sit in this desk and this space and I'm going to do it for 90 minutes. And there's no phones, there's no distraction. Mine must only do this. And what it's about is learning to tolerate the frustration of nothing happening. The blank page. If you can tolerate the frustration of nothing happening

for those first 15, 20 minutes. And that means the horrible feelings of I am a failure. Anything creative I've ever created before has been a complete accident. And this moment right now where I can't come up with an idea is proof of it. It's gone. If you just can break through that and how I break through it is trying to fail. If I'm scared of failing, then let's fucking fail.

Let's write a story about a man's anus. You know what I mean? But then once I go there, what chicks and me I said was, we use the closed mind throughout our day. The closed mind is, I need to pay my bills. I need to be at this place on time. I need to speak to people in a respectful way. But then you have the open mind, that's what he said,

which is the flow state where anything happened and humor is present and there's no rules and you're in a state of play. And I do that. I stick with that frustration and then before you know it, 15 minutes, I break through and now I'm in flow state and I lose all sense of time

I don't look like I could be anywhere it's just amazing and it's the best feeling of the world and then when I exit flow state I usually have a piece of work where I'm like this isn't too fucking bad but that is frequent regular practice to me

so I go to the gym of doing that to my brain so when you looked at that scan Are you able to tell this is how this fella's head is or is this someone who just goes to the gym of creativity every day? I mean, you kind of tell whether it's always been there or not, unless you have data from previously.

But you can piece together, I guess, with your context and your life story and the fact that these patterns exist, you can talk a little bit about school or whatever. And this pattern of thinking is as I say, it's difficult to do your maths homework like that and your Irish verbs and... And this is my life, yeah, I've had school like...

Yeah, the school system doesn't reward that. No. If you listen to Ken Robinson talking about schools in creativity, we don't value in school creativity in general because the killing phrase is you'll never get a job at that. So we, as you say, we serve a particular way of... We reinforce a particular way of thinking. And creativity really flourishes.

One of the key criteria for creativity to emerge is safety. John Cleese talks about this. He talks about The Life of Brian or the Monty Python stuff. Did you see John Cleese's creativity talk? Yeah. Yeah. So he, that's all from Chicks and Mihai. It's the safety.

Yeah. Because again, as soon as you activate stress, and I mean, everybody talks about stress, But once you activate neural networks involved in that fight or flight or that feeling that you're being judged or whatever, by its nature, it prevents the connection then of previously unconnected networks, which is a luxury to your brain. And is that because you're scanning for threat? You're in survival. What I always think of is, that's the classic when you, like, I have two little toddlers, you know, and. I call them my teachers

because I get to watch them playing all the time. I get to watch them playing with Lego or painting and shit. And you can just observe with little kids when they are playing, you know they're fucking happy. But if they're a little bit stressed or worried

or whatever, play doesn't happen. You know what I mean? And I think that's the same with us as adults except it's the threat that we feel is for me anyway, it's its identity. Like anyone in this room

who's creative or as an artist would relate to this. It's, when I was in fucking school, I was shit at school, like so bad, but I was the kid

who was good at drawn. So my identity latched onto well, because I'm good at drawn, that gives me a sense of worth and value. But the danger of that then for me is that

if I'm not careful, if I base my self-esteem and sense of self-worth on being a good artist and being creative, then that threat of being a bad artist doesn't mean that I've just fucked up a short story. It means that I'm a terrible person. And that's what I have to be careful of. That's what I have to. I always say at any time, if I got a good review or to get an award, I always say, I'm very mindful of this. I don't allow this to define me as a person. My work got a piece of reward, but I did not get a reward.

you know and to practice I suppose humility humility of just someone being good at one thing it doesn't make you a better person than someone else you know what I mean they're just aspects of behaviour it's not easy to separate those two things out because we have been trained

very subtly to connect skills or capacity with worth and then we internalise that as self-worth and we reinforce effort, and we tend to punish lack of effort. And then we've managed to layer on top of that

a kind of a moral judgment. So if you're not paying attention or you're not doing your homework or you're thinking in a different way, it is then seen, or if you're getting distracted all the time, or if you're hyperactive and you can't sit down, that's misbehaving.

Yeah. And we've linked those two things, together, to the extent that even to say that maybe they're not linked is a surprise to a lot of people. So we have layered on moral failure with anything that isn't what people ask you to do or doing something different. And that's, I mean, that's pretty damaging for a lot of people. And I've seen it from both sides. A lot of people blame that on Protestants. I know. I said that's a big one. There's, oh, who wrote, there's a book called the Protestant work ethic. And apparently, modern capitalism as it is today,

you can trace it to the Protestants of Scotland, England and then America, where work ethic became, I think it was the Puritans and Calvinists. Work ethic in your capacity to work and produce was a sign of moral goodness. Yeah. And this was unique to specific types of Protestantism, Germanic Protestantism, that's what it was. So the book is called the Protestant work ethic. No one knows the name who wrote that, no?

Okay. It's a popular one. It's big in anyone who studied economics. I, you got it right. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry for forgetting sectarian there, ladies and gentlemen. But, no, I know what you're saying.

the how we tend to put external value on our capacity to produce and these things and we do that

in spite of the fact that I mean there's a thousand people here have come to listen to see you and you know we in Ireland

in particular we value the arts creativity music, you know, I would say disproportionately highly compared to other countries. We do, yeah, we don't think we do, but yeah, we do. Like we are

certainly I mean, last September I went down to, I grew up in a small village in North East Galway called Kilkirn. I went down to our neighbours. My uncle had died and we have a farm and there's a few farms around us and I went down

to our neighbours to say my mother's brother had died and he was a farm really 70. He's out in the field. I waved down to him. He came in. And I said, you know, Michael a bellymo is dead. Oh, she's come in. We weren't in. We had tea. And he took down a book of poetry. There's a farmer. He hoshaed on his well. And we sat at his kitchen table eating scones, drinking tea. And he was reciting a few poems. And it's a sort of part of our existence. We're all used to it. Everybody's used to sing songs and whatnot and going to see drama. and whatever. We value disproportionately highly here, I think, compared to the countries.

And yet, the process of getting there, we don't value. Because we have gotten our heads that, you know, it's the 18-year entry into university, as Ken Robinson calls it. We value that kind of stepwise, linear idea that anything that deviates from that is, as I say, a moral failure unless,

and as I say, I've seen this from both sides, because most of my work has been clinical work. But I've worked with professional footballers, fellas in the Premier League, World Cup winners are doing mad things. And they describe the same process in school, a lot of them. Real difficulty with maths and paying attention. Go away out of it.

But they were good at soccer. So they were good at something that people reinforced. So we are also familiar with that. That it was grand. Give him a football. when you see what this fella can do. There was a huge value. It was unbelievable to me

to listen to the similarity of the story of people who had played in the Champions League final, people who had played at World Cups and incidentally having all the same worries as you and me, talking about their school experience and kind of coming out of it by the skin of their teeth. So the advice I used to always give to parents of children who are struggling

with ADHD or whatever it might be is about school was two things if you can find their passion look for that and try to get to 18 with your confidence intact you'll figure it out from there

and the reason I talked about the passion thing is and we take it back to looking at the neural networks, the brain networks if we look at our behavior and our brain activity not as good or bad or black white or whatever, but look at it in terms of variability. If we think about behaviour in terms of variability,

if you have a car or a friend who's high variability, it's pretty difficult to manage. If you have a car that's high variability, most amazing car is sometimes. How do you mean high variability? The most amazing car sometimes, but won't start another time and you can never predict. Oh, right. Okay, yeah, yeah. The most unbelievably brilliant friend,

sometimes, most of the time, but sometimes not. It's very difficult to manage with that. You want that you're looking for the consistency, the predictability. Yeah, and low variance, low variability. The Toyota Yaris of a friend. So we...

That sounds like a real country insult. Isn't out a theory, how is it? But it's predictable. Yeah. And you think that's what we go for. We value that as a... a society, that predictable. I mean, that's because everything runs on time

and you have to know how many people are turning up and what time they're turning up at and all that. And we've created those systems. But in the highly variable system, when you find that passion, so I could do 40 minutes of Irish and then I could do 40 minutes of maths and then I could do 40 minutes of geography.

And it was kind of a meat and two veg kind of approach to life. But I couldn't do anything for more than two hours. But when you get the highly variable networks activate it. And you attach them to a passion. You attach them to something that this person is particularly interested in. You'll get this flow state.

You'll get this six hours of reading a comic in the front hall of a house with their legs going purple from the cold because they're so into it. And if we could have a system whereby we can encourage that in some way and reward that because we reward the end product. That's beautiful. Yeah. we don't reward the process or we don't have the facility

because our systems are so built for scale it's hard to to facilitate that because I spoke about that recently on a podcast where I was remembering my time in school where I used to get in so much trouble that eventually I just wasn't allowed into classrooms

and instead they just told me go to the art room and listen to music and draw and when I was doing that I was happy. But I used to get angry about... I used to leave school and then at home, I'd be learning how to create music or I'd be learning about musicians

and I would be so fucking passionate. I'd do it for hours. It was flow state. And I used to say to myself, I can't even... I wish the teacher could see what I was doing there and evaluate me on that. But I can't.

And I have to do it privately and I have to keep it away. And I can't bring it. it, I can't bring up the music of Cyprus Hill in economics class. Do you know I mean? But if I could have if only they could have it's like I am doing good work, it's just

nothing that's happening here, it's happening at home and it might pay off someday. And this is part of the layering in a failure because people see it as a choice from the outside because the implication is

well he can do it when he wants to. Yeah, oh God, yeah. He's not bothering to do it in here with me. That is a pain in the fucking arse. And that's where it becomes a choice, where it appears to be a choice, then comes the judgment, then comes the internalization of that, because then you think, Jesus, maybe it is a choice. Maybe I should be better.

Mm-hmm. And then what do you say to an 11-year-old or a 12-year-old who says that to you? You try and, like, how do you get them out of that? if we're we'll say speaking about what we call noradivirgent brains right

um like I'm very I deliver a podcast each fucking week and I never miss it and there's a huge amount of work

involved in it right but I I won't say I procrastinate but I have I need that fucking deadline if I need to get

to the point where it becomes terrifying and then it all unlocks. And it's not laziness, it's not procrastination. And I think there's something going on in my brain whereby only when I get to the point where it's like, fucking you got to do it, you got to do it. Then, but I can't do it. Like today's Saturday. I was doing research. I don't know what Wednesday's podcast is going to be. Having a fucking clue. I know it's going to happen and I know it's going to be good.

But I don't know what it is yet. It's going to have to arrive to me at sometime around Monday and Tuesday when I'm like, fuck, fuck, there's a podcast. But I think what's going on there? What's my relationship with deadlines where suddenly something is unleashed? Because I'm doing it

every week for nearly nine years and I still haven't sorted it out whereby it's Thursday morning sit down and do the podcast. Like no, forget about it. Again, if you think about variability and think about extremes, right? Yeah, it's an extreme thing.

Yeah. And the idea that if we think about identity versus, let's say, diagnosis, right? And I have a particular issue with the fast online assessments for things, right? You know, five, answer yes to these five questions and you have ADHD. The DSM, really, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, that's a multiple choice. It's a bigger version. Yeah. But if you think about that, the five questions for ADHD, all right?

The framing of those questions is something like, have you ever put off a short, simple task for way too long? And it got bigger and bigger and bigger. And of course, the question is phrased like, have you ever done that? And everybody does that, right? That is what you call human behavior. Yeah. So this is an identity thing. It draws people in and it asks you questions.

Barnum effect, vague general statements that are true of everyone that you feel are specifically true of you. Now what you're talking about is the difference from have you ever, yes, we all have done that, versus this happens to me all the time. I cannot do anything about it. I cannot change it. And it is so extreme as to create a functional impairment for me. And that's a different thing to have you ever. And if you say this to people and say,

oh, I should look, that happens to me all the time. You say, no, no, it's a different quality. It's a dimensional thing for you. That's it's so extreme. It's so consistent. Whereas the other thing I want to bring up around that specifically is, so when we did my EEG scan I also presented with a brain

that looked quite stressed and I'm so I'm not on I'm actually quite happy so when I saw that I was like Jesus I'm not that stressed I enjoy life but what I do to myself each week regarding the podcast

putting myself to like I'm not joking you when I say on a Tuesday I'll do 22 23 hour day not a bother on me and I don't need sleep I don't want that like that like that

but the next day it does feel like I took a load of ecstasy I get like a chemical drain and I think that's what the stress is that was shown

up on that scan it's not necessarily the stress of I'm afraid of something or my life is unpleasant the stress of performing doing that to myself

repeatedly repeatedly every single week there's a dead like tomorrow you're fucked, you're fucked, do it, do it, do it. And then something, and then I'm working for 23 hours, or not sleeping. I mean, that's stress. I'm guessing there's cortisol hormones going there,

but I'm using those stress hormones for motivation rather than to beat the shit out of myself. And one of the issues with procrastination is, you know, everyone says, why do I keep doing this? You know, and last minute study for these exams. next set of exams I'm definitely starting earlier. I'm sitting down Thursday morning. I'm going to do eight hours and all that.

But the interesting thing about procrastination is, it's kind of reinforcing. Because the absolute unbridled joy of just escaping, just getting it in and getting it done. Oh, God. He's so reinforcing. It's the going to someone's wedding

and you're being late and you just nip in ahead of the bride. Ha, ha, it's that, is it? It's kind of reinforced. That lovely feeling of I'm not in trouble. Fuck, and I did it. We did it this time. There you go. No fucking way.

And life kind of reinforces it in some odd way. Well, it's a little climax. It's a little rush. Yeah. And look, I don't mean to trivialise the difficulty of it, but there is a behavioural principle at play that makes it kind. So there's a little dragon that we're chasing, and the dragon is, it's when we procrastinate.

Like, for me, So like I said, I have not missed the podcast in eight years. I fucking do it every week. But I bring myself to utter an absolute terror in order to do it. And who else does it? The South Park lads, there's a wonderful documentary. I'd know if you've seen it called Six Days to Air. And it's about how South Park make an episode every single fucking week.

And they're sleeping in their offices. Like, they have to have it by a Friday and it's Wednesday and they don't know what it fucking is. So they're relying upon this. But it's different across people. this is the interesting thing is can I fix it? I mean it's all about

I remind myself there I sound like did you ever see the film The Elephant Man no about John Merrick oh I know that one you have never seen it

yeah he goes to Anthony Anthony Hopkins character and goes can you cure me and then Anthony Hopkins goes no I can't so can I fix this the way I look at it

is it's about being able to manage it when you want to and not bothering when you don't have to. I think that makes life a lot easier. But what you're talking about and this idea of reinforcement, and if we use that kind of simple example of being late, late, late, late and you just get there on time, for some people, the getting there on time is a kind of a rush. It's a kind of, I mean, it's a

rush to get there. It's a rush. And he's like, okay, this is amazing, brilliant. For me, if I'm rushing a rush and I'm late, because I like to be a rush to get there, it's a rush, it's a rush. because I like to be early. If I'm late and I just managed to get to somewhere on time I don't feel any joy. I just feel angry

that this happened. Oh. So I don't get the reinforcement. No, but it's worth pointing out too. You became a medical doctor and that's fucking hard and to become a medical doctor means you need to have your shit

together in Junior Cert and Leaving Cert. It's a I mean it's a different type of existing I guess. It's a different type of sort of, honestly, the only way I can think about it is a meat and two veg kind of approach to life is it's not very variable, it's not very exciting, it's kind of predictable, all of that kind of thing. So how was school for you just grand, there's the work, let's just do it and get a good

result? Yeah, I mean, it wasn't brilliant. This is it. We became a doctor. Yeah, but it's kind of predictable, do you know what I mean? There's no big surprises. And what's interesting about that is, is we have a brain area called the dorsalateral prefrontal cortex which creates context for things and depending on and the same situation in front of two people can be can create an exceptionally different internal context so if I could give you an example and I was working with my co-founder Pete

out of it he lives in London but he was home with his dad place in Navon and they randomly have a sauna in a kind of a caravan out the front and he's he's real into cold bats and anyway we were working away in the dad's house and he said we'll have a cold bath and they have a bath out in the back garden that's filled at the hose and I thought to myself I can't think of anything worse than than doing that. Me too it's a bit of an odd request but I and we go to the sauna we'll come in and out

I saw okay so I kind of felt slightly pressured into it yeah even though he's a very good friend of my we run a business

together whatever I did feel a kind of a social pressure and it was November and then he gave me a pair of shorts I had to put on a pair his shorts

so I was standing in the in his dad's back garden in Pete's shorts and he was filling the bath and I was already freezing so if you were looking at it

from the outside side, right? You would see two people doing physically, practically, exactly the same thing, right? And everybody talks about the benefit of cold baths and all this kind of stuff. But the context for it was completely different internally. So for him, he's an avid Jim Gore, cold baths and so on us and this type of thing is a part of a release. It's a part of a health fitness plan that he has. It's part of de-stressing. So the psychological context for him was positive. He goes in, he feels the cold, and he embraces himself over there and then goes to the soil. So he gets all that positive, you know, people love talking about endorphins and all that.

So he gets that positive neurochemical and neuroendocrine cascade into his body. I, on the other hand, again, if you're looking from the gate, you see two people doing the exact same thing. the psychological context for me was I was stressed I didn't want to do it I felt pressured into doing it I've two small kids as well I'm thinking I'd rather get home and get them to bed

maybe a bit afraid of how cold it's going to do yeah and I just don't like it yeah so the psychological cask or the physiological reality for me then was completely different so you didn't get that rush

you didn't get cortisol I get stress and it's bad for me he gets a complete if you think about it like John Philly and it's like I'm in freezing cold water

and I'd rather be warm I need to get the fuck out this is terrible yeah so the activation of that dors of lateral prefrontal cortex creates the psychological context and that then

that psychological context then changes the physiological reality of what your body does afterwards and that is the I mean that's a very simple trite example of how the way you think or the way something feels to you completely changes your physiology and completely changes physiological reality and means that you and I can

have differing physiological reactions to essentially exactly the same experience just because we think about it differently and that's a reality what it reminds me of is A buddy of mine recently had his first child and he went to me going, look, what can I expect? And I said to him, it's like being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, but you don't experience it as torture

because there's so much love. Do you know what I mean? And what I mean is like, if you've got small fucking kids, you're not sleeping. you haven't slept in a week and someone wants to scream into your ear all day

and now it's like oh I'm touching human shit five times a day but you know what I mean these are all that's not a good Wednesday afternoon but like I do that all the time

and I love it if somebody else's children this is the context when it's yours and I know exactly what you're talking about our kids don't sleep very well so you're up half the night

but you're doing it thinking Totally. It's love, compassion. Totally. If they wake up another hundred times, I'll get up a hundred times more. But if they're not yours... Well, I never find myself in that situation. You get a different psychological context. But even, look, to take it back to Guantanamo Bay, right?

Some of my favourite heavy metal tracks were used to torture people in Guantanamo Bay. So, like, the band Slipknot, who I love, who I will listen to, maybe five hours straight, that was an actual torture in Guantanamo Bay. They would force people

to listen to Slipknot. The context is totally different. You can't escape this. You don't have choice. We're doing this aggressively at you. No control. Or as I have full control, I love it.

It's the same music and it helps me. This is the same reason they've put the on long haul flights you can see the camera views from the nose of the... Go away out of it.

The nose of the plane and underneath. What's that about? you have no control and you have no idea what's going on so you can't normalize anything but if you can watch it

and the plane feels like it's doing all sorts of funny things but if you actually watch it coming in to land on those forward-looking cameras you're feeling a little bit of control you can see how smooth it is you can see how normal it is

and this kind of sense of having no controls obviously it seems accidental from from the you know sitting in the tube and you can't see the steering wheel but you know

that's part of the process of removing control from you as you move through the airport and onto the flight is to kind of keep people compliant. So you know, you kind of lose your independence and your autonomy

once you get to the airport and you're brought all the way through and there are a lot of people telling you what to do under a lot of rules. And I know that was part of it because so much of it is like this fucking 100 middle liter is a liquid thing. I reckon that's mostly bullshit to make

people just afraid. Yeah, I think the stop now, that's a two-leaders thing in Dublin. But why does the pilot wear a military-style uniform? It's the same reason. There's no reason for them. And it's all so...

They could wear, I mean, they could wear a hoodie and a shirt. No one's getting on the fucking plane. Exactly. Yeah. It creates that sense of authority and trust. Yeah. It's purely dera, like it's made up. That's a whole thing.

Which you know, we're going to have to talk about that in the second half. because we've gone over the fucking interval, man. I can tell by my Salberdardarly clock here on the floor with the existential fucking, I'm not looking at that. He can have a little pint and a piss

and we'll be back out in about 10 or 15 minutes. But actually, before we do it, did anyone bring cans? Yeah, okay, here's a lovely thing that I like to do. First off, yeah, when people bring cans to shows, no problem at all, but sometimes it sounds like someone totting

and when I'm speaking to you, I don't want to hear. I'm like, what the fuck did I say? So what I like to do is collectively, if you do have a can, we open it together and it actually sounds very beautiful. So on the count of three, on the three, if you do have a can, take it out and you can open it, right? So it's on the three.

One, two, three. It's not gorgeous. All right, I'll see you in 15 minutes. love cracking a can open at the live podcast. I really enjoy doing that. So let's have a little break here. Well, the virtual audience are doing the same. We'll have an ocarina pause for some adverts, right? And I'm going to play my ocarina. And I'll play it gently so I don't disturb any dogs or anyone who's trying to sleep. I'm laughing. Sorry, I'm laughing. I'm laughing while I'm playing the ocarina because I just keep thinking of fucking people.

You might just get some person on the internet. Who's like I'm going to listen to the... Having a clue what my podcast is. Having a fucking clue. I'm just going to listen to this podcast here about neuroscience. This podcast where... This person is interviewing a neuroscientist about the human brain. And now I'm playing an ocarina.

I'm not even going to explain it. You have to go back and figure out the lore of this podcast. Those are my favorite podcast listeners. Not my favorite, but the most rewarding podcast listeners. for me are the ones who are like this they hadn't having a fucking clue who I am having a clue

they stumble across one episode because of the title of the podcast my title might have nothing to do whatsoever with the subject matter of the podcast and then they just find themselves listening unsure whether they hate it or not and then

end up becoming like a listener to the podcast I get a lot of maids from people like that Australian listeners in particular for some reason. Just get a A random Australian person just comes across one of my episodes. They were Google searching a topic that I might have discussed in an episode and then my podcast arrives as a result in Google.

Then they listen to it. And they're like, what the fuck is this? And then they stay. That's how I end up with little strange pockets of listeners in various parts of the world. Anyway, I was in the middle of an ocarina pause. there and I paused the ocarina pause

so we'll have to have a second one now very pathetic very pathetic ocarina pause this week nothing wrong with that that's a that's after fucking some cocker spaniel now is having a panic attack

because of that some poor prick of a dash under is having an epileptic fit as a result of that pitch that's enough of that all right so Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patria.com, forward slash the blindboy podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck you're doing listening to this podcast.

Please consider paying me for the work that I do because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This is how I rent out my studio, how I pay my bills. this is how I have the time and space and energy to deliver a podcast each week. So if you enjoy it and you're a regular listener, please consider becoming part of the Patreon community. Even though I wouldn't call it a community because I deliberately don't update the Patreon page. I want everybody to get the same experience whether they contribute or not. So it's all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee.

Once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. This is a listener funded experience.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. Also it keeps this independent. So advertisers can't come in here and tell me what to speak about or dictate the content or even suggest the content in any way. If they're advertising here, it's on my terms. All right, upcoming live podcasts. On the 9th of May, which is about a week away, I accidentally booked two gigs on one day.

All right, I'm after booking two gigs on one day. They're not clashing, they're not happening at the exact same time. They're in close proximity. It'll be grand. We'll get it done. So anyway, the first gig on the next. 9th of fucking May the first gig is

at the Arts and Minds Festival in Maynooth which is a daytime gig at 1.30pm right and that's in Maynoot University all right it's the Arts and Minds Festival Maynote

and then later that day three hours later to be precise I'm above in Dublin which isn't too far away from fucking minute really, is it? Above in Dublin at Wellfest Alright

which is in the Royal Hospital Kilmenham Which is It used to be the Centre of Colonial Military Administration for the British Empire in Ireland until the fucking IRA sorted that out

Absolutely gorgeous building which is walking distance from Kilmainham Jail where some of the leaders of 1916 were executed So I'll be doing two gigs in one day Alright And the second one is at Wellfest At Royal Hospital Kilmenham

On the 9th November Then I'm doing fuck all until the middle of June I won't be doing fuck all I'll be at home playing with my analogue synthesizers Until the middle of June Right Where I'm going to be gigging in Berlin On the 19th of June

I'm in Berlin That's sold out And then on the 20th I'm also gigging in Berlin. That one. Very few tickets left. That could be sold out. I don't know.

Check it out at the Babylon Theatre, Berlin. Then in July I'm in Sheffield at the Crossed Wires Festival as the Sheffield City Hall I believe on the 5th of July over in Sheffield. And then

English tour England, Scotland and Wales toured there in October. I'm chilling the fuck out for the summer. I'm going to I booked too many gigs for the introductory months of 2026. All right, I booked way too many fucking gigs.

And I'm experiencing pretty hardcore burnout from the sheer volume of social interaction and masking that I've had to do. So I've got a lovely break coming up. I won't be doing any more doubling gigs, I'd say, until 2027. And my next big tour is October. I'm doing England, Scotland and Wales. And I'm going to begin that on the 18th of October in Brighton, then onto Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London at the Barbecue, which is sold out, I believe.

Glasgow, think that's sold out too, Gateshead and then Nottingham, all right? Now back to the chat with the wonderful Dr. Michael Keane, where this is where we start speaking about the neuroscience of doom scrolling. Do you know what's fucking absurd? So I'm technically not... All right. So tonight is technically a play

and we're both playing characters and therefore legally I'm allowed to vape on stage. That's actually a theatre rule. But technically you're not allowed fucking vape. And then that smoke machine is just a giant vape. That's what it is. I had to bring a can out because the dressing rooms in this venue

are very depressing. it's just I know but what's bothering me is I can feel the ghosts of people in show bands having sex that's what

just the vibe of not not the venue but the dressing rooms are very I was there with my fucking laptop going Joe Dolan's arse has been on this fucking table

without a doubt Joe Dolan's bare ars has been here and I'm typing so Ah, fuck. So how are you getting on, Michael? All good, yeah.

Um, I had questions there. Now, you wouldn't see Round Toverty doing this. These are questions. We're a different guest. So when you left the IRA... I actually haven't left it. Um...

Is there any study into the... Like, what we're doing to ourselves with social media recently, right? is there any study into the impacts of social media on our brains? I mean, just the level of I don't do it, right? But the temptation to wake up first thing in the morning

and go, let's see what Sky News has to say there as I just wake up. Instead of looking at the sunset, I'm going to look at Sky News. Like, that can't be good for our brains. No, it's not. And the interesting thing is when we're doing it, we know we shouldn't be doing it.

And there's nobody sitting on Instagram for six hours thinking, this is good for me. But we kind of get drawn into it. The doomscroll. Yeah. And of course there are a lot of things at play, but even the concept of doom scrolling, we have,

we're in a world now where we accept that there is no end to what you're looking at. So for all of our existence, it's been an end to things. We have the capacity. now to sit. It started with 24-hour rolling news. You didn't have a news section, and then you waited for more news. At the same time tomorrow, you got the 24-hour news, and then we got this idea that we had end this content that we could scroll through. And I mean, that's an absolutely wild phenomenon. Somebody had to think of that. Let's not put a bottom on this. Let's just keep it rolling.

And the design of the thing is designed in large part by people like me who understand how brains work and understand what keeps them engaged. And what keeps you engaged when you're there? And if you get away from it, what can bring you back? So if you think about what keeps you there when you're there? is reinforcement. So you're obviously getting reinforced. You're in some way getting some reward from this. But it's not consistent.

It's not predictable. Okay. Reward. And this is the key element of it. It's not predictable. It's intermittent reinforcement. It's a key fundamental part of behavioral control, like gambling.

Gambling is intermittent reinforcement. So if you put side by side, predictable and intermittent reinforcement. And look at what happens to behavior. So predictable reinforcement is your cigarette machine. So you put in the money, and every time you put in the right amount of money, you expect a reinforcement.

You expect the cigarettes to drop. If they don't, so in the absence of reinforcement, your behavior goes to zero. You're not going to put in another 20 euro or whatever it is, right? A slot machine on the other hand, It works on a different principle. It works on the concept of reinforcement,

but unpredictable reinforcement. So this time when I put the coin in, I might get reinforcement, but I might not. In the absence of reinforcement, the likelihood of me doing something again is still very high. And the likelihood of that behaviour

stays high for a long time in the absence of reinforcement. And then, very slowly, the likelihood of you doing it decreases until you get a reinforcement. You win. The likelihood goes right

back up to the top again. Social media is like that. I mean, and it's not just... Rears in particular, but since we move from TikTok to Rails, that's 100. Look, everybody loves that statistic.

They only need to know eight things about your or ten things about you and they understand you. See, okay, if they understand me so well, Why is every single video I'm presented with not the perfect one that I love? Why not? Because then the behavior would decrease very steadily because there's no unpredictability.

You have to get the bad ones, the ones you're not interested in that you can flick pass, and then get the good ones because that creates the unpredictability. And that drives your reinforcement pathways. crazy. That floods your mesolimbic pathways with dopamine. And dopamine is not primarily a neurochemical of reinforcement. It's a chemical of motivation and pursuit. It tells your brain this is something worth pursuing. The outcome of that, of course, is being a reward. So when you get intermittent reinforcement

in your pocket that is exceptionally addictive I mean it is exquisitely addictive it takes advantage of the fine

architecture of your reward networks and it's deliberately not perfect the reels thing some of them yes okay

some of them are about testing what's your watch but there's a deliberate dilution of the perfect algorithm for you to create unpredictability. Yeah.

And that's why isn't the perfect algorithm. Yeah. And that's why you pick it up in the morning. I mean, it's an addiction. It uses all the same mechanisms of addiction, a neural mechanisms of addiction that we know from any other addictive behavior. So all the same mechanism. Then, so a buddy of mine, right, he came to me like a month ago, basically saying,

this reels shit he's like he's in the doom scroll can't stop going at the reels he's saying to me I need to delete Instagram I just fucking can't do it and this was a conversation we had about a month ago since then he got a job that gives him a good sense of meaning

and he's added all day long and then I said to him how are you getting on with the reals thing you were talking about is like it's not really a problem anymore and I took from that that something gave him a sense of meaning and purpose

and that allowed him to go, no thanks. I mean, is there something there? Well, I mean, it's easy, easy. It's soothing. It's the thing. Do we need something to soothe? Does it feed upon people who are in pain? Well, it's distracting.

And it's easy. Okay. And it's nice. Interestingly, you don't feel good when you finish. No. And after an hour or half an hour. And then judgment and shame comes in because it's like, this is a key thing. What did I just do there for the hour?

You feel guilty. You feel ashamed of yourself. You don't want people to see you're doing it. So what does that do to you? It causes that that stress response. So what does a stress response do? If you think about the way your brain works in fairly simple terms, there's always a balance between limbic system,

kind of non-conscious, emotional brain areas, and more conscious language-based frontal cortex, executive function, planning, organizing, all that. There's always a balance between the emotional parts and the logical parts, right? So you get really terrified. The logical parts go offline. They're taken offline by the limbic system.

Your limbic system activates, your attention narrows, you get the fight or flight. We're all familiar with that. and over time you can get your logical brain areas back online and you can soothe the limbic system or whatever and that's happening to us all the time and the limbic system is quicker

it's stronger it's non-conscious it happens before thought and it's an extremely strong driver of behavior and it's not conscious when you are stressed out so you do your scrolling you feel a bit guilty about it. What happens?

Remember, your brain doesn't differentiate where information comes from, internally or externally. So you feel the shame, you feel the guilt. You say, oh, Jesus, I've wasted another hour or sitting on me hours here. You should have gone for a walk or whatever.

The limbic system activates. The prefrontal cortex goes offline. Once your prefrontal cortex goes offline, your capacity to inhibit response. Diminishes all of the good stuff goes offline so your capacity for social control for forward planning for thinking to the consequences of actions for inhibiting responses disappears So what do you do go back to moreness and and how I would experience So like like I'm assuming there's a lot of you're all resonating with this yeah? Yeah, I experience a So if I wake up in the morning and I decide to go for 20 minutes of reels is the first thing I do in the morning,

then I know afterwards I'm going to be irritable. I'm going to be happy. I'm not going to be able to regulate my emotions as best as I would have if I didn't. Like it is measurable. If I make that choice in the morning, no, fuck off phone. See, it's tough. It's my job. You know?

And same with you as well. You started posting reels recently. So when it's your job, it's really, like, if you're tough, it's my job. Like, if it wasn't my job, I simply wouldn't have it because I can see how destructive it is, but I fucking have to be there in the algorithm. But like, what I'd love to know about is, is, like, I keep looking for the patterns.

Like, post-pandemic, when we entered the Reels era, right, TikTok and Reels, that's not the social media we knew from five, six years ago. That wasn't great either, but this is a new thing, this continual fucking scroll. when I look at things like like Limerick City Centre is empty now there's a few reasons for that online shopping destroyed everything

but also I just remember being younger and when your neighbours were bored they would just stand at the end of the driveway hoping that they could talk to someone you don't see it anymore because that person is looking at reals now

I'm just wondering how much And here's another fucking mad one now But So how long has Tinder been around for? Like what? 10, 12 years, right? So there's children born and the parents met on Tinder

So does that mean The algorithms are going to change human evolution Sexual selection has been handed to an algorithm And now a child is born Because an algorithm decided that sexual selection Whereas it used to be a nightclub I mean, you can argue the merits of whether the nightclub is better or worse than Tinder. The nightclub is better because you had to overcome the fear of speaking to someone.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Jesus Christ, you had to fucking dance. I'm sure they've had a few teenage dances in this room, yeah? Yeah. And you remember that. Girls here, boys there, and then some very brave person stands into the middle.

That was very important. Do you know? And it was that in the flesh thing. And just going back to the thing about the first thing in the morning, I think it's a really interesting phenomenon. If you think about... What's that fucking noise? Hold on.

Sorry, it sounded like a small beetle on the microphone. Sorry, Michael. No, it's all good. He's back. Is it when you talk? I don't know. Say the word postman. Postman.

I hope it's not like MI5 or something trying to hack the microphones. Go on, sorry. That's all good. The phone thing, first thing in the morning, you know those, the fairground attraction things where you hit the bell, where you hit the thing with the sledgehammer and it reaches a certain,

the thing moves up and reaches a certain point. If we think about our reward system like that, and we are built for, there's a lot of things in your, day, which will give you reinforcement and, you know, natural things. When you start with your phone, because it's, it sensitizes your, it's like a drug, it sensitizes your reward networks. Remember, your reward networks evolved 100,000 years ago. So they're being presented with this new external source of extreme reinforcement.

So you're hitting that target and the bar is going way up to the top. Now you get up then and you get engaged in all of the normal things that activate your reward network. They're not getting anywhere close to that. So you're always feeling you're coming up short all the time because your reward network, like in the case of exogenous sources of dopamine that you get from drugs, your reward network gets sensitized so you need more reinforcement to get the same feeling

and you simply cannot get that from the normal sources you're hugging your children or whatever it might be if someone walked in there that's what people who get addicted to coke talk about people who I've listened to who come out of cocaine addiction

they are like I don't use anymore however it's fucked up my pleasure in other things Like, so this morning, for instance, I didn't go for the phone. And I got, I walked out and I got to experience the beauty of the first proper summer's day of the year, which is the best when it's a fucking summer's morning and it's cold and you can smell the good weather in the air. And it was just healing and magnificent. And I noted that is the opposite of looking at Instagram Reels.

They're both pleasurable, but this one here, this sets me up for the. the day. This is like eating parage with my mind. Yeah. I know. It's wholesome and it's natural and it seems to tick boxes that you didn't even know were there. Yeah. And it feels right and there's no guilt and it's the opposite

of guilt. It's like excellent. You got up early in the morning and enjoyed the sunshine and listened to birds. And it's the same at night time. Again it's one of the reasons I started doing some videos is there's a lot of talk about the phone and blue light.

and the evidence is emerging now that the amount of light that comes from your phone isn't enough to activate the cells in the back of your eyes to activate the because that's the thing for years it's like how can you sleep if you're looking at a phone and that you think it's daylight and your brain can't go into sleep mode is that a bit yeah yeah there isn't the lux there isn't the amount of brightness required for you to activate those cells to activate the super chasmatic nucleus to reset to tell your brain that this is the daytime. It's not brilliant, but it's

certainly not enough. The magnitude of the effect is very small and inconsistent relative to the blame that's put on it by people in general. The issue with being on your phone at night time is what it does to your thinking.

It's agitating. It gets the wheels in motion. It gets you angry with the other crowd or whatever it might be. And a really interesting sort of observation in that respect when you think about the algorithms is

we love this gotcha stuff that's really good social media stuff particularly political stuff so you'll get somebody will attend a political rally they will give the the attendee a quote or they'll try and kind of back them into a corner

relatively easily and then they'll do a you know they'll shrug their shoulders at the camera and say I imply like What a loser. And the idea of watching, when you watch that, there's a certain amount of pleasure in that, right?

Yeah. And the interesting thing about that is that you or I deriving pleasure from that is, that's confirmation bias. So you're paying particular attention to information that confirms your bias that all these people are X, Y, and Z.

Right? You're watching confirmation bias. You're watching somebody being caught and they're exhibiting this confirmation bias. They're supporting this guy. They're only looking at the evidence of their politician that they like and they're ignoring all the bad stuff. But I, deriving pleasure from that,

I'm exhibiting the exact same psychological bias and it's extremely satisfying. And you are presented with that, 1120 at nighttime, and it simultaneously aggravates you about how stupid this other crowd are and gives you a self-righteousness about how right you are to think that they are so stupid

if wouldn't it be better if more the world is like me so when you're getting that 40 times or 100 times before you go to sleep and you put the phone down you can't sleep it's nothing got to do with the blue light it's got to do with that cognitive overload

that you get from that extreme I mean in the normal circumstances in a day you're rarely ever going to encounter that level of confirmation bio in real life

in real life but it's part of our daily diet now but not only that something I think about if we think of the genocide in Gaza right we all witnessed

violence. We all saw horrendous things happening to innocent people and I saw so many butchered people and butchered kids and I thought to myself I'm not sure in human history people didn't see this all the time or maybe if you were unlucky enough to see that that that was exceptional and now all of us were bombarded with

that type of... Like even when the interest came about. There were gore videos. There were videos of people dying, but you could stay the fuck

away from it. Every person in this room has that experience years ago where you went to the internet and saw the

dead person and went, oh my God, that's awful, I never want to see that again. I'm staying the fuck away

from that. And then the past five years, someone took it out of our control and now you're confronted with death. Twitter or X

in particular, I just took it off my fucking phone. That's nothing but Gore videos now. That's not nice, eventually I desensitized to it.

That's what I didn't fucking like. Do you know what I mean? It's like, oh, okay, there's the seventh dead person I've seen today. I don't give a fuck anymore. It's part of that big sort of process that's beginning to happen is that you are just being fed, this constant news. And it's generally, like if you take news, for instance, it's generally not the good news. it's somebody said something terrible or somebody did something terrible or 158 people were killed

and it's just yeah okay move on to the next thing and move on to the next thing and you kind of are desensitized and then you are slightly robotic but remember what's happening is it's it is distressing so you're and and this is going to sound slightly like a conspiracy but you are slightly stressed and remember that balance you have have when you are stressed or anxious or afraid or lonely or ashamed or guilty because you're watching this from the comfort of your lovely home and your lovely safe life and you feel terrible about that and you have to ignore it you have to go back and complain that your pillow isn't plumpin off or that the room is slightly too warm or i probably ate a bit too much dinner and you

have to square that in your head and you do that then by basically that's really stressful. So your limbic system, your emotional centres get activated by that. Your prefrontal cortex, your thinking stuff gets slightly disempowered.

And you're a sitting duck then. Because what's the best thing to get you out of that is soothe yourself with something. More social media, alcohol, buy some useless thing on Amazon.

It's a, it's just, you don't have to do it much to a person. You just have to do it a tiny bit to a lot of people and you'll push behaviors in a certain way. So it's a very subtle, it's a very population-based way of changing behavior ever so subtly and you're giving people the tools to do it to themselves. and the and of course this sounds very dystopian and it is and I would talk a lot about when I was doing those talks on trauma and I spent the first half and talking about all these brains and all the people who've been through different traumas in Ireland and famine and all that kind of stuff and and I would always say before

the half time I say it does get better like you know that there's going to be an inflection point here We're going to talk about a hope. The interesting thing about all this is, we have all the tools in here to sort. If we're just talking about the problem with social media and phone addiction and all the time we lose to it and how bad we feel, we have all the solution in here,

readily at our disposal. And as sister Stan used to say about mindfulness, it's simple. was not easy. So we do have all the tools. So in the same ways we paint a dystopian picture, when we understand how our brain and body interact and how much we can actually take control of things

with some simple, very simple basic practices, it's actually quite empowering then. That's what I wanted to get at, because, so, like, you did that scan on my brain like a year ago, and we're going to do another one when we get the opportunity soon but when you gave me that scan scan of my brain and I saw

Jesus, a lot of stress going on in my brain I knew okay I'm going to make meditation daily practice not just something I do occasionally to sit down to meditate with purpose for 15 minutes a day and then the other thing I did was

I cycle in and out of work so I just simply said I'm not going to listen to music on this cycle every cycle in another work every day is going to be a mindful cycle and what that means is with intent and purpose I just focus on I am cycling

I notice a bird, I notice the sky and checking in with all of my senses and diaphragmatic breathing the whole time and I've been doing that and I'm waiting to see eventually will that show up as a difference in my scan now I know I'm less irritable since I started doing that

I had a very powerful thing happened to me after about three weeks of just 15 minutes of meditation a day and a purposeful, mindful cycle as opposed to I'm going to listen to music and worry about what has happened and what might happen. Do you know what I mean?

And not hear the music. And not hear the music and arrive home and forget the entire cycle. You know? So when I do it, mindfully, that can't happen because I'm redirecting all the time. I'm ruminating. No, no, no, no.

cycling. What does it feel like here? What does it, what does the ground sound like? Notice when you go from tarmac to cobbles. Oh, that feels different. All that type of thing. After about four weeks of that, I cycled home and the sunlight hit a certain

pink and I experienced what I've now learned is called a glimmer. So a wave of intense, an intense feeling of love and safety. came over me, which some people would call that a spiritual experience. I

went, no, you've been meditating for three or four weeks, solid. My brain felt safe and when the sun was beautiful, I went, wow, isn't that amazing? And then it was like I just got a shower of love. It was beautiful, it was amazing. But that's

called a glimmer. What? As a neuroscientist, what's going on in my brain there? Well, who the fuck else am I supposed to ask? I mean, you're describing that, I mean, that very easy to describe process, right? This kind of mindful activation, right? And again, without boring people to tears about the kind of the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex, when they're not mutually exclusive, but certainly, if you think about post-traumatic stress,

So, you know, when we were growing up with the 80s, it was kind of the Vietnam vet. Their nerves are at them. Yeah, exactly, yeah. That person, their nerves are at them. The nerves are gone. A school teacher was after hitting me, no, his nerves are at him. The limbic system's capacity, with trauma,

this limbic system gets hyperactivated, and its capacity to take the prefrontal cortex offline is increased dramatically. Why? Because the limbic system responds to things quickly. It's black and white thinking. It's extremely fast. It keeps you safe. It has a negativity bias. Brilliant. It'll keep you

safe, right? So that goes online very quickly. The prefrontal cortex which is slow, it's thinking, it's ponderous, it's thinking through lots of different options. It's way too slow in an emergency. Is that when we're in the shower and we get good ideas? Slightly different.

Okay, sorry. Your your limbic system being activated and your prefrontal cortex being offline, that's kind of traumatic response or that stress or fight or flight or whatever you want to call it. With mindfulness and meditation and mindful meditation, what you do is you strengthen the capacity of the prefrontal cortex. physically, you strengthen its capacity to reach down to the limbic system and deactivate it. What it doesn't do is it doesn't take away pain and fear and anger and worry and thinking about the future and thinking about the past and all the terrible things you did in shame and guilt.

It doesn't take those things away. We should never try to chase a life without those because the limbic system is so quick. And suffering is inevitable part of human existence. 100%. It's the step after that that's not inevitable. So you talk, interestingly, you talk about cycling and your mind jumps to the past of the future and you have to grab it and bring it back. That's a function of the prefrontal cortex. And the more you meditate, the stronger its capacity gets. Wow. It's not. that you don't think about things or you don't feel pain or fear or anger

or disgust or whatever it's never not about feeling emotions ever it's about feeling them and say okay right that's it's Homer Simpson stepping on the nails you know that will require a tetanus shot it's kind of looking at pain and saying

oh that's exceptionally painful and then allowing your prefrontal cortex to say okay that's an interesting experience experience. I'm back to cycling and feeling my bum on the saddle. And the more you do that, the more you allow, because if you ignore your limbic system, of course, it's going to shout louder. The more you do that, the more you bring a prefrontal cortex online, the stronger it gets. And then when you are learning to, as my father-in-law very eloquently described it, defang the tiger. When you defang that tiger, your prefrontal cortex comes online. These then are the conditions that John Cleese talks about, Ken Robinson talks about, that we're talking about area around in the podcast. It's under these conditions.

They are necessary, not sufficient, but these conditions are necessary for the diffuse activation of what we now know as the default mode network and other networks. These conditions need to be met for all these other networks activate. And what you're experiencing then in this context is the limbic system is having it say, it's being soothed by the prefrontal cortex, you're not ignoring it, you're just, you're strengthening your capacity to deal with it and say, that's fine, that's okay. Get to that point then, now you've laid the conditions for your normal, natural, inherent, inbuilt, curiosity, wonder of the experience around you.

The religious person will call it God. The spiritual person will call it spiritual. Every person calls it a different thing. But you experience it as this kind of whole body joy or the glimmer you describe it. It was the whole bodiness of it. It wasn't just a happiness. You could nearly cry with that. Yeah.

And afterwards, the reflection I had on the cycle home, because it was so powerful, is I then experienced a sadness. And the sadness was, fuck it, I haven't felt that since before the pandemic. That was the sadness. So, and I knew that fucking pandemic fucked me up.

Needing to be, when it got to the point where, oh, here's some groceries, better disinfect them. You know what I mean? And we were all doing that. We were all fucking disinfecting groceries. When you're conducting yourself

in ways that would be seen as mentally unhealthy in any other, context. That was like, I had agoraphobia when I was 19 and I overcame agoraphobia. And when it got to the pandemic, I had to behave as an agoraphobic person because it was the appropriate response to the situation. That fucked me up. It's, oh, I'm supposed to be afraid. Oh, there is something outside that's dangerous. You know what I mean? And I couldn't parse it. It's like this is actually a reality. And I coped and coped and coped until It left me in, what I would say, hyper vigilance. So by about a year into the pandemic, if a postman came to the door in the morning and knocked, I would wake up in a jump scare.

A knock on the door meant someone was kicking it down to kill me. That was my immediate response, you know? I mean, are we seeing any data from the pandemic about, I think it's fair to say we all have a little tea trauma from it. And then the people, of course, obviously, who lost someone, have the big T-trauma, but for the rest of us, for all that shit we were dealing with. Yeah, I mean, I don't know the literature,

or if anything is, if we've, what the data is, but we, even if there is, whatever data is there is not going to be sufficient, I think, now, it's too early for us to see. We'll, I think we'll only see the effects of it as time goes on. Just to take it into context, too, one thing I used to think about during the pandemic is imagine if the pandemic just happened to one person

that would have been like this massive news story it's like there's one person and they're not allowed to leave their house for a year and they have to do this everyone would descend and oh my god isn't that terrible but because we all experienced it together that somehow possibly flattened the context a bit yeah and I mean I think the pandemic did different things different people. I mean, I was working in the matter hospital at the time and of course, you know, there was a lot of, you could see the immediate sort of, you know, acute medical effects,

I suppose of it. But I remember the funerals of people in, from down home. The first funerals in the pandemic, when there were only 10 people allowed to get into the church or whatever. And I remember the phenomenon of people saying we have a formula for funerals here, right? And when I reflect on my own father's death, for instance, four years ago, and it was in May of 2022,

and he died on the 26th, that was a Thursday, and on the Saturday, he had the removal. and obviously I remember the dates very readily because my father had died but the other reason the date sits in my mind

is it was a Champions League final and Liverpool were playing in it and the removal was at 5 o'clock and I went on until 5 o'clock I think it went on until 11 or it would not half the night and I remember friends of mine who were Liverpool fans

standing in the and the Champions League matches on in the pub there and they didn't go over. They stood and they kind of inched forward for three or four hours kind of watching the match with the phone down at the side. And to talk to you for four seconds to kind of mumble something out

because we know that in that moment there is some ritualistic kind of healing that happens when some somebody has stood there and shook your hand and walked out the door or stood at the front door of the house or ate a triangle sandwich

or whatever it might be there's a healing in that ritual and the thing that stands out to me most was the people who missed that the funeral's with only 10 people and down our way what people started to do as the remains

who be taken home, people stand outside their house or stand at the end of their road. And we've retained that tradition now, actually, at home, that people will come out. So I'll sometimes go home. And my mother will say

we'll up to the head of the road such and such one as passing. And the hearse will come by and we'll stand there and kids will have a little candle or whatever. And so we've had this incredible kind of trauma and I don't think we know the effects of that.

on us as individuals and it had disproportionately large effects on some people you talk about like having agoraphobia I mean that's

the pandemic is kind of like a tender box for that then it just sets the whole thing off and then you can go down through the layers of things that we missed and the people who are traumatized and re-traumatized by it

and the things that they're missing and I use the funeral example just to point to something really subtle that we take no notice of in the day to day, but when it was taken away from us, you realise, oh, Jesus, this is a huge part of who we are and what we do

and it has a huge meaning and it has a huge significance in the moment and I can't do it now and now I don't know what to do. Do I send them a WhatsApp? Sorry if you're lost. It doesn't seem to have the same. same effect when you send a GIF instead of standing to just shake hands and say, sorry to hear

about Tom and move on to the next one and the next one and the next one. So I think the layered loss will only come with time and it has affected different people differently, certainly, and it has affected the different generations. Yeah. I think that's the thing that we're going to see is the people who are in school in those formative awkward teenage years where you have to learn the hard way to be sort of embarrassed by your voice and your body and your awkwardness and your inability to speak to people. You know, we've a generation of people who've not been forged in that kind of horrible environment which ultimately can often benefit you. I don't think we'll see the effects of that for...

But even now, if you look at the manosphere discourse that's happening at the moment and the explosion of young men going towards horrendously toxic influencers, and some people are contextualizing that with the age of these young men. 1819, what age would age during the pandemic? You know? Before I take questions from the audience, like one thing that always jumps out at me is people, were radicalised during the pandemic, right? If I just sat in front of this audience in 2018 and said, you're going to lose your uncle. Your uncle won't be invited to Christmas dinner

because he won't shut the fuck up about how much he loves Trump. People would have just no fucking way. But everyone lost somebody to complete polarization. Someone became a hardcore conspiracy theorist or a fucking racist and you just had to not deal with them anymore.

and that's a very common story. And we saw it happening with a lot of people and it was a pandemic thing. Was that, do you think that was a trauma response? I think it's partly you got to do with the fact that you could amplify that signal very readily with the phone and social media.

Those radical people have always existed. In the same ways, violence has always existed. And the horrendous treatment of each other by us has always existed. The difference is, of course, we are, like with violence, for instance, and wars, we are being fed it constantly, constantly. And similarly with, um, the, you know, the people who won't shut up about Trump or whatever. Are even flat earth.

Yeah. It just has a, it has a platform now. It's easy to get it out there. One thing I witnessed is so, I did a podcast recently, basically, I've been using the internet for party years, 1996. So I've seen it all. And I remember, like, mad, crazy racists and shit used to exist 15 years ago on the internet,

but there were a small circle of loud people. Something that changed was when Facebook groups became a thing. So when people found themselves in a group where they're being rewarded and amplified within this group for extreme beliefs, that's when it started to emerge and you saw it on the streets. and you start to see people you know

who it's, I can't have a chat with them anymore. You know what I mean? Nothing I can say can get through to them. They're fully radicalized and they think that I'm the opposite of them and I have to just stay away. That 2014, like impossible to think of that happening. They didn't have the in-group.

It's the in-group. There's something about the group thing, the online group. Yeah, I mean, even in the most positive circumstances, we are we are subject to the forces of the in-group and the out-group

with your children you know they're my in-group those other children are not in my in-group and even things like oxytocin everybody loves talking about oxytocin is a love hormone right is it bullshit no I mean it's partly true the difference between men and women is related to sensitivity rather than amounts per se

but oxytocin increases the in-group, out-group dynamic. So it makes you care more for these groups. We can get oxytocin from pets, from dogs. I mean, it is when you make that little connection, there is an oxytocin and that's the love hormone. Yes, yeah. I mean, and that's certainly one way.

So even when you're having points with your mates, yeah, there's a bit of oxytocin. 100%. It's just that men are slightly less sensitive to it than women are. And it drives pro-social behavior in the, but in the in group, not in the outgroup. So we are sensitive to these kind of forces. But then we are presented with the universe

in which anything is possible, in which you can find anybody and you can say anything. And under normal circumstances, if you think just purely in terms of reward and punishment, absolutely wild ideas or racist ideas or homophobic ideas or whatever, would typically

typically, I mean now not always, but would typically find very little reinforcement in typical environments. Yeah, in real life sort of situation. Somebody would say look, please, you'd be excluded or whatever it would be. If he did it in the fucking pub,

you don't know what I mean, if he go to the pub and decide I'm going to nail a fucking swatstick to the wall. Yeah, you know, somebody would take you aside or somebody would punch you in the face or, you know. But it's It's true. It's true. There's so much shit that you see online. Even if you don't have that reinforcement online, you have other people like you. Even someone, I don't know, fucking Jedward get a lot of hate. I have no problem with Jedward. I love Jedward. But if you look at comments under Jedward's videos, you stupid fucking pricks, I hate you. If you said that in a pub, someone's going to go, what's the problem? It's just a pair of lads. Yeah, relax. Do you know what I mean? What's the problem? Why are you getting so angry? Yeah, there's no immediate punishment. And also then there's amplification and reinforcement and there's identity. and there's camaraderie

and then there's connection and then there's identity and then there is something against which I can I can exist in relation to my opposition to these people and that's an identity piece

I have and interestingly you know you talk about you know not having social media or whatever and being able to find joy in all these other things it's being able to

the difficulty which is the thing which is simple but not easy is to try and establish an identity which exists in and of itself as opposed to in opposition to something else. I hate that crowd

or I don't like this person or that fellas or whatever that identity is way easier and it's really like we're talking about with confirmation bias it's very satisfying to have that identity to be anti-Trump

it's a satisfying identity and it's extremely easy to form. it because you can listen to things and say, I don't like those things. And look at all these other people who don't like them. So we can all share this dislike. As opposed to nuance and disagreement and thinking? Yeah, as opposed to having an identity of what you actually send for or who you are or whatever it might be.

Oh, right. As opposed to something internal. Yeah. And the musician, I see. Okay. And the nuance is the fact is most people are really, reasonable people most of the time. Most people are genuinely lovely

if you are stuck for something most people will help you out most of the time. We all experience that and know that. The example that I use for that a lot of the time is if you're driving in a car and you almost bump into someone you go, yo fucking prick you stupid cunt and the other person does the same thing within that car.

But if you're in the street and you accidentally bump into a stranger, you have this lovely happy, empathic dance where you go ooh, but it's true. And you make a little mini friend with a stranger. The same thing has happened. It's just when you're in the car, you have

the disinhibiting effect. Yeah, and there's a protection between you and a protection thing, you know? So I love thinking of that example of now I understand where cars, there's money involved and shit like that, but still we all love that little, you almost bump into a stranger and make a mini friend.

And there's also a bit of identity in the car as well, don't forget. That's true. Because I have this one. And you have that one. Yeah. And I have grouped all of you people who drive that type of car. That's a big thing. That's a big thing.

Dr. Michael Keane, I could fucking chat you all night. This has been absolutely gorgeous. Thank you. We enjoyed that. Galway, you were absolutely lovely. Thank you so much. And thank you for coming along, even though I got the chicken pox on my balls. Dog bless

Go in peace I'm fucking I'm not even going to add context I forgot about that I'm not even going to add context to what I said at the end of that

podcast I'm not even going to explain it you have to have been in the room I forgot I said that all right look that was a wonderful chat with the magnificent Dr Michael Kane

check him out all right I'll catch you next week, with a hot take. In the meantime, rob a dog. Genia flick to a swan and wink at an arm. Dog bless.