Brain poisoning

What my brain looks like after quitting Twitter.

Last week I went into a bookshop for the first time in probably a year. I picked up a book called Livewired by the famous neuroscientist David Eagleman. I like David. He’s enthusiastic and charming, like neuroscience world’s energetic little brother. Livewired isn’t the most elegantly written thing I’ve ever read, and it has a distinctly transhumanist bent to it, but there is plenty of interesting stuff in there.

The book is focused on the plasticity of the human brain—its ability to change throughout our lives in response to our experiences—and it argues that this feature is what has allowed humanity’s incredible achievements. We are biologically nearly identical to the first humans, David writes, yet we can ride bikes, drive cars, type on keyboards, and do all other sorts of things for which our prehistoric brains could never have been prepared. This is possible because our brains can work with almost any kind of input, learn how to process it and respond appropriately.

These cognitive changes happen quickly and profoundly. “When medical students study for their final exams over the course of three months, the gray matter volume in their brains changes so much it can be seen on brain scans with the naked eye,” David writes. Famously, London cabbies who must memorize every street in the city as part of their training have noticeably larger hippocampuses, the part of the brain that is involved in storing long term memory.

As David points out, the Gladwellian meme that you need 10,000 hours to become great at something is based in truth—the more you practice something, the deeper and more automatic that neuronal wiring becomes.

In May of 2020, I quit Twitter. I joined the site in 2009, but really got into it around the 2016 election, when I started tweeting dozens of times a day. When I decided to quit, I knew the only way I could control my compulsive desire to use the app was to have my partner change my password. That worked even better than I anticipated. Suddenly, it’s been more than half a year since I’ve used Twitter for more than a few minutes.

I loved Twitter for a few reasons. The tiny pings of dopamine brought on by having something I said liked or retweeted by someone I admired was a real salve to my insecurities. It’s also probably the place on the internet I find the funniest. Facebook is a swamp of boomer memes, bad opinions and high school friends with kids, and Instagram is brimming with yoga pictures and Canva JPGs about decolonizing self care. Twitter, at least the section of it I frequented, is for people who want to laugh about how depressed we are that the world is ending.

It may be surprising that I didn’t decide to leave the site in May 2019, when I briefly became the dreaded “main character” of the day after a misguided series of tweets on hygiene. It wasn’t fun, but public embarrassment is par for the course as a terminally online person.

My deeper fear about Twitter was not that I would be re-cancelled, or how much time it sucked from my life, but that it was reshaping me, on a biological level, into a worse person. The dominant mood on Twitter, at least in the circles I travelled in, is cynicism. Amid the silly jokes and dumb memes, a lot of what I did on the app was make fun of people. Becoming popular on the app depends on crafting a detached, nearly nihilistic view of everything from politics to your own mental health. There’s a reason that being addicted to Twitter and its dramas is commonly referred to as “brain poisoning”.

I quit Twitter because I don’t want my neurons to be connected in such a way that I only get a rush out of being mean. I want to be a person whose brain defaults to compassion, not mockery. I’m not sure if there’s an app for that, but Twitter isn’t it.

I’m not some kind of Zen monk now. On the contrary, I’ve struggled hard with mental health issues for pretty much this entire year. And I miss Twitter, especially when the president gets COVID or Rudy Giuliani starts leaking hair dye. But I’ve come to realize that what I really miss is the affirmation, the sense that I’m someone because other people are paying attention to me, not just a random girl sitting in her bedroom at the bottom of the world watching YouTube videos. That need is something that the high of a few likes can’t fix. I’ve got to find another way to feel whole.

This year has impacted all of us in ways that will probably take years to understand. I’m sure as we speak, scientists are scanning the brains of people who went through lockdown, looking for minute new wrinkles in our gray matter. The neurons in my brain are reconfiguring themselves as I type this, billions of tiny chemical reactions slowly changing me into a new person. I take great comfort in knowing they’ll never stop.