WHAT'S FORMING YOU RIGHT NOW?

TELOS&today
4 days ago
5 min read

Season One | Post 3

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but as someone who taught psychology and understood a bit about how the nervous system works, I completely missed how much I was letting everyday technology reshape my brain.

And I mean reshape. Not influence. Not affect. Literally rewire the neural pathways that determine how I think, feel, and show up in the world.

My wake-up call wasn’t dramatic. It came on an ordinary Tuesday when I noticed I was genuinely anxious about something I was viewing on YouTube. That’s when it hit me: my computer wasn’t just showing me content. It had been subtly training my nervous system—teaching me what to care about, what to fear, and how to react. And I hadn’t noticed.

THE Brain on Autopilot

Here’s what I needed to remember (and what I wish I’d paid attention to sooner):

Your nervous system is beautifully designed to help you survive—by alerting you to danger, learning from experience, and regulating your emotions. It’s also deeply social—constantly shaped by the people and inputs around you.

But here’s the key part: everything you think, feel, and do flows through a vast network of neurons—sending electrochemical signals throughout the brain and body. And the more often certain neurons fire together, the more likely they are to wire together.

Through repetition, your brain starts to build shortcuts. Neural pathways become habits. And habits become… mindless.

Myelination speeds up this process by reinforcing the brain’s most-used pathways. It works by wrapping a fatty coating around well-traveled neural circuits, helping them fire faster and more automatically—making mindless habits even easier to repeat.

What starts as a dirt path becomes a paved road… and eventually, a superhighway in your nervous system.

Remember learning to ride a bike? At first, your brain had to coordinate everything—balance, pedaling, steering, braking. But after a few hundred tries, it became second nature. You could ride while talking or daydreaming because your body had built and repeatedly used a now familiar neural network.

This is fabulous news when I've engrained a helpful skill or life-giving perspective.

After a little reflection, it's easy to see how this could also be unnerving.

WOULDN'T IT BE NICE IF...

Our brains came with an alarm system that would announce:

“Wait! Are you sure you want to think, feel, or do this over and over again?

Soon this thought, feeling or behavior will be a habit.

And once it’s a habit, you’ll start doing it automatically.

Just checking—do you want this neural network to form?”

But there’s no such warning. Left unchecked, our nervous systems build pathways out of whatever they engage repeatedly—whether that’s gratitude and curiosity, or outrage and comparison.

And that’s where our technology comes in.

The Subtle Hijacking

We all know our devices feed us what they think we want to see. Click on a bird feeder once, and suddenly your feed is full of DIY squirrel-proof contraptions. Mention it out loud near your phone, and like magic, there’s an ad for Home Depot.

Every time you click, you’re essentially saying, “Thanks, I’d like more of that.” And your algorithms learn: Give her more.

But here’s what’s happening under the hood: each notification, like, or scrollable surprise gives your brain a little squirt of dopamine—a neurotransmitter tied to both reward and addiction. Tech companies hire neuroscientists to help engineer experiences based on intermittent reinforcement so the experiences are harder to resist.

And it works. Intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful conditioning schedule known in psychology. It’s the same mechanism that keeps people pulling slot machines in Vegas.

Over time, your preferences get locked in. Your algorithms build a world around your past behavior—not your future hopes. You see more of the same. You encounter fewer new ideas. Your feed becomes a mirror of where you’ve been, not a window to who you want to become.

And while that’s happening, your brain is faithfully building neural networks out of whatever you keep feeding it.