Verified by 
As an expert in child development, I have been vocal for years about my concerns regarding the role of media and social media in adult's and children’s lives—especially their potentially detrimental effects on our brains. On "The Minds of Boys and Girls" blog at Psychology Today, you can read Part I of this series. Because Part II continues where Part I left off, I hope you will read Part I before reading Part II.
The Systemizing Frame as a Potential Brain Disorder
The examples of reality cloaking I use in this three-part blog come from across the political spectrum. The January 6, 2021 attack on Congress occurred, I argued in Part I, in some part because millions of short-burst words and images traumatized the brains of millions of people, the reality of the lost Trump election got cloaked, and a new systemizing frame, "Stop the Steal," inculcated in the brain to make these brains feel safe. As often happens in situations of reality cloaking, the feeling of safety is temporary; gradually, situations become unsafe and even lethal.
To cross the aisle toward a more Left-leaning issue (I have promised to be fair to all parties in these blogs so that we can look at the brain without taking political sides): How did the tragic personal reality of a policeman murdering a vulnerable black man, George Floyd, become the reality cloak in millions of minds that “everyone white is racist; police are racist; if you don't think you're racist, you are racist; we need to defund the police”?
Feeling safe (self-protection) is one of two primary reasons our brain cloaks reality. The second is to empathize.
When we saw George Floyd murdered in various media and social media, we did not just “see” it a thousand times; we had an experience of it in the insula, the part of the brain that creates mirror neurons. As a repetitive barrage of images and words enters our brains’ sensory registers, the insula fills up with mirror neurons so that our brains will feel the other’s pain—George Floyd’s death, then experiences of other vulnerable and beaten young black men, then, with Breonna Taylor, black women, as well. In this way, our mirror neurons combine with our brains' protective need to systemize overwhelming stimuli by enhancing rumination loops that both quiet the fear and empathize with the fallen.
In the case of systemic inequity in police conduct, the actual reality in which some police have done bad things to some people was cloaked by “all white people and our police forces are all systemically racist.” Our empathy for some people—the 278 black people last year killed by police in America and thousands of others who have been harmed—became an attack on a whole group that we stereotyped (police) and a whole race (white people). Unfortunately, because of the quick-burst images and words on social media and because of bombardment by them, the traumatized brain often feels compelled to create stereotypes by which to feel safe and to empathize.
The Systemizing Frame as Part of a Potential Brain Disorder
To understand how this works in our brains, think about the autistic brain. Autistic children are beautiful and unique in their way of thinking and doing. At the same time, as Cambridge scientist Simon Baron-Cohen notes in his new book, The Pattern Seekers, their brains include patterns we can study with other applications.
Because of de novo mutations that occur at conception and in utero, an autistic brain loses activity in brain centers that process social-emotional reality. This loss depletes the brain's safe, accurate, and empathic judgment of what is going on inside other people’s emotional structures. To compensate, the autistic brain relies heavily on systemizing activity. It encounters social reality by cloaking social cues in an internal system that loops and confines the cues to small compartments. As it systemizes reality, it creates framing structures that allow it to encounter reality as best it can, and feel safe as best it can, and empathize as best it can.
The comparison with our own brains traumatized by media/social media is, I think, apt: Our brains cannot realistically take in all the contextual cues in media/social media, so our brains pick and choose reality cloaks and systemizing frames, often the ones that bombard us most heavily and most often in the media/social media we frequent. How can we know they are problematic—even rising to a brain disorder? By watching for our own and our children’s increased anxiety and agitation: just like we do when we are managing an autistic child.
Systemizing Frames as Increased Anxiety
Researchers at Trinity University and Hebrew University published “Looking on the Dark Side: Rumination and Cognitive-Bias Modification” recently, research in which neuroscientists studied rumination behavior in teens and young adults, including rumination loops that grow from social media use. The researchers discovered that too much emoting on dark things can increase trauma rather than decrease it. While we often think, “expressing yourself is always healthy,” in fact, it is not; increasing our anxiety via social media’s rumination loops can actually harm us.
Why? Because media/social media barrages, then the framing and reality cloaking create brain trauma by looping anxiety front-and-center. This is a part of negativity bias. Initially, the social media bombardment helped us feel empathic (e.g., just after the George Floyd murder), and it even helped us find group-belonging as we shared, through social media, our anguish; but a few hours, days, weeks into that sharing, we saw the negative so much our brains compounded negatives on negatives, utilized cloaks, frames, and stereotypes to stay safe, and then felt increasing anxiety. We were not healed from or by the George Floyd trauma—instead, the trauma increased.
Many of us had to turn off media/social media for a time to protect ourselves. If you get to that moment—sensing your constant anxiety in the face of media/social media bombardment—you are sensing the disease. The rumination loop forces your thoughts back into anxiety in your mid-brain—you do not expel your fear but increase it with more negativity loops. All people do this, no matter where they are on the political spectrum; partisan ideas do not affect this because it can go beyond politics into every brain.
The Irony of Social Media: New Anxiety and Anger
Just like anxiety, no matter our politics, while we may release some media/social media-induced anger at the “other-enemy” (Congress, police, white people), we also become angrier as the weeks wear on. The Dark Side study shows teen’s anxiety and anger directly paralleling the amount of time they spent on social media. When they—and we—operate out of reality cloaking, they and we increase stereotyping in rumination loops. Like an autistic brain bombarded by social cues it can barely systemize, the social media overstimulation will often make us angry.
This is the other clue you can follow as citizen scientists: Watch out for not just depression or anxiety but also your own and your children's anger in the face of media/social media. Overall, if you or they are becoming...
- More depressed
- More anxious
- More agitated
- More enraged or angry
...Then you or your teen are likely experiencing reality cloaking, what I am arguing is a new social disease.
What Should We Do?
How do we step out of the trauma of the cloak, frame, and negativity bias? Saying “turn off social media” does constitute some solution, but not all. Each of us must also focus on the cloak, the frame, and the loop until we see them for what they are.
If you have an autistic child, let that child be a teacher—through that mind, see how the hyper-systemizing brain works. If your autistic child (or any child) has become so angry as to become violent with family members or others, use those experiences to mirror the kind of anguish and anger your own brain produces when it cloaks reality in hyper-systemizing frames based on media/social media.
Notice with all your children how media/social media create stereotyping loops: Media/social media mainly work in short bursts of words or images so they cannot give depth to life or reality; as such, they must stereotype the world racially, ethnically, sexually, politically, and in every other way. Teach this to your children. The more your children's and your own brains get locked into arguing over stereotypes and not reality, the farther away all our brains move from what is real.
In Part III, the final part of this blog, I will look with you at the seven stages by which reality cloaking damages our brains and, thus, builds to dangerous outcomes like the insurrection on January 6, 2021, in our nation's capital. While in Parts I and II, I have begun to explore with you the ways in which reality cloaking may be an actual disease; I will finalize this argument in Part III.
References
Hertel, Paula, et.al. Looking on the Dark Side: Rumination and Cognitive Bias Modification. Clinical Psychological Science. April 16, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702614529111.
