There’s a saying I go by anytime I find myself self-loathing, fearful or in crippling pessimism. “Garbage in, garbage out.” It hands me perspective when I need it most. The phrase is accredited to an IBM programmer by the name of George Fueschel who used it while training people to operate the IBM 305 RAMAC system in the 50’s. For him, it meant bad input, equals bad output. But isn’t that also the human condition? Afterall, we too, are just an operating system and our brain is the processor running it.
This means whatever you focus on becomes what you see. If you’re focused on the good, you’ll notice more optimism, more opportunity and more reasons thing could work out — even when the bad is still there, just under the surface. And if all you focus on is bad, that all your processor registers in front of you, no matter what else is happening.
The Experiment
There was an experiment I ran at an early childhood education conference where I taught a session years ago. I’d first seen Tony Robbins do a version of this with his audience and it clicked with me instantly. The session I taught was called “Mindful Mentors.” My purpose was to test this theory in real time, in front of a room of educators, so they could feel what garbage in does to a developing brain long term. I wanted them to understand how environment and focus, whether intentional or not, quietly skew our realties.
I asked the room to look around and study it, memorize everyone wearing a black shirt. I gave them five minutes to get a really good look. When time was up, I asked them who was wearing the green skirt. The room went still for a moment and then erupted into chaos — everyone scanning, no one finding it. Minutes passed. Then someone shouted, “Oh my god, YOU ARE!”
I was wearing the green skirt the entire time.
The lesson? What you’re told to look for determines what becomes invisible to you, no matter how obvious it actually is. An entire room full of adults missed the target that was standing right in front of them, because attention isn’t a spotlight that catches everything, it’s a gate that only lets in what matches the assigned criteria. That’s the same mechanism at work in a child raised amid chronic yelling and nonstop disciplinary actions without play. Their attention is turned to watching for threats and that becomes the child’s attention set, not by choice, but by survival logic, filtering out the patient teacher, the solvable problem, the safety of being wrong, the same way that room full of educators filtered out the green skirt.
This is garbage in, garbage out in it’s truest form. Whatever inputs the teacher, or the parent, or the coach is providing in a child’s environment, doesn’t just produce one bad output, it sets the criteria for what the system us even capable of registering as information from that point forward. Meaning, it’s not just shaping what they feel, it’s shaping what their brain is structurally perceiving as real.
What Algorithms Do To Our Brains
Now, let’s go back to how algorithms shape our brains. Algorithms optimize for engagement and it’s been documented heavily that human attention is most reliably captured by content that provokes strong negative emotion, like outrage, fear, envy and insecurity. Humans are predictable and emotional and the algorithm is mathematically designed to pick this up.
Algorithms don’t hate you though. They don’t seek to destroy your self esteem or rage bait you. They’re indifferent to you. They view everything as data. That indifference is by design. It keeps up scrolling using math and that math happens to be optimal through our worst psychological vulnerabilities.
They’ve also been programmed to give us variable reward schedules. For example, one day, an article you publish goes super viral — thousands of likes and tens of thousands of views — then crickets for weeks until one day another one of your articles goes super viral again. It’s the same intermittent reinforcement that keeps gamblers at the slot machines. And the billionaires who built these social media platforms contrived this reward schedule purposefully.
They’ve also made the algorithms in social media a social comparison at an industrial scale. Now they have global feeds of everyone’s best moments, filtered faces, curated highlight reels and lavish lifestyles. This leads us to compare, which leads to envy, body dissatisfaction, depressive symptoms and lower self esteem, which primes to algorithm to keep us in a low vibrational state. The same outcome plays out when we doom-scroll through one tragedy after another — posts about genocide, war, ICE killings, racists pricks doing their worst on this platform, and endless attacks on women and vulnerable communities.
The algorithms keep us spiritually sick no matter which way the dice fall.
The Repair
So, do yourself a favor. Start today. Limit your exposure by switching your screen to greyscale mode. It strips the color reward off the screen entirely. You can also remove apps from your home screen. Simple and yet, so effective. Try charging your phone in another room or across the room when you go to bed. Bring back old school alarms — don’t let that be your excuse not to do it.
You can also turn off your notifications. This way, you don’t feel obligated to look every time your phone dings. You choose when you want to look. I’ve also found that cutting social media time by 30 minutes every week does wonders for sleep and mental health. Cutting it by 30 minutes everyday has been proven to reduce depression and loneliness in just three weeks. Remove the input.
In addition to limiting your exposure to the garbage, sleep is one of the most overlooked ways to repair your mind, body and soul. Take walks without earbuds — even if it’s just a 15 minutes stroll around the block. Really absorb nature. Notice the things the gate to your attention never lets in, like birds chirping and planes flying above, or water babbling in a creek. Read real books, with paper pages — feel the texture between your fingers and the smell of a new or old book rising off the page with every turn.
Attention comes back just like a muscle during exercise. Just give it time. And always remember, “Garbage in, Garbage out.”
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~Eevie
For some of us, reading a book with paper pages is not easy. However, taking your e-reader (with no phone apps/etc on it - JUST books) into a room away from the phone and PC and sinking in to a good story will achieve the same thing.
Or, for my sister, a severe dyslexic, putting in her earbuds and settling in her hammock with an audiobook and closing her eyes is the ultimate in absorbing a story.
Enjoying a story in e-book or audiobook, away from distractions, is no less a step away than opening a paper book.
Fascinating article. It made me figure out how to switch off the notifications on my smart watch (the only thing left that was still sending me notifications). I don't read actual books any more, my Kindle adapts to my poor eyesight and my weak wrists are no longer stressed by holding an actual book. Your 'garbage in, garbage out' analogy in the context you used to demonstrate it was excellent.