Do you believe in magic? (asks the neuroscientist)
Your phone is casting spells on your world
I am an engineer, mathematician, scientist and data collector, yet I am going to make a case for the existence of magic.
The year was 2004.
It was two years before I would get my first “dumb” mobile phone (a tiny little silver and pink flip one). And four years before Steve Jobs would walk on stage and famously unveil the world’s first “smart” phone.
Outside of school, the only means through which my teenage friends and I could talk to each other was using a landline — a physical phone literally bolted to the wall. I remember spending many afternoons sitting on the cold tiles beneath the benchtop, twirling its rubbery cord around my fingers.
It was a simpler time, as they say.
Then my friends told me about this new thing called “MSN,” a live messenger chat client for Windows desktops. They all had it and begged me to join their now virtually connected circle.
I remember sitting down at our family’s big behemoth of a computer, dialling up the Internet and logging onto MSN for the first time. I was instantly mesmerised, completely drawn into its world of dialogue boxes, message notifications and digital validation. It was like an alternate dimension — one that gave my teenage-heightened self-consciousness a reprieve yet supercharged it at the same time.
The disembodied medium gave me the confidence to actually talk to classmates I might otherwise not have spoken to. The written communication gave me a chance to gather my racing thoughts and articulate them far better than I would have verbally. Ironically, taking socialisation out of the physical world and into the virtual one made me feel like I could finally be myself.
MSN became all I could think about. I couldn’t wait to finish my homework and violin practice so that I could enter that world of “lol’s” and “D&M’s.”
I stopped having dinner with my family. I stopped reading for fun. I stopped riding around the neighbourhood after school. Nothing could keep me from that shabby office chair in the dark corner of my room.
A glimpse of dark magic
I didn’t know it at the time, but as my fingers clicked against the keys, a dark kind of magic was being woven, binding me to the machine. I need only walk past it, or spy it from the corner of the kitchen, or draw my violin bow across the last note, and the spell would activate, summoning me to the machine.
And I would helplessly obey.
My parents were understandably alarmed by my sudden reclusiveness, and it didn’t take long before they pulled the plug, literally and figuratively. They deleted MSN and banished the computer from my room, instantly weakening its sorcery.
I remember feeling as if the world were caving in on itself, my mind spiralling into endlessly dark futures of social ostracism. (Teenage angst is a force to be reckoned with, and one that I am acutely aware is coming my way in about seven years.)
The machine still held some of its magic, but with its dark MSN core now missing, the spell slowly lost its power. I started going for rides again in the afternoon. Reading books. Spending time with my family. My life returned to normal (relatively speaking… I was still a teenager, after all).
And for years, the magic stayed relatively dormant.
Then phones got smart and media got social.
The dark magic has amplified and spread
Twenty years later, messaging has moved from a bar-fridge-sized computer that needed dialup Internet to the always-connected tablet in my palm. And spawned a vast family tree of offspring: SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Messenger… The list goes on and on.
Messaging itself has become just one tiny little sliver of an ecosystem of social apps that are mere fingertips away, at every moment of every day. The social validation of a “lol” has multiplied into “likes,” followers, subscribers, comments, shares… The list also goes on and on.
The dark magic that gripped me when I was fifteen has not only amplified, it has been distilled into a tiny little device that often feels as vital as a fifth limb.1
And emotions are what give the magic its power.
Every shiver of excitement — more likes than you thought, a message from a lover, a praising comment, a comparison where you came out on top — is a summoning spell being cast, binding the device to you. It makes you want to stay gripping the device, mining it for more exhilarating feelings just like that.
Every flare of anger or disappointment or outrage — less likes than you thought, a scathing comment, bad news, seeing someone doing better than you — is a summoning spell being cast, binding the device to you. It makes you want to stay gripping the device, mining it for good feelings to wash away the bad.
If this dark magic were visible, it would first appear as a concentrated black haze around the notification icon, with its little superscript number boasting the magnitude of social validation on the other side. Over time, as the magic is fed by your emotions, that darkness spreads to envelop all the glowing little app icons on your screen, each one promising an infinite oblivion of someone else's life, someone else's wisdom, someone else's joke. Soon, that dark haze of magic swallows the phone itself. You need only be within its vicinity to feel suddenly compelled to use it.
And the magic continues to spread.
Other things can be imbued with its summoning spell. When you use your phone at the dinner table, some of that dark energy seeps into the table. When you check your phone first thing every morning, that hour of the day starts to carry the spell. The bathroom. Your bed. The couch. The minutes before sleep. All of these become imbued with its sorcery, each one casting the spell that summons your attention whenever you encounter it.
If you could peer into your mind, you would see how far the darkness has spread. Because the magic doesn’t just imbue your surroundings, but your state of mind as well. You’ve used your phone when bored, sad, happy, angry, calm. All of these emotional states become imbued with black magic, each one summoning your attention to your phone.
The whole world has become a summoning spell.
Look around you (or within you) next time you go to pull out your phone. Where did the summoning spell come from?
20 years later, it gripped me again
Before I started writing on Substack, the dark magic was contained. I would occasionally lose some time to scrolling social media, but without engaging — without touching the social ecosystem and having it touch back — the magic didn’t spread too far. My emotions stayed outside the phone, away from the magic.
Then I published my first essay.
Almost overnight, all the little icons on my phone began to elicit feelings. Big numbers meant exhilaration. Small numbers meant disappointment. Nice comments meant happiness. Negative comments meant anxiety. And with the emergence of these feelings, the magic spread. It oozed into my desk, my bed, my morning coffee. And soon it invaded my mind — even my thoughts and feelings summoned me to my phone.
I had two options: banish the sorcery like my parents did two decades ago and throw away my phone. Or take control of the magic.
I chose the latter.
The laws of magic
In every fantasy story involving magic, the magical world has to obey some laws. There are natural limitations that must govern its use and prevent the world from descending into chaos. I needed to figure out the laws of this magic, so that I could harness it myself.
The Three Laws
First Law: Any object present in the seconds before a flare of emotion becomes the object imbued with the summoning spell.
Second Law: When you obey a summoning spell, the imbued object gains more magical power.
Third Law: When you resist a summoning spell, the imbued object loses some of its magical power.
I felt the biggest emotions (good or bad) when I checked notifications. Which meant new objects were constantly being imbued with power (First Law), or the summoning power of existing ones was being amplified (Second Law).
Casting my own spell
So I decided to choose my own object for imbuing — one that I could control: time of day. I set three very specific alarms on my phone (morning, noon and afternoon), even going so far as to make the sound and screen unique to any other alarm. Every time my Summoning Alarm went off, I would check notifications, reply where necessary then close the apps and put down the phone. The First and Second Laws dictate that the Summoning Alarm should slowly start to accrue magic.
Every time something within me or my surroundings activated an old summoning spell, I would resist it — focus on something else, describe the feel of the floor beneath my feet, do a stretch… Anything but succumb. The Third Law dictates that this should weaken its magic.
And the world did indeed obey those laws.
Within three days, my Summoning Alarm started to accrue power, drawing it like poison from every other imbued object in my life. Within five weeks, those objects had been emptied entirely — the bored mood reverted to just a bored mood, the couch to just a couch, the darkness even receded from my beloved coffee shop around the corner. All of their magic now lived in the Alarm.
I stopped feeling compelled to fill the gaps of my life with my phone. (And it turns out that a lot of life happens in those gaps!)
Black magic vs white magic
Over time, something wonderfully strange started to happen. I began to look forward to the Summoning Alarm. Almost superstitiously, I didn’t want to check my phone unless it had sounded. It became a comforting ritual of the day, potent in its power, but not distractingly so. It had completely and utterly absorbed all the darkness from its surroundings.
In fact, now that I am in control of the only imbued object, it feels like that dark magic has become a kind of white magic — benevolent and healing. It is not a summoning spell I have to fight or feel guilty about or war with myself over. It is a chosen one, and that makes all the difference.
Magic binds itself to objects. Compels behaviour we can’t resist. Spreads through contact. Operates through invisible mechanism. This phenomenon does all four — and unlike the magic in stories, it casts itself.
The first article I ever wrote for this newsletter ended with these three words:
“Dopamine is magic.”
Do you see it now too?
Dopamine mechanics behind The Three Laws:
First Law: Any object present in the seconds before a flare of emotion becomes the object imbued with the summoning spell.
A moment of exhilarated happiness at a better-than-expected “reward” is a spike of dopamine that gates neuroplasticity in any recently active neural circuitry, including context (where you are, what you’re doing etc.) and interoception (your internal bodily and emotional state). Your brain stores this information as cues that predict the reward. With repetition, the dopamine spike then shifts earlier in time — onto whichever cue, or combination of cues, predicts the reward earliest. When this prediction spike is triggered, it feels like a sudden and urgent re-orientation towards the reward.
Every time you feel an urge to check your phone, some cue in your environment (or yourself) has triggered that predictive dopamine spike.
Second Law: When you obey a summoning spell, the imbued object gains more magical power.
When a cue (location, feeling, time of day etc.) triggers this predictive spike of dopamine, the brain stays in a heightened state of plasticity for up to a minute afterwards. Any behaviour that occurs in this window is captured as part of the prediction — evidence for or against whether the cues correctly predicted reward.
Which means that every time you respond to the urge by checking your phone, you reinforce the cue-reward link — the cues gain more predictive weight, and the urge they trigger gets bigger next time.
Third Law: When you resist a summoning spell, the imbued object loses some of its magical power.
When a cue triggers a predictive spike of dopamine and the automatic behavioural policy of checking your phone is not enacted, a dopamine dip occurs, which weakens the urge — synaptic weights stored against those cues are adjusted downwards.
Why the Summoning Alarm absorbs the power of the others
When there is a chain of cues that eventually leads to a reward, the dopamine spike of prediction will shift upstream to the earliest cue (Schultz et al. 1997). An alarm that always precedes a notification check is, by design, an earlier predictor than a notification alert or symbol. Which means that once the alarm begins reliably predicting the check, the spike shifts to it.
But this only works because the downstream cues (the bathroom, the bored mood, the couch) are no longer being followed. If you check your phone in response to the bored mood, the bored mood retains its predictive weight, and the alarm never establishes its monopoly. The two halves of the protocol — reinforcing the new cue and refusing the old ones — are the same mechanism, just seen from two different angles.
There’s an elegant consequence of this power redistribution as well. The more you reduce the spectrum of answered cues, the more predictive weight the remaining ones absorb (Waelti et al. 2001). Predictive weight is distributed across whichever cues are doing the predicting, so when you reduce the number down to three moments in the day, those moments accrue concentrated power.
They absorb the magic.
The next time you go to pull out your phone, ask yourself: what around me (or within me) just triggered this urge? There is always a cue…
If you need a little stop-gap to get an instant reprieve from the urges to check your phone while trying to implement the above, the following strategy can nicely complement it:
If you’d like to read more about the original dopamine programming protocol behind this article, here it is:
If you’re having trouble recovering from the suppressed dopamine that too much scrolling causes, you may find the following of help:
And if you want to read more about the knowledge behind more broadly turning urges into rewiring opportunities, you may find the following of interest:
References for this essay, and for the wider series, are available as a collection in the Research Library, specifically:
This isn't literally true of course, but neither is it purely metaphorical. The brain can temporarily assimilate tools into its body schema, extending our sense of “self” into objects like tennis racquets or canes (Maravita and Iriki 2004, Cardinali et al. 2009). Smartphones appear to exploit a similar phenomenon, and many people have reported feeling “phantom vibrations,” or find themselves reaching for absent phones. Worst of all, many of us feel a strange sense of incompleteness when they are separated from us (Rothberg et al. 2010).
What a wonderful piece. You capture this all so beautifully, and your solutions are really elegant.
My first instinct was to say "Me too!" at every observation (including btw the addiction to dial up internet as a teenager in the early days of it all. I used a messaging service called CIX or something like that - another world)
But maybe instead of me too, maybe it's just all of us! After all, almost everyone I talk to on the train describes themselves as "the worst in the world" or "uniquely bad". We can't all be uniquely bad.
So many of us are alone in this. That's why sharing experiences like these, so eloquently, is so vital.
I will admit, i didnt read rhe entire article.. i 'scanned it'. Why? Because i don't wamt to be on my phone right now.
BUT i read enough to be very intrigued.
Make an alarm. Don't look. SEEMS SIMPLE ENOUGH ( DIDNT MEANT TO HIT CAPS LOCK 🙃)
WILL I TRY IT? ILL TELL YOU IF I DO. 😘