This week I’ve been at SXSW London. There’s been music, film, and a lot—and I mean a lot—of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies.

Early in her career, the biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it’s true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink.

Mark is worried that things are only getting worse. The title of our session was “Have we lost control of our brains?” Unfortunately, Mark told me, the answer is yes.

Around two decades ago, Mark started wondering about how our use of devices might affect our attention spans. She set up what she calls “living laboratories,” using sensors and trackers to monitor adult volunteers’ attention, mood, and behavior when they were using devices.

In 2003, she found that the average user had an attention span of around two and a half minutes. That’s how long people could spend focused on one thing before moving on to something else. “That surprised me at the time,” she told me during our session on Wednesday. “I thought: Wow, this is really short.”

But when she repeated the experiment in 2012, she found that attention spans had shrunk—all the way down to around 75 seconds on average, she said. In research she conducted between 2014 and 2020, attention spans shrank further still—to a mere 47 seconds, on average. Yikes.

And it’s not good for us. Mark told me that she’s found switching our attention so frequently is stressful. “We would have people wear heart rate monitors, and … we would see direct correlation between switching attention fast and stress going up,” she told me.

All this distraction makes it harder for us to get stuff done, too. “It just takes longer to do any single task if you’re switching your attention,” she told me. “It’s not great for performance. It’s not great for our emotional well-being.”

And that’s for adults. What about the effects of digital technologies on children? A few months ago, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google’s YouTube were ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to a 20-year-old woman who had accused the companies of creating products that led her to develop a childhood addiction.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Meta settled another lawsuit, this one brought by a rural school district in Kentucky. The district had also accused the company of designing addictive products that were harmful to students and had sought more than $60 million to cover the costs of their mental-health needs. Around 1,200 other school districts are taking similar legal action against social media companies.

But social media isn’t all bad, all the time. It can provide opportunities for some people, including those from marginalized groups, to form connections that might otherwise be difficult. A 2024 survey of LGBTQ+ teenagers found that while some described social media as a place of rejection and fear, others described it as a place where they felt a sense of belonging, where they could develop friendships and cultivate their identity.

In truth, we can’t definitively say what effects using social media is having on children across the board, says Mark. “There have been lots and lots of studies, and the evidence is to date inconclusive,” she told me. (Despite what you might read in best-selling books on the subject.)

Mark is hopeful that large, long-term studies might finally start shedding a bit more light on this question. An effort of this nature is underway in Australia, which enacted a social media ban for under-16s at the end of last year.

Given this uncertainty over a 20-year-old technology, I wondered if Mark had any thoughts on the potential impacts of AI—an obviously much newer offering that within the space of a couple of years appears to have become deeply integrated into our digital lives.

She told me she’s worried.

When we put in effort to do something—such as evaluating or summarizing content—we’re doing what’s known as “depth of processing,” she told me. “When you’re actively engaged with information, you’re processing it on a very deep level,” she said. “Then you’re more likely to learn it, to understand it, [and] to retain it.”

That’s not happening when most people use AI bots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. When we ask these tools to write, summarize, or evaluate for us, we’re no longer doing that depth of processing. “You’re deferring your cognitive work to AI,” she said. “And it’s not good for us.”

The risk is that our cognitive abilities will weaken over time. “If you’re not constantly exercising your muscles, they can atrophy,” Mark said. “And that’s exactly what can happen with our minds.” People with weaker critical thinking skills are more likely to fall prey to misinformation, she added.

Interactions with AI-powered “synthetic companions” can be just as harmful. Relationships between human beings take work—time, effort, and understanding. None of that is needed if you’re forming a relationship with a sycophantic bot. The “muscle” we risk atrophying here is emotional intelligence, which surveys suggest is already on the decline, said Mark.

She’s not painting a particularly rosy picture.

“If we continue on this trajectory, attention spans are diminished, loneliness is rising, boredom is rising, emotional intelligence decreasing, and actually our sense of purpose, according to studies, is also decreasing,” she said.

Luckily, she thinks we can course-correct by changing our relationship with these technologies. The key factor is effort.

The more effort we put into something, the deeper the satisfaction we stand to gain, Mark told me. That means making an effort to read a book rather than skimming its summary, and to meet with friends in person when you can. Try not to use GPS in places where you can probably manage without it.

“I love technology; we can’t give it up,” she told me. “[But] we have to learn how to create new life routines.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

The alert was raised on May 5. Four health-care workers in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had died from an unknown illness within four days.

Rapid response teams were sent to investigate, and tests at a research center in Kinshasa revealed the culprit: the Bundibugyo virus, one of the viruses that cause Ebola. Suspected cases of the disease have snowballed in the last few weeks. By May 24, the WHO had estimated that 223 people had died from the disease. There were over 900 suspected cases. Today’s figures are likely to be higher.

A couple of weeks ago, I covered the hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship. Three people sadly died, but the outbreak itself was kept under control. There have been no further deaths, and passengers have been safely repatriated. The picture for Ebola is far bleaker. And there are several reasons why.

The most obvious is the disease itself. Ebola is a severe disease with an average 50% fatality rate. Previous outbreaks have resulted in thousands of deaths. (Hantavirus also has a high fatality rate, but it doesn’t usually spread as easily between humans.) 

Between 2014 and 2016, an Ebola outbreak in West Africa caused more than 11,000 deaths. A more recent outbreak, which took place between 2018 and 2020, caused 2,299 deaths before being brought under control with a vaccination campaign.

But those outbreaks were caused by the Zaire virus, which has a different genetic sequence. There is no vaccine for the Bundibugyo virus. We don’t know if the two vaccines approved for Zaire might also work for Bundibugyo. There’s a concern they might even make things worse by interfering with a person’s immune response to the virus.  

Scientists are working on potential Bundibugyo vaccines. But the most advanced efforts are still months away from clinical trials. There are no specific antiviral treatments for the virus, either.

So to control the outbreak, health-care workers are trying to stop the spread of the disease. Ebolaviruses can be transmitted to humans by animals including fruit bats, chimpanzees, and gorillas. They can then spread between people via contact with bodily fluids such as blood or vomit.

That’s why the virus is often spread among family members, to health-care workers, and during some burial services. The WHO advises isolating people who have the virus in treatment centers. It also recommends safe burial measures that limit physical contact with the deceased, for example. Communities need to be informed about the virus and how it spreads, and health professionals should be on hand to diagnose cases and track them.

That’s all easier said than done in an era of misinformation. Some members of the community even doubt whether the disease is real. There have been three attacks on health-care facilities in the region in recent weeks.

Last week, two treatment centers were burned down. The first incident occurred after relatives of a deceased man were prohibited from retrieving his (infectious) body. As a result of the second incident, 18 suspected cases reentered the community.

A couple of days later, a group of men unleashed gunfire at Mongbwalu General Hospital, which was also treating people with Ebola. They were demanding the bodies of their deceased relatives.

There are more causes for concern when it comes to the spread of the virus. The Ebola outbreak is thought to have originated in Mongbwalu, a high-traffic mining hub. People who caught the virus in Mongbwalu are thought to have sought care in neighboring districts. And the wider province borders both South Sudan and Uganda. So far, Uganda has reported seven confirmed cases and one death. South Sudan’s health ministry has said it will strengthen surveillance, but no cases have been reported in the country so far. 

Violence in the region is making it much harder to contain the spread of the virus, too. Conflict involving multiple armed groups, including deadly attacks on civilians, has hampered humanitarian and health-care efforts. Poor infrastructure and damaged roads make matters even worse. Food insecurity is ravaging the region as well—this year, nearly 10 million people in the region face acute hunger.

Together, these factors are making it “nearly impossible” to isolate people with Ebola and trace others who have been in contact with them, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement earlier this week.

The dismantling of US aid programs hasn’t helped either. US government funding for international health projects has steeply declined since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. These cuts have harmed disease surveillance systems, according to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian nonprofit.

“Funding cuts have left the region dangerously exposed,” Heather Reoch Kerr, the organization’s country director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said in a statement. “Years of underinvestment and recent funding cuts have left many health facilities without adequate protective equipment, surveillance capacity, or frontline support needed to respond quickly and safely.”

The US has mobilized emergency funding for the outbreak, and a spokesperson for the State Department has argued that none of the administration’s actions have hampered the Ebola response. But health experts counter that the damage has already been done.

On May 17, the WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. In a statement on Wednesday, Tedros described the situation as “a catastrophic collision of disease and conflict with the Ebola outbreak in Ituri province outpacing the response.”In an online appeal to residents on Wednesday, ahead of an in-person visit, Tedros pleaded for a ceasefire and commended the spirit of community members. He also acknowledged the steep challenges they face. “You are already carrying so much: malaria, hunger, insecurity, and the daily struggle to keep your families safe,” he wrote in French. “And now Ebola. It’s not fair, and I won’t pretend otherwise.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.