Stop Your Text Messages from Killing You (or Your Friends, or Total Strangers)

Abstract

As we discussed in the last chapter, your phone is designed to get your attention. Just because it is designed to do that, and just because people have been using it to do that for a long time, that doesn’t mean that it does the job well… …or even in a way that won’t kill you.

We also discussed the UN report about how the combination of smartphone and driving has become the number one killer of young people around the world. Well, the primary source of driver distraction is text messaging.

Please remember our triune model of the brain: Your reflexive system perceives all of the internal and external data that it can, and either filters out most of what it senses, or deals with it reflexively. A small portion of that sensory information is passed on to the thinking parts of the brain for processing.

The limbic part of your brain is the part that wants to see recognizable patterns in that data and becomes emotionally-stimulated by unanticipated change. It seems to me that this is why we have such strong reactions to broken patterns. We, as a race, find some pattern interruptions challenging and upsetting, and we find others funny. I think both of those are reactions of surprise, and I think that both happen in the limbic or emotional or reactive part of our brain… but that’s a discussion for another time. In this chapter we are going to look at the way that you have learned to react when your phone buzzes at you, or beeps, or boops, or sings a song that you used to like.

The point is that, right now, the parts of your brain that react to an SMS alert are not logical, or sensible, and they react much faster than your conscious brain. Your well-trained limbic brain treats an instant message as though it’s a reward, and it anticipates the opportunity to sink into a nice comfortable environment of instant gratification where you and your circle of friends natter at each other like digital protoprosimians reassuring themselves that they are safe and clever and cared for.

It doesn’t care – it cannot care – that your conscious brain is trying to carry on a conversation, or read, or drive, or perform brain surgery. When the phone buzzes it will react,

The only way to stop that is to train that part of your brain to react differently about SMS alerts. In this chapter we’re going to try and do that in a measurable way.

Don’t worry, you’ll still enjoy texting with some of your friends, and you’ll still hate getting texts from others. All of the feelings will still be there, they just won’t be as likely to kill you or someone else.

It’s not my fault! Look at the text she sent me!!