An Ancient Nervous System in a World of Screens

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  The human brain did not evolve to recognise screens.

It evolved to answer a much older question:

Is this happening to me?

Long before glass rectangles, the nervous system learned to track movement, faces, tone, rhythm, and story. 

These cues meant survival. They meant belonging. 

They meant danger or safety, connection or exclusion.

Screens didn’t invent those signals. They perfected their delivery.

At the level that governs emotion, habit, and stress, the brain does not reliably distinguish between direct experience and mediated experience. Not because it’s naïve because it’s efficient. 

Meaning arrives faster than context.

Strip away the technology and what remains is ancient biology. 

The nervous system responds to movement, faces and eyes, voice and emotional tone, narrative arc, novelty and unpredictability, social inclusion or threat.

Neuroscience has shown for decades that observed experiences activate mirror mechanisms — systems that simulate actions, intentions, and emotions in our own brain — often overlapping with those used when we directly experience them. 

This is why observing emotion activates many of the same regions as feeling it: the insula for pain or disgust, the cingulate for empathy, premotor and parietal regions for action and intention.

Screens deliver these cues in high-definition, rapid-fire ways.

So when you watch conflict, scroll outrage, witness intimacy, absorb danger, or consume desire, many of the same neural circuits light up as if you were physically present. 

The body responds before the intellect weighs in.

Your system doesn’t ask, “Is this a screen?”
It asks, “What does this mean for me?”

This is where things quietly unravel.

Real-world experience comes with context, depth, sensory completion, and feedback loops that close. 

You speak, someone responds. You move, gravity answers. 

You feel, the moment resolves.

Screens offer meaning without embodiment.

Eyes lock on conflict or desire. The heart quickens. 

But the hands stay still, no outlet, no resolution. 

The nervous system mobilises… and has nowhere to go.

Arousal rises — heart rate, cortisol, dopamine anticipation — but there is no physical discharge, no breath shift, no social reciprocity to let the system down-regulate. 

This explains why people can feel exhausted after “doing nothing,” emotionally full but relationally empty, overstimulated and numb at the same time.

Nothing is wrong with the brain.

It is responding exactly as designed — to meaning, not medium.

Even phenomena like cybersickness echo this mismatch. 

The eyes register motion while the body remains still, producing fatigue, disorientation, or flatness without any obvious cause.

Dopamine doesn’t spike most on satisfaction. It spikes on anticipation. 

Screens specialise in continuous novelty, prediction without payoff, outrage cycles, cliff hangers, and social comparison without closure.

Observed actions and emotions are simulated through mirror mechanisms as if they were our own. Emotional imagery can trigger stress hormone release even without physical threat. 

Dopamine is driven by novelty and anticipation, not fulfilment. 

And the nervous system struggles with prolonged uncertainty and unresolved loops.

Endless scrolls and notifications keep the brain in wanting mode — activated, alert, unfinished.

Unresolved loops drain far more than effort ever could.

This is why people can feel overstimulated yet empty, busy yet depleted. 

The system never completes the story.

This is also where things turn hopeful.

The same simulation engine that allows screens to affect us is the one that allows story to heal, language to shape physiology, and imagination to regulate. 

Imagination isn’t fantasy. 

It’s the brain’s built-in rehearsal and meaning system.

The difference is agency.

Passive, accelerated input fragments attention. 

Conscious, embodied imagination restores coherence. 

When imagination includes the body — breath, sensation, rhythm, pacing — it gives the nervous system something screens rarely do: completion.

The body doesn’t speak language. 

It speaks sensation and resolution.

Screens aren’t the enemy. 

Unconscious consumption is the problem.

The brain treats meaning as real before it treats the source as real. 

That isn’t a flaw. It’s how humans learn, bond, and survive.

The invitation isn’t withdrawal. It’s discernment.

Pause. Feel your body while you engage. 

Notice when the system mobilises without resolution. 

Return to sensory completion — breath, movement, nature, real conversation.

When the body is included, choice returns.

And when choice returns, the spell softens.

Awareness doesn’t ask us to reject the modern world.

 It asks us to meet it with our whole biology online, not just our eyes.

When the body is included, the nervous system recalibrates.
And clarity stops requiring force.