THE MASTERS OF MIND CONTROL
The headquarters of Boundless Mind looks as if it were created by a set designer to satisfy a cultural cliché. The tech startup is run out of a one-car garage a few blocks from California’s Venice Beach.
On the morning I visited, in March, it was populated by a dozen screens—phones, tablets, monitors—and half as many 20-something engineers, all of whom were male and bearded, and one of whom wore a cowboy hat. Someone had written in blue marker across the top of a whiteboard in all caps: YOU’RE BUILDING AMAZING SH-T.
But that, more or less, is where the Silicon Valley stereotypes end. Ramsay Brown, 29, and T. Dalton Combs, 32, the co-founders of Boundless Mind, are hardly the college dropouts of tech lore; they’re trained neuroscientists. And unlike most tech entrepreneurs, they are not trying to build the next big thing that will go viral. In fact, Boundless Mind’s mission is almost the opposite. The company wants to disrupt America’s addiction to technology. “It used to be that pathogens and cars were killing us,” Brown says. “Now it’s cheeseburgers and social media. It’s our habits and addictions.”
Every day, we check our phones an average of 47 times—every 19 minutes of our waking lives—and spend roughly five hours total peering at their silvery glow. There’s no good consensus about what all this screen time means for children’s brains, adolescents’ moods or the future of our democratic institutions. But many of us are seized these days with a feeling that it’s not good. Last year, the American Psychological Association found that 65% of us believe that periodically unplugging would improve our mental health, and a 2017 University of Texas study found that the mere presence of our smartphones, face down on the desk in front of us, undercuts our ability to perform basic cognitive tasks. New York University psychologist Adam Alter describes the current state of tech obsession as a “full-blown epidemic.”
The problem, critics agree, begins with Silicon Valley’s unique business model, which relies on keeping us in the thrall of our screens. The longer we are glued to an app—a value nicknamed eyeball time—the more money its creators make by selling our attention and access to our personal data to advertisers and others. You and I are not customers of Facebook
