NEW BOOK!
Explore a better way to work – one that promises more calm, clarity, and creativity.

Study Hacks Blog

What Neuroscience Teaches Us About Reducing Phone Use

This week on my podcast, I delved deep into the neural mechanisms involved in making your phone so irresistible. To summarize, there are bundles of neurons in your brain, associated with your short-term motivation system, that recognize different situations and then effectively vote for corresponding actions. If you’re hungry and see a plate of cookies, there’s a neuron bundle that will fire in response to this pattern, advocating for the action of eating a cookie.

The strength of these votes depends on an implicit calculation of expected reward, based on your past experiences. When multiple actions are possible in a given situation, then, in most cases, the action associated with the strongest vote will win out.

One way to understand why you struggle to put down your phone is that it overwhelms this short-term motivation system. One factor at play is the types of rewards these devices create. Because popular services like TikTok deploy machine learning algorithms to curate content based on observed engagement, they provide an artificially consistent and pure reward experience. Almost every time you tap on these apps, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised by a piece of content and/or find a negative state of boredom relieved—both of which are outcomes that our brains value.

Due to this techno-reality, the votes produced by the pick-up-the-phone neuron bundles are notably strong. Resisting them is difficult and often requires the recruitment of other parts of your brain, such as the long-term motivation system, to convince yourself that some less exciting activity in the current moment will lead to a more important reward in the future. But this is exhausting and often ineffective.

The second issue with how phones interact with your brain is the reality that they’re ubiquitous. Most activities associated with strong rewards are relatively rare—it’s hard to resist eating the fresh-baked cookie when I’m hungry, but it’s not that often that I come across such desserts. Your phone, by contrast, is almost always with you. This means that your brain’s vote to pick up your phone is constantly being registered. You might occasionally resist the pull, but its relentless presence means that it’s inevitably going to win many, many times as your day unfolds.

~~~

Read more

The Great Alienation

Last week, I published an essay about the so-called Great Lock In of 2025, a TikTok challenge that asks participants to tackle self-improvement goals. I argued that this trend was positive, especially for Gen Z, because the more you take control of your real life, the easier it becomes to take control of your screens.

In response, I received an interesting note from a reader. “The biggest challenge with this useful goal Gen Z is pursuing,” he wrote, “is they don’t know what to do.”

As he then elaborates:

“Most of them are chasing shiny objects that others are showing whether on social media or in real life. And when they (quickly) realize it’s not what they want, they leave and jump on to something else…this has been a common problem across generations. But Gen Z, and youngsters after it, are making things worse by scrolling through social media hoping to find their purpose by accident (or by someone telling them what they should do).”

Here we encounter one of the most insidious defense mechanisms that modern distraction technology deploys. By narrowing its users’ world to ultra-purified engagement, these platforms present a fun-house mirror distortion of what self-improvement means: shredded gym dwellers, million-subscriber YouTube channels, pre-dawn morning routines. Because these “shiny” goals are largely unattainable or unsustainable, those motivated to make changes eventually give up and return to the numbing comfort of their screens.

By alienating its users from the real world, these technologies make it difficult for them to ever escape the digital. To succeed with the Great Lock In, we need to resolve the Great Alienation.

Read more

The Great Lock In of 2025

If there’s one thing that I’m always late to discover, it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I’m only now starting to hear about the so-called “Great Lock In of 2025.”

This idea began circulating on TikTok over the summer. Borrowing the term ‘lock in’, which is Gen Z slang for focusing without distraction on an important goal, this challenge asks people to spend the last four months of 2025 working on the types of personal improvement resolutions that they might otherwise defer until the New Year. “It’s just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you’re going to do,” explained one TikTok influencer, ​quoted recently​ in a Times article about the trend.

Listeners of my podcast know that I’m a fan of the strategy of dedicating the fall to making major changes in your life. My episode on this topic, ​How to Reinvent Your Life in 4 Months​, which I originally aired in 2023 and re-aired this past summer, is among my most popular – boasting nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube.

To me, however, the more significant news contained in this trend is the generalized concept of ‘lock in’, which has become so popular among Gen Z that the American Dialect Society voted it the “most useful” term of 2024.

Read more

Does WiFi Make Students Smarter?

At a time when educators are increasingly concerned about technology’s impact in the classroom, the Washington Post published ​an op-ed​ with a contrarian tone. The piece, written by the journalism professor Stephen Kurczy, focuses on Green Bank, a small town in rural West Virginia, home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. Due to the sensitivity of this device, the entire area is a congressionally designated “radio quiet zone” in which cell service and WiFi are banned.

The thought of a disconnected life might sound refreshing, but as this op-ed argues, there’s one group for which this reality might be causing problems: the students in Green Bank’s combined elementary and middle school.

“Without WiFi, the 200 students couldn’t use Chromebooks or digital textbooks, or do research online,” Kurczy writes. “Teachers couldn’t access individualized education programs online or use Google Docs for staff meetings.”

Some teachers in the school are frustrated. “The ability to individualize learning with an iPad or a laptop – that’s basically impossible,” explained one teacher, quoted in the piece. “Without the online component of our curriculum fully working, it’s really detrimental to our instruction,” said another.

These concerns aren’t merely hypothetical. As Kurczy points out: “Green Bank consistently [posts] the lowest test scores in the county.” He quotes the school’s principal, who blames this on the students’ “lack of access to engaging technology.”

The message of this op-ed is clear. At a time when we’re rushing to condemn phones in classrooms, we should be careful not to extend this ire to other ed-tech innovations, as without these, students struggle.

It’s a tidy point. But is it true? I decided to dig a little deeper…

Read more

On the Reverse Flynn Effect

Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had taught the topic, so he looked forward to revisiting it. As he explained in ​an essay​ about the experience, he decided to start the lecture by discussing the so-called Flynn Effect—the well-known phenomenon, first observed by James Flynn, whereby measured IQ scores have been steadily increasing since World War II. “It’s always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who have ever lived,” Dehli wrote.

But as he gathered data to build an up-to-date chart, he was “very surprised” by what he discovered: “IQ has actually started to fall.”

Dehli was not the first person to notice this decline. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have been documenting what has become known as the Reverse Flynn Effect. Consider, for example, ​a recent paper​ published in the journal Intelligence that studied IQ scores over time in an American population. It found a steady decline in almost every intelligence metric studied as part of a 35-item assessment.

Here’s a chart that shows these declines broken out by education level:

Read more

Does Work-Life Balance Make You Mediocre?

Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title:​ “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”​

He opens with a spicy take:

“I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.”

As Barr elaborates, when starting his first company, he slept only three and a half hours per night. “The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety,” he writes. “But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.”

He ends the piece with a wonderfully cringe-inducing flourish. “I plan to become a billionaire by age 30,” he writes. “Then I will have the time and resources to tackle problems close to my heart like climate change, species extinction and economic inequality.”

(Hold for applause.)

Read more

What if AI Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?

In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the looming impacts of generative AI. This reaction has been fueled, in part, by the confident declarations of tech CEOs, who have veered toward increasingly bombastic rhetoric.

“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. He added that half of entry-level white collar jobs might be “wiped out” in the next one to five years, creating unemployment levels as high as 20%—a peak last seen during the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that AI can now rival the abilities of a job seeker with a PhD, leading one publication to plaintively ask, “So what’s left for grads?”​

Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that superintelligence is “now in sight.” (His shareholders hope he’s right, as he’s reportedly offering compensation packages worth up to $300 million to lure top AI talent to Meta.)

But then, two weeks ago, OpenAI finally released its long-awaited GPT-5, a large language model that many had hoped would offer leaps in capabilities, comparable to the head-turning advancements introduced by previous major releases, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. But the resulting product seemed to be just fine.

GPT-5 was marginally better than previous models in certain use cases, but worse in others. It had some nice new usability updates, but others that some found annoying. (Within days, more than 4,000 ChatGPT users signed a change.org petition asking OpenAI to make their previous model, GPT-4o, available again, as they preferred it to the new release.) An early YouTube reviewer concluded that GPT-5 was a product that “was hard to complain about,” which is the type of thing you’d say about the iPhone 16, not a generation-defining technology. AI commentator Gary Marcus, who had been predicting this outcome for years, summed up his early impressions succinctly when he called GPT-5 “overdue, overhyped, and underwhelming.”

This all points to a critical question that, until recently, few would have considered: Is it possible that the AI we are currently using is basically as good as it’s going to be for a while?

Read more