Are the phones melting our brains? Or is it just me?

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Finding it hard to concentrate? Are you glued to social media for longer than you’d like? Well, maybe it’s not you… maybe it’s the phones. Brittany is joined by Magdalene Taylor, writer, cultural critic and senior editor at Playboy, and Fio Geiran, producer at TED Radio Hour and a writer of their Body Electric newsletter, to discuss this phrase: “it’s the phones.” They get into the effects that smartphones have on our brains and our culture, why some people are returning to “dumbphones,” and why it might take more than willpower to manage our relationships with our phones.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all.
0:11.5	On the web at theshmit.org.
0:17.0	Hello, hello. I'm Brittany loose and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
0:31.1	This week, we're connecting the dots between blackberries,
0:38.5	pigeons, and doom scrolling.
0:40.7	I know, I know.
0:41.9	How are all these things connected?
0:45.7	Well, we're going to find out with Magdalene Taylor,
0:48.7	culture critic and senior editor at Playboy,
0:51.1	and Fio Giron, producer at TED Radio Hour,
0:56.2	who also writes their body electric newsletter. Magda, Fio, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you so much.
1:02.4	I want to talk to you both about a phrase I've been hearing around. It's the phones. It's the
1:07.9	phones. I'm always hearing this phrase. What does that phrase mean to you? Magdalene, we'll start with you.
1:13.1	My interpretation of that phrase, it's the phones, is a sort of harkening back to something a lot of us who grew up using cell phones, essentially, probably heard a lot in our teen years from older generations that every
1:30.4	social, personal, ill we experience being lazy or whatever is because we're on our phones.
1:37.6	It's those damn phones. A lot of us are realizing that perhaps the older members of our community
1:43.4	had some wisdom to share there
1:45.6	in that actually, yeah, our phones are in fact a problem.
1:49.6	And even for a lot of the members of the older generations, the phones are a problem for them too.
1:56.4	Yeah.
1:57.2	I mean, I have to say it has been very rich the past like 10 or so years to see the same
2:03.3	parents that like were constantly chastising me for using my phone all the time. Now they're
	...

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