Surfing Uncertainty with Screens

another theory about why we scroll, plus: adventures in quantifying myself

Following up on my piece last week about the dopamenu, there’s one more model I came across that attempts to explain why we scroll that I want to explore here (spoiler: it’s also about feelings). But first I have to tell you about an emerging neuroscience theory called The Active Inference Framework.

It’s kind of trippy — basically, it proposes that your brain is not experiencing the world passively, but rather, it is making active predictions about what’s going to happen next, and constantly updating these prediction models according to new information you encounter.

The philosopher of neuroscience Mark Miller calls the brain an ‘uncertainty minimizing machine’ — it wants to be certain in a highly uncertain world, the theory goes, so we are drawn to things that give us information that will help our brains update their models. Under the AIF, the brain is:

“..a prediction engine constantly attempting to predict the sensory signals it encounters in the world and minimizing the discrepancy (‘prediction errors’) between those predictions and the incoming signal.

…

According to this framework, predictive systems can go about minimizing prediction errors in two ways: either they update the generative model to more accurately reflect the world, or they behave in ways that bring the world better in line with their prediction.”¹

Social media is one way that we can update our brain models, but the problem, according to Miller and colleagues in the aforequoted paper, is that the feed tends to give us skewed information. We get unrealistic images of the world from social media, which become bad data for our predictive models.

Take body image, for instance. Scrolling means swimming in images of thin, made-up, surgically-enhanced influencers who spend all their time and money on their looks because being hot is their job. They are, obviously, not representative of the human population of the world in any way, but they are overrepresented on the feed, which rewards conventionally attractive bodies with attentional currency (and also, like, actual currency).

Skewed by these images, your brain’s prediction for what a body should look like could end up far off from what you see in the mirror, making you think that you look like this:

you dont!!!! but he’s kinda cute tho??

If you ask me why I use social media, I would say that I feel particularly drawn to it because of how much information it contains about society. People have always been a fascination of mine — how do they work? what are they thinking?? why are they like that? — and I often find myself spending hours reading through Reddit threads and comment sections and exploring internet subcultures to try to understand them.²

My tolerance for uncertainty is quite low, personally, and I am always stressed by a chronic lack of details in the world, so I go looking for them on the internet.³ This is helpful (I learn a lot) but it also hurts (I overwhelm myself).

Miller has another paper I love called Surfing Uncertainty With Screams that uses the the predictive processing framework to explain why people like watching horror movies. I have previously written about how I find horror immensely therapeutic for my anxiety — it’s the one thing I can watch that reliably soothes me, which I thought was kinda weird, but it works.

Miller et al say, actually, that’s not weird at all!

“..people prone to anxiety seem to be among the most likely to seek out movies with anxiety inducing plots.”

Horror movies are a kind of ‘affective technology’ that give us ‘a controlled opportunity to occupy the limits of our predictive capabilities’ — they are ‘a relatively low-stakes arena for learning about high-stakes scenarios.’

According to the authors, the anxious attraction to horror has something to do with interoception — your ability to sense and understand your body’s internal states. They write:

…if one cannot be sure about one's own internal states one also cannot be sure how to act appropriately and with confidence in the world.

Horror movies can act as a reliable way to feel a particular emotion — I watch this scary thing, and I feel scared because of it. Through this process, the authors think that a person can briefly gain a sense of interoceptive control. Affective technology!

This month I embarked on a new journey in trying to understand my own internal states, one I thought I would never in a million years ever ever do dear god please why. But, alas, the time has come…

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Okay Fine I’ll Wear a Fucking Wrist Computer

I am extremely stubborn — even if you’re totally 100% right about something, you really can’t tell me shit. You just have to wait for me to come to my own conclusion 2-5 years later, at which point you will say, “Yes, I told you that a long time ago,” and I will say, “Oh, did you??” and if I love you very much, I will eventually apologize and admit that you were right this whole time.

Enter the smartwatch, which I have completely dismissed for a long time whenever it was recommended to me, despite my severe need for constant reminders about basic tasks of daily living. Unfortunately, I have read too much about surveillance capitalism and health data privacy,⁴ which led me to develop a penchant for shouting things like, “YOU WILL TAKE MY BIOMETRICS FROM MY COLD DEAD WRIST,” etc etc.