that is extremely seductive to our brain.

Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin,

socially speaking, existentially speaking.

- We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody

Even if they're on the other side of the planet,

even if they have a lot more money than we do,

We can still compete with them on engagement.

We're pulled in so many directions between the texts alerts

and the constantly scrolling feeds.

And if we're distracted, we can't pay attention.

If I can't pay attention, I can't make new memories.

Every time you go online, you are in a funhouse of mirrors.

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Now let's get back to the discussion of the impacts of social media.

I'm Luke Burgis, founder of Fourth Wall Ventures,

professor of business,

and author of the book

"Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life."

- We all exist in this world where we can tweet at somebody

or engage with somebody,

could even be the President of the United States.

And they might react to us back.

Social media has thrust us all onto the head of a pin,

socially speaking, existentially speaking.

Even if they're on the other side of the planet,

even if they have a lot more money than we do,

we can still interact with them.

We can still compete with them on engagement.

They're inside of our world.

We have a mimetic machine in our pocket

where all of these people exist.

So, what is mimetic desire?

Mimetic desire means that we're adopting

another person's desire as our own,

usually without even realizing that we're doing it.

So, social media has given us millions of mimetic models

that we now have to contend with.

Some people have went from having 10 mimetic models

to now having a million,

and we haven't quite come to grips as a culture

with what that means for our mental and emotional health.

There are two kinds of mimetic models.

The first kind is called an external mediator of desire.

These are models that are outside of our world;

whether because they exist in a different social sphere

than we do,

there's no possibility of us coming into contact with them

and certainly not becoming rivals with them.

They're in some sense, outside of our world of desire,

outside of our world of competition.

Now, these external models of desire

can be real, or they can be fictional.

The other kind of model is inside of our world

called internal mediators of desire.

These are people that we do come into contact with,

and there is a possibility of conflict

or rivalry with these people.

These are people that are in our family;

these are people in our workplace;

these are people that could even be our friends.

It's easier to compare ourselves to them.

These are the kinds of people that we look to as benchmarks,

and we're far more likely to be envious

of somebody that we went to high school with

who now has a great job and a beautiful spouse,

than we are to be envious

of the richest person in the world.

The danger with external mediators of desire,

with keeping up with people that are very successful,

with people that have modeled a certain kind of lifestyle,

is that there's no end to that process.

All desire is a form of transcendence.

We desire to go beyond the boundaries,

to go just over the mountain,

to be the kind of person

that we don't feel that we currently are.

Having positive models of desire to emulate

is a very good thing.

It's important to have people that model virtues

and goodness that we would like,

but we have to understand the limitations of any model.

And understanding how the dynamic

between us and our models changes in that scenario

is really, really important.

It's also important to understand

when somebody is an internal model of desire to us

because, in that case, we have to have boundaries.

All desire comes from us feeling like we lack something,

and that can bring us into a dangerous, vicious cycle

because there will always be another model to find.

We have to choose our models wisely.

We also have to know when the model

is inflaming us with the desire

for something that's gonna bring real fulfillment

or whether it's going to bring a dopamine hit

or allow us to fantasize about a life

that we'll probably never have.

And even if we did have,

it would probably make us miserable.

All you need to do is go on Instagram

and spend five minutes,

and you see lifestyle's model,

you see vacation destination's model, fashions,

manners of speech, ways of engagement,

ways of speaking, political preferences.

All of these desires are modeled for us 24 hours a day,

billions of them, and we need to understand

the mimetic landscape of social media

or else we'll become totally controlled by it.

The greatest strength of social media

is its 'democratizing tendency.'

We don't have to just look to elites

and a few news outlets to tell us about us.

We can actually communicate with each other.

But when we engage online, we tend to think

that we're interacting with a reasonable sample

of the actual population, but it's not true.

Close to 80% of all content on social media

is generated by about 10% of the users.

That 10% tends to be extreme on most social issues.

They are the vocal fringe.

When you have a vocal minority

that is perceived as the majority,

critical mass of us will actually either self-silence,

or we will actually go along to get along,

and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is how collective illusions form.

It's not terribly surprising that some of the first people

to start to use these tools to manipulate

were leaders who need consensus to conserve power.

- Venezuela. (speaks Spanish)

- An example of this is Nicolás Maduro,

the leader of Venezuela.

For a long time, it looked like, on social media,

that he had a pretty good beat

on the consensus of the people that he led.

So, almost everything that he would say,

stories that were written about him that were positive,

would be retweeted and shared,

and it looked like this represented some kind of consensus,

but it turned out a significant percentage

of his so-called "followers"

were actually what we call 'social bots.'

These are fake accounts that only exist

to retweet anything positive about him or that he said,

and, importantly, to attack the opposition.

When Twitter banned them,

the real consensus was with the opposition,

and that started to emerge and be retweeted

as more and more people recognized

that it was okay to say what they actually thought.

Social media is a free-for-all

in terms of who can shout the loudest,

and who can silence other people

in the name of masquerading as a majority

and manufacturing collective illusions.

Your willingness to conform

and your unwillingness to challenge

what you think the group believes

will actually contribute to leading the group astray.

The solution to our online life

is to get offline once in a while.

The most important thing you can do

is continue to have conversations with your family,

with your neighbors, with your community.

Don't carry that distortion over

into the way you treat people in real life.

My name is Amishi Jha. I'm a neuroscientist and professor

at the University of Miami,

and the author of the book "Peak Mind:

Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention,

Invest 12 Minutes a Day."

- Where is your attention right now?

The human brain's attention system

is actually the success story

of what makes us unique as human beings.

Because attention fuels our ability to think,

to feel, and connect,

what we pay attention to is our life.

For a long time, through our evolutionary history,

the brain started to suffer from a very big problem

which is that there's far more information

out in the environment than could be fully processed.

Attention ended up becoming a very useful solution

because it allows us to prioritize information,

but there are qualities of the human experience

that disable attention.

Given how powerful attention is, we need to really respect

where we place this precious brain resource.

The mind is no different than the body.

The mind needs to be exercised daily

to optimize our psychological well-being.

Knowing this, I became very interested in understanding

if we might be able to train attention.

The brain's attention system is incredibly powerful.

There's three big ways we use attention as a fuel

for having success in our daily activities.

We use our attention to actually 'Think'-

during thinking there's an idea that comes to mind,

and then we hyperlink it to other ideas.

That's what thought actually is,

and the glue between those hyperlinks is attention.

But it's not only used for the purposes

of what we might call cognitive functioning,

we also use our attention to 'Feel.'

Think about the last time you actually had a joyful moment

in your lives.

If you weren't paying attention to it,

chances are you missed it.

You didn't get the benefit

of the positive emotional response.

Finally, the third area

is 'Connecting'-

our social interactions with other people.

Without devoting attention, we don't experience care

and we can't extend care.

In fact, you might say that paying attention

to another person is our highest form of love.

But while attention is so incredibly powerful,

it's fragile and vulnerable.

The three biggies that we've learned about in my labs are: