Matt Richtel > Quotes

“researchers worry that heavy use of interactive media can, over time, reduce attention spans. The fear is that we grow so accustomed to frequent bursts of stimulation, we have trouble feeling satisfied in their absence.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“He repeated that the texting driver faces a sixfold crash risk, whereas a driver talking on the phone faced a four-times increase in likelihood of a crash, which he said was roughly equivalent to someone who is legally drunk. A drunk driver and a person on a phone were equally likely to crash, whereas “we’re seeing the risk factor for accidents when someone is texting exceeds the level when people are legally drunk.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“no medicinal fix we contrive will lead us to live forever. “There is no ultimate solution. There is no free lunch. If you cure cancer, you will have more cases of neurodegenerative disease. If you cure neurodegenerative disease, a major plague will come for people who are a hundred years old. There is no ultimate solution, nor should there be.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“the likelihood of getting cancer depends in large part on how often a person experiences injury or certain types of injury. This is just math. More injury means more cell division and, simply, more opportunity for dangerous mutation to occur.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“Sometimes we cannot control our world and
hold it too tightly without squeezing some of the life from it.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“the brain is limited, lacks bottomless capacity, and isn’t particularly fast relative to computer technology. The technological advances defined by laws of Moore and Metcalfe got married and long since overtook what our brains can handle. And we know now that their union also presents the challenge of addiction, or, at least, serious compulsion. Even allowing for the fact that we can know these devices challenge our limitations, sometimes they are so compelling we can’t stop using them.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“the war metaphor is misleading, incomplete—even arguably dead wrong. Your immune system isn’t a war machine. It’s a peacekeeping force that more than anything else seeks to create harmony.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“If you land on the moon, you still have to get home.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“Dr. Greenfield, predictably, goes further. He deems young people who are raised on digital devices “Generation D.” “They’re so amped up on dopamine that when it’s not firing, they feel dull, dead,” he says. And that means they need to move on to the next thing, quickly, rather than staying with something. “They have no threshold for attentional capacity.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“At the same time, such technology—from the television to the computer and phone—can put pressure on the brain by presenting it with more information, and of a type of information, that makes it hard for us to keep up. That is particularly true of interactive electronics, delivering highly relevant, stimulating social content, and with increasing speed. The onslaught taxes our ability to attend, to pay attention, arguably among the most important, powerful, and uniquely human of our gifts.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“What happens when we disclose information? What they found was that the reward areas of the brain light up when people share. “Here, we suggest that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary awards such as food and sex.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“You hear the ping of an incoming text or call, you respond; the ping happens, you respond. And each time you respond, you get a hit of dopamine. It’s a pleasurable feeling, a release from the reward center. Then it’s gone. There is no incoming text, no stimulation. You start to feel bored. You crave another hit.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“What she and others discovered begins to explain why things like smoking or coal mining or sunbathing are so carcinogenic. Each activity injures the tissue and damages the DNA. When the tissue is damaged, the immune system kicks in and cleanses the site and helps stimulate new tissue growth. The trouble is that when the DNA is damaged, the new cells that grow can be malignant cells, some that are made up of self but that are different enough to behave like a cancer.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“Hell, we elected a demagogue last election in this country. People made some comparisons to Hitler.”
― Matt Richtel, Dead on Arrival

“The answer to the polio mystery, also well known, came from Jonas Salk, who was born in New York City of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and eventually was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (by way of New York University and Michigan). His vaccine weakened the poliovirus with formaldehyde and mineral water. It effectively “killed” the poliovirus. But it was recognizable enough for the immune system to pick it up. Ta-da! It cut the risk of infection in half. The country scrambled to produce and disseminate the vaccine as quickly as possible. Alas, this happy ending comes with an asterisk. The first big batch of vaccine wasn’t properly made. Cutter Laboratories in California, one of the main producers of the vaccine, inoculated more than 200,000 children in 1955, and within days there were reports of paralysis. Within a month, the program was discontinued, and investigations revealed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“scientist”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“A typical office worker was getting interrupted by various media stimulation every three minutes in 2004, according to research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine. That was before the spread of instant messaging and Facebook. By 2013, the interruptions were every two minutes; such intrusions came either from a person responding to a new stimulus—like an incoming email—or from an internal urge to change tasks, say, to write a new email.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“Together, autoimmunity is the third most common disease category in the United States (after cardiovascular disorders and cancer).”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“The cyclists produced more new T cells from the thymus, and they had fewer cytokines that cause the thymus to decay. The upshot of the research is that exercise slows the natural aging process of the immune system.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“Inflammation is—very generally speaking—the body’s immune system’s response to stimulus.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“isoantigens—antigens within the same species.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“He repeated that the texting driver faces a sixfold crash risk, whereas a driver talking on the phone faced a four-times increase in likelihood of a crash, which he said was roughly equivalent to someone who is legally drunk.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“Ideas ... can elicit a kind of autoimmune response - an overreaction that feels protective initially but can ultimately be counterproductive and make it harder to find truth.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“Here, we suggest that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary awards such as food and sex.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“The study, by a research firm called Localytics, looked at the use of five hundred news apps between July of 2012 and July of 2013. It found that people were spending 26 percent less time in each session. At the same time, it found that people were launching their news apps 39 percent more each month. It’s important not to read too much into one study. But the research points to a very interesting dynamic: The reason people are spending less time in each app session isn’t because their interest in news is declining. After all, people are launching news apps more and more often. They like and want news. They just don’t have the patience to spend much time with it.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age

“Baby mice, deprived of the thymus, had many fewer of the white blood cells with only one nucleus. These already had the name lymphocytes. This must mean, Dr. Miller thought, that these cells had come from the thymus. “Thymus-derived cells,” he called them. Thymus. T. T cells.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“The B cells came from bone marrow and generated antibodies. The T cells matured in the thymus and could either fight or direct action. They are generals and soldiers.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“The immune system killed only the infected ones that were self. An individual’s elegant defense didn’t care simply about the infection; it cared about the infection when it attacked its own personal habitat.”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“Jason could tell a yarn. He could hardly talk without telling a yarn; according to his zealous world view, every day was an adventure. He would relate his experiences like a combination of a bard, radio talk-show host, and bawdy”
― Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

“Take, for instance, several classic studies with animal models. A baboon, say, is shown that if it pushes a lever then some food will drop through a dispenser. But the animal doesn’t know which push of the lever will be the one that will deliver the food. “The baboon will press the lever at a very steady rate. ‘Is the food there yet, is the food there yet?’ Each press is like a question,” explains Dan Bernstein, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, where he has an office down the hall from Dr. Atchley. It may not be a comfortable comparison for some. But the image of a baboon pulling a lever for food is not all that dissimilar from a person obsessively pecking at their phone waiting for the next email to appear.”
― Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age