Rob: Because I just want to throw one more quote at you, you say and I'm quoting from your book, you say when alpha brain waves function correctly where and when they should, you are a superstar. Think supreme professional of Olympic athletes or the greatest innovative thinkers. For me Einstein, Chomsky and elite composers come to mind. When alpha is not a well regulated, well neither are you.

M.S.: Yes, and that's the difference I'm finding again the anxiety or addiction signature is very common amongst extremely successful people because it has been flipped into drive.

Rob: So it's really a matter of learning how to tap and regulate it?

M.S.: Yes, but there's also no coincidence that for a lot of people in this classifications, when they reach the pinnacles of their career or when they're forced into retirement, this is where addiction comes up so lawyers are infamous for liking their scotch, doctors and addiction this is known, athletes when they can't play due to injury or when they're forced into or not even forced, they have early retirement, the body can only take so much. There's very high alignment of addiction in these professions and populations and that's the 'what we do next'? You got through school, you have your family, you have driven to the top of your career and then you're there, what next? And that's where an addiction can form because you can't, there's nothing left to feed it with.

Rob: Ok I just want to take the alpha, your findings are a little too certain, I'm going to start talking about how Alpha can be good, how it can be a problem in the frontal area but you also talked in the book about how Alpha is associated with creativity and what you're finding is that there's a real change happening with iTechnology that is pretty scary. Talk about that.

M.S.: Very much so. Here I have to give credit to my own father Dr. Swingle Sr. He was responsible for discovering what we refer to as the artist signature. So what this is, is when you close your eyes, Alpha goes up by at least a 30% centrally and by at least 50% occipitally. So essentially from eyes open to eyes close condition and when we found that that was robust meaning ran up by 100% in the back and 50% or so in the front. This was unilaterally associated with creativity. Now it could be in the modern sense of singing and dancing and painting but also in terms of the classical sense so higher levels of mathematics, architecture and one of the things that absolutely saddens me, it's probably been around 10 years ago, I found that kids that cross our threshold here, they have behavioral disorders, their educational learning disabilities etc. so we always want to latch onto something positive when we're giving them the bad news of why they can't focus for example and when we would see the signature, we'd always doubt on it in a positive way and say: Ah, yes Joseph does have trouble with focusing in school but isn't he also creative? Does he also have these features and parents would go, oh yes, and they'd be overjoyed by extreme positives to the child as well. And around ten years ago, I started to notice the parents are going yeah he used to but not anymore. And I was hearing this over and over again and then I started to connect the dots and the really sad feature was this was precisely the time when a child discovered gaming. So essentially all of this creativity was going into gaming and this is why I talk about it, it's hijacking it, it's taking it away.

It's not that you play the game and you continue to sing and dance and play your Lego and things like that. It just gets completely taken over by the gaming and towards the creative process we also see this educationally but I know where you are leading me and that is one of the key things I found. Actually, it was when I was doing my PhD dissertation on Internet addiction, I saw something really peculiar, not peculiar, unusual on the raw EEG when I was going through the data and it was essentially an alpha fluttering. It was a lot higher than I would see anywhere else and a couple of instances was even in the spindling sometimes we see in seizure disorders, and the program wanted to edit these out as artifact. I didn't put it into my dissertation but I really watch this and I went back to the data and I saw that when I was really looking for it, it was in every single participant's data and then I started looking for it in my clinical cues, working with clients and what I was finding is that for individuals who acknowledge that they excessively use Internet or any screen-based device that you get this extreme augment in alpha with eyes closed and it's not the creativity wave anymore and this is why I refer to as hijacking. When I present at conferences, show these slides of data but we used to be talking around 250 rise in the back of the brain, I'm seeing 300, 500, 600. It's absolutely noticeable.

Rob: Wait let me just get this straight; what you're seeing is a different kind of brain wave and a different kind of Alpha?

M.S.: It's a spindling alpha, when you close your eyes that essentially your standard Alpha in the 8 to 11 hertz range that just starts an extreme spindling patterns when we close our eyes and that's what I'm seeing. And I don't.

Rob: And that's different than the creative kind of Alpha?

M.S.: Well it's a lot bigger and the morphology looks similar and I would say around 8 years ago maybe 5 years ago, it looked the same; the morphology, the shape looked the same. And now it's so much larger, so much larger it's about a 300%.

Rob: What does that mean in terms of the way the brain is functioning?

M.S.: I don't know completely. What I do know is these individuals seem to be limited in creative process. What I do know is these individuals unilaterally tend to have an anxiety issue but I do not have all the answers and this is where I really call out to other researchers and professionals to please look at this with me. The other thing is I don't know if this is an effective process meaning this is what is happening to the brain when you're on screens a lot, it could also be a sense of exposure to EMS fields. I honestly don't know but I'd be remised not to look at this and present this and ask others within my field and beyond to come up with what we really think is going on.

Rob: Now in other area of the book, you talk about is how this all ties in the socialization.

M.S.: Yes, bottom line is we're becoming much more isolated and harboring with our iTech as opposed to being out with people. I think this is where we're missing our face to face, heart to heart is what I speak of and that's really affecting our wellness and happiness, a very casual way of putting that. And again there a lot of studies, it's kind of been termed the Facebook effect but what it is, is individuals who spend a lot of time "socializing" on Facebook are becoming depressed versus individuals who spend less time on Facebook and are out and about with people. So it's not a substitution for real life people.

Rob: Ok, why do you think that's happening?

M.S.: Really good question, I think it's just part of technological evolution that there's the positive in terms of what I refer to again in distal relationships. People live very far apart now and also people are very busy so when is the last time that you literally went and knocked on your neighbors door and said, 'Hey, you want to come over for a cup of tea or do you want to come over for a beer?' How many of us even know our neighbors enough to knock on the door and say hey. Outings require planning, majority of us are very fatigued after our work days. Again I think this is part of the hyper arousal.

Rob: The other thing you mentioned earlier in your book is the difference in timing. You talk about how people have different expectations about reactions used to be you would send a letter, a week later you get a response. Now you send an email, you expect a response instantly. Talk about timing.

M.S.: Yes. The instant expectation of responses again that's keeping us all on call. Now, part of that is also the nature of the beast. This is where I kind of connect it to gambling and addiction, unfortunately. The anticipatory cycles we're actually getting aroused on this by opening our mail and seeing what we have from whom, if it will be this, if it will be that. And these of course are very reinforcement schedules that we see in gambling since the beginning.

Rob: You talked about the unwrapping the gift high.

M.S.: Yes, that is my analogy that it's not the high of receiving and of satisfaction that we're getting something, it's is it this, is it that? The excitation that we have before we know recently has a lot higher than the satisfaction we have for the gift actually is what we wanted.

Rob: Let's talk a little bit more about that.

M.S.: Well the example that I used in the book is multiple gift giving holidays or ceremonies and it's of children, the behaviors of children. There's that anticipatory state which I think is natural for example before a birthday. You'll just be really excited about what they will and won't and that's we're dealing with, and then when you get only one gift, the cycle makes sense. It's finite but what I refer to as times of affluence or multiple gifts, the child will open one gift and squeal with delight and immediately move onto the next. They will not spend time with that toy or that item and they'll hop to the next, rip it open and hop to the next and rip it open. It's the anticipatory high that they're getting; it's not the receipt high, it's not the actual gift that they're responding to. It's the anticipation. I know I'm fumbling here in terms of how I'm expressing it. Do you think that's coming across?

Rob: Well no, I think that you need to talk a little bit more about what you mean by anticipatory high and what's involved in that.

M.S.: Ok, it's just essentially the heightened arousal. What will or won't be, and maybe I should go back to gambling. It's that state whether a slot machine put in the coin feeling in the breast, in the belly and the brain when you pull the handle, my age is coming, or push the button I shouls say. It's that state of excitement that you have and the reason why people sit at those machines more and more and more. It's not really seeking the win per se, they're seeking that anticipatory arousal and the "proof" of this is when people do actually win the sums that they want, they don't stop. Somebody on those machines does win $500 they don't go home and take their $500 amount of tokens and cash it in and off they go. The majority of people will sit there and put them back in because that is a high they want. It's not the high of the win, it's not the high of the gift, it's the anticipatory high.

Rob: You know it's interesting, UNESCO actually, I have this as a tab on my computer that I haven't opened for a while, I want to explore it more. UNESCO has project anticipation, a scientific study of anticipation and the anticipatory systems. This is a big topic there's a lot in there, it's a very important thing and so it's fascinating. So basically what you're saying is people no longer appreciate what the gift is, they're more excited about what it could be the moments before they open it.

M.S.: Yes.

Rob: And in my work, in another world where I founded this conference on optimal functioning and positive psychology as you know, I've long found that one area that people miss is anticipating things that they plan like vacations or weekends and that a lot of the pleasure is in anticipation. What you're saying is this can go to an extreme and it can even become more important and more loaded for the individual than the actual experience themselves.

M.S.: There's nothing wrong with it, in fact it's a lot of fun, but it crosses over. And again what we're seeing in texting, in searching; this is why people continuously text. This is why people continuously search. They're not actually after the content, I mean look at your conversations on text, they're not really that fulfilling but it's crossing over into everything. Another really good example is the Internet dating phenomenon. It's really affecting the way people date or used to date and again, it's the anticipatory cycle. It's the opportunity more it's completely hoarding pair bonding. Individuals might find somebody that they're really intrigued with, met all their classifications and what have you but they don't only pursue that person, they pursue the feeling of moreness, that anticipatory state and again we can kind of go around in terms of many of the functions of Internet.

Rob: Yes, you have a chapter on sex. This is it seems like a good transition to talk about that.

M.S.: Ya, I don't know where to start on that one. It's essentially the mass dissemination of porn that occurred with the Internet has really changed what I refer to as arousal cycles and I guess the easiest way to talk about this is again, it's the needing of more.

Rob: The what of more?

M.S.: The needing of more. So in terms of sexual practice due to obsessive exposure to pornography, people and typically men, need more and more to become aroused or interested in person-to-person sexual activity. And we can kind of look at the conservative cultures as well if you look at cultures of old, the viewing of a woman's ankle would send a man spinning and that's because he never saw ankles and if you come into modern Western culture, men are seeing everything online, women for that matter too. The exposure is absolutely extreme there's no body part or position or whatnot that people can't get exposure to within a click and real-life experiences just don't match up anymore. And my greatest concern is for young men and again going back to stages of development. First stages of sexual exploration are awkward; they're terribly wonderfully exciting but there also awkward. As people learn how to touch each other and give out their bodies and or hearts but people fumble, they don't quite know what they're doing and all kinds of jokes about experience and the like. But what's happening is young boys are learning what they should or shouldn't be doing, should or should not be receiving online.

Rob: You mean through porn.

M.S.: Through porn yes, so essentially their expectations of their first sexual explorations are through the roof. Also again what it takes to get a young male aroused is significantly higher. It goes further because the young women know this and what we're seeing is young women and adolescents essentially offering more and more on the sexual platter to be accepted, completely mimicking porn acrobatics and vocalizations. So essentially processes that people are meant to discover slowly, introduce awkwardly, it's all absolutely instant and I also mentioned this in the book, there are some wonderful writings out there, unfortunately they're extremely religiously framed but essentially it's talks about the complete and total loss of intimacy, the loss of discovery of a person-to-person to the total sacrifice of the physiology, the experience without the heart. I don't mean to sound old-fashioned that everything has to be about intimacy and romance, there's a place for non-intimate or raw sex or what have you, but there's a place for it. It shouldn't be unilateral. And if you look at.

Rob: You mean universal.

M.S.: Yes, sorry, misterm, thank you very much for that correction. Yes, it shouldn't be universal and there's nothing wrong with people seeking intimate relationships but it should be a certain portion of the population.

Rob: Do you think that this is where you get this new world of friends with benefits?

M.S.: Absolutely yes, absolutely.

Rob: There's a whole collection of terms, F-buddies and I can't even think of the other ones. So the porn is basically facilitating this new no intimacy, shallow kind of sex?

M.S.: Non intimacy with sexuality, and the extreme now is there are apps essentially where they you have locators and you push a button, let's just say you're in a department store or a certain location on the street, you push it and it will essentially list other people that are sexually ready and wanting at that moment. And essentially you go around the corner into the community bathroom or what have you and you have sexual encounter and that's that. So there are actual apps for this, increasingly popular.

Rob: Are there studies on this?

M.S.: Well, there's a really interesting study on that actually with the augment of STDs associated with these apps. So yes there are studies very interesting ones.

Rob: What effect does that have on marriage and healthy relationships?

M.S.: I think you should still again this is through my experience as a therapist. I think infidelity is climbing. I put it in the classification of bullying, it always was around but it's the accessibility issue. Again I talk about this in the book where people who were, for whatever reason, dissatisfied with their sexual life with their partnerships whether it's emotional, physical irregardless. They had to actively go out and seek it, meaning they had to overtly want to have an affair or it would just naturally happen in environments where people spend enough time for curiosity to really develop but that's another form of intimacy; that's not non-intimate. But we see this in terms of the dating sites now; standardized dating sites have whole sections that are dedicated to individuals who are supposedly in monogamous faithful relationship. Of course there are the overt cheating sites, the most infamous of them Ashley Madison.

Rob: Wait, what is Ashley Madison? What's that?

M.S.: Ashley Madison it was one of the first cheating websites overtly geared towards people in relationships who did not want to leave the relationship but wanted extramarital affairs. And it was a big hoopla when it came out but any dating site now actually I shouldn't say any, I should be careful, many dating sites now will have a section for that. And essentially it's being normalized, you open up your computer and you know, do you want a date tonight or if you open up the newspaper now, the advertisers for prostitution services; it was always covert before. Then again I'm sorry I'm getting into the __ [1:20:15] which I shouldn't but it used to be more covert and it's the availability that's augmenting the acceptability. People don't have to make an effort for an extra marital affair now, they literally click on a button and depending on whom they find and how responsive they are, they can be involved in an affair within three minutes.

Rob: Wow.

M.S.: It's an accessibility issue.

Rob: You think this is going to be something, let's go back to the iBabies, who are at the most 6 to 8 years old now, and you know I have friends who are grandparents and they tell me about their three-year-old grandchildren who already can download apps. Where do you think this is going to go in terms of healthy relationships with iBabies.

M.S.: I think it's a major issue but let me just go back, the ability to download an app, that's a technological ability. I don't want that to confound that with a child that has a behavioral issue meaning tantrums if they don't have a phone in their hand, so first they have to separate that. But again if we look at insecure attachment or disorganized attachment so some kind of a primary attachment issue or potential for that, the inability to read facial cues and body posturing; so autistic like features, less eye contact, not learning true physical boundaries, again kids don't learn what hurts and doesn't hurt by playing some of these games on iTech, they don't learn what hurts their own bodies. Again, those types of boundaries, we just kind of go on and on and project not using iDevices to bridge natural phases of awkwardness in adolescence so essentially learning to be very brazen on iDevices but not being able to communicate face-to-face.

Rob: Wait let me get into that, that's something you really haven't talked about before. Using iDevices to bridge phases of awkwardness.

M.S.: I think I already mentioned that in terms of adolescence wherein adolescence will use digital interface to talk to each other instead of communicating, and they will be sitting in the same room but things that they cannot say and for those of us older we wouldn't dare say, they will say by texting.

Rob: So they can't talk face-to-face but they can use texting or whatever.

M.S.: Yes. Now again we have to be careful about the total emphatics of can't but yes.

Rob: They're inclined, they're more likely to do it that way.

M.S.: Yes.

Rob: Wow. So let me take another digression here, I've done a lot of interviews over the last couple of years looking at psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissist and the other end of that, what I've learned by interviewing experts, interviewing psychopaths is that a few of the things they have in common is lack of empathy and lack of caring. Where do the things that you're describing fit into that picture?

M.S.: It's going to exacerbate it, if not create it. And again just look at the whole Facebook and selfies, the whole narcissistic twisted. What's going on in cyber bullying, again, if you look at what goes on in cybersex versus interpersonal sexual activity, again it's all narcissistic process. It's all about you. Exacerbates one of the lines I have in my book is, for many individuals people on the Internet aren't people, they're Internet people, they're Internet relationships and the rules are different and the way we act is different and again look at bullying, look at trolling, look at cybersex people, many people partake in behaviors that they never would in real life, these are the older people. The younger people are instigating relationships this way and I think it's branching out into real life in terms of the way we treat people. Now I'm not sure about the connections, we have to be careful of chicken and egg here, but again if you look at the phenomenon of a friend with benefits, where did that come out of in terms of communication on phones sitting next to somebody hey, you want to hook up instead of looking somebody in the eyes. There's a pupil dilation that happens, when you sit next to somebody, your arm might touch, you have a physiological reaction. None of that is going on in terms of building intimacy.

Rob: I have a concern that this whole iTech process that you're describing in such detail is leading to more and more people either being psychopathic and narcissistic or being ok with it and manifesting more of the traits and the behaviors.

M.S.: Yep absolutely I'm greatly concerned if you even go further in terms of some of the developments in terms of virtual reality. We were talking about sex, there's a whole classification of technology called sexnology now.

Rob: Sex, can you spell that?

M.S.: Sexnology. So technology, sexnology.

Rob: S-E-X-N-O-L-O-G-Y?

M.S.: Yes.

Rob: What is it?

M.S.: It's essentially technology developed solely for sexual purposes. So we used to laugh about blowup dolls but it's essentially there are attachments that you can buy for your computer that you attach to your genitals so you have essentially touch experiences along with the visual experiences. It's very graphic and it's a huge industry now.

Rob: Wow. I never heard of the genital accessories.

M.S.: Yep, it's a changing world. But I'm really hoping for, and what I feel now is my social duty is to really disseminate information while we still have again my generation and older that can talk about what people are potentially missing but without pontificating. Nobody likes a pontificator, that's really important and to essentially learn how to embrace all of the positives, really open our eyes to the negatives and start a full discussion. And what I'm seeing, I don't want to end this whole thing on negative, there are little pods occurring, there are individuals for example who are opting out of Facebook. So they've canceled all of their accounts. There are individuals who are opting out, there are individuals who are choosing not to carry cell phones so it's happening a bit and one of the things I try to promote is just deciding what your personal boundaries are and, Rob, you're familiar with this because you and I have a professional relationship and you said hello on Facebook and I kind of went Ha-Ha back and responded but I have a very overt rule in terms of my Facebook, I don't have many friends. I don't want many friends because anybody who's on my Facebook, I have a personal relationship with. I have a known from my past or know in my presence and that's the way I choose to use my Facebook. It really is my personal connection with distal relationships. I have a couple of exceptions and again when I meet people in conferences and they Facebook me, I'll say apologies but this is my personal space. Now I might choose to get a professional Facebook, I might choose to have a Dr. Mari Swingle Facebook and use it professionally.

Rob: Do you have one?

M.S.: I don't yet.

Rob: It sounds like you should.

M.S.: Yeah everybody in social media and such tells me I need it. I probably will, but I'm just saying in terms of the boundaries, we all have to make our personal boundaries and another one I have is I very rarely respond to professional emails after certain hour of night, I might choose to write them but I don't send them because when it's a personal duty, I don't want the person on the other line to feel an obligation to respond.

Rob: You know, you got me thinking when I read that in the book. I liked it because people expect it. I published a website that reaches a couple 100,000 unique people a month, people email me all times of the day, weekends, holidays and they expect a response right away. They send me something Friday night and I don't respond until Monday sometimes and they're offended, they are outraged that I took so long and it got me thinking about it with my email server that I use, I can set up something that basically says I'll be late for a couple of days like an auto respond or somebody sends me an email and I haven't used it in a couple of years. But it will be nice if there was a way that you can set it to send it during certain times of day. You could send back an auto response that said hey I'm not going to be responding to this because I only respond to emails and send them out during certain times of day so don't expect anything from me over the weekend or between 5 PM and 9 AM the next day.

M.S.: I think that would be the healthiest. It's just like office hours, when you phone up your dentist and they say our office is open from 9 to 5:30 PM if you're calling outside of these hours. I think this is exactly what we need for all of our professional lives. I think we need to take back our personal lives. Now there's a catch, even our personal lives are horrendously inundated. I had a situation just the other day myself and I wasn't next to my phone, I saw text and I wanted to respond because it was just the right thing to do but then I looked at my watch and I was like, no I'm not going to, I'm going to respond tomorrow morning because I don't want to wake this person up. Again eight years ago, I would have responded because we all turned our phones off at night and one of the really cool things about texting versus phoning is because if you phone, the phone would ring and somebody would pick up and you'd wake them but you could send a text at midnight and the phone would be off. You can't do that now because most of us keep our phones on at night. So same thing is always being on always being on call and a portion of this is also "our fault". Why do we leave our cell phones on, if we still have a landline, mind you. Why is it on all the time? We're really going to have to negotiate the rules of when we do and don't call and what this implies, obviously if we go to it, a cell only world we don't want to turn your phone off at night because what you do need it for emergency, it's a positive blessing of modern technology.

Rob: It's not just phones, texting too. I have a Do not Disturb function on I put on when I go to sleep and I sometimes remember to put it back on when I wake up. So I just decided that I need to do that the least and I'm very conscious of not sending texts to people after bedtime because you never know whether they have their chimes and their noises on. It seems like there ought to be and there probably is somewhere a Dear Abby, you could be the Dear Abby for technology actually.

M.S.: Perfect! Hire me! I'm on, but again some of these things are generation specific. One of the major issues with high school students and what they claim is insomnia but it's actually chronic fatigue in class and they have their phones under their pillows and they're responding and texting all night. So I wouldn't dream of that type of behavior but that's my age classification but in terms of what kids have to do to remain popular, if you're not in that loop and you go to school the next day and you don't know the things that have happened over the evening but again here I put responsibility on parents. Just the way we're talking about we should have Do not Respond after certain hours of business. I strongly believe parents should take cell phones away from children after certain hour because you know they're going to do it. Socially this is what their peer group expects them to do.

Rob: I just was talking to a friend who's throwing a party. She's having a box at the door for people to put their phones in, no phones in the party.

M.S.: Perfect and I'd love to hear that, again I had a parent here brought a child in, the child went to a birthday party and she's very strict, she does not want her daughter to have a phone and she said her daughter went to that birthday party and everybody had a phone. She said she didn't know what to do, everybody nobody at the party was talking to each other, including a lot of the moms, and the child went out and played by herself in the backyard.

Rob: Yes, I was accused recently of constantly being attached to my phone and looking at it and I thought to myself, that's what the people in their 20s and 30s do.

M.S.: I'm just trying to stay young and hip.

Rob: Well you know I make my living online. I have that's the way I do it, so that's an excuse but even then I think reading your book, it's made me really think that that makes it even more important for me to be even more conscious of it. I went the other day to a baseball game and I didn't bring my phone and you know what, I couldn't take a picture during the game, I couldn't send a text to the person who gave me the baseball tickets and they were great seats and I wanted to be thankful but you know, I did it later. And so I went for maybe 4 or 5 hours without a phone, the first time I've gone that long. Since I had that conversation about me being, using the phone all the time, I've been working at using it less, staying away from it. But it is so addicting. It's incredible. Now, we got to wrap up but I wanted to finish up and have you talk about biofeedback because that's how we got to know each other and what you do is neurotherapy. What does that fit in to all this?

M.S.: Well, I mean, the way I discovered all of this is years ago. We have a really good hit rate at the Swingle clinic in terms of people we work with.

Rob: Hit rate?

M.S.: Hit rate meaning the success rate of satisfied clients feeling much better in terms of the symptoms that they came in for. And all of a sudden there's a class of client that just wasn't getting better so our success rate was dropping and I really couldn't understand why and just coincidentally, during this time I started noticing the connection with the use of iTechnologies. And bottom line is a lot of these symptoms for which people knock on our door, excessive use of iTechnology sometimes is the cause of, and sometimes it helps to maintain them. So always now you must ask about the role that iTech plays in people's lives. So, for example, always in anxiety disorders, depression and learning disabilities, it can be key. Now, there's another part to this where in especially with anxiety, insomnia and certain forms of ADHD. If the individual comes in for one or two therapy sessions a week and then they go home and they do, I don't know 72 hours over the total week on gaming and social media or what have you. Guess which is going to have the most influence?

Rob: How many hours a week?

M.S.: Well I'm just saying 72. If you look at a young gamer in school so let's say 14 year old in school that's not an unusual amount of time.

Rob: 72 hours a week, that's over 10 hours a day.

M.S.: Can be. So essentially every waking moment when they're not in school, they are on those devices. Ok so essentially individuals have to realize if technology is or isn't affecting them, for many people it's not, it's just fine. You just need to be aware and then if it is affecting you, you have to be prepared to change your behaviors and here I draw the analogy to addiction and the phases of addiction. If you're on the denial phase, the therapy is not going to work. You're wasting your money if you're in contemplation or pre-contemplation phase, we have some work to do but essentially if you're dealing with any form of hyper arousal and you're in excessive use of iTech, your anxiety, your depression, your insomnia is not going to be helped unless you drastically change your iTech patterns.

Rob: Okay so and what do you tell your patients you identify as a major factor in their symptoms being anxiety, learning disability, insomnia and depression, ADD, autism. What do you tell them they need to do in terms of iTech?

M.S.: Well, depending on what it is. It depends, for example, with gaming; just stop it, hiatus. Many others we've kind of put it in the classification of eating disorders because it is part of our modern world. With eating, you can't for the obese person, you can't say stop eating. The same thing with anorexics and bulimics, you have to learn how to mediate the behavior or one can even say mitigate it. Essentially you have to be very conscious of your behaviors and set your boundaries. So an obvious for somebody with insomnia is no screen device whatsoever two hours before your head touches the pillow because it acts as a stimulant.

Rob: Ok, so how about we got a wrap this it's been going around a really long time. It's been great. What about business? It seems to me I go to a job, I'm told to sit at the computer all day long. I develop anxiety or depression, could this be considered disability that the employer would be accountable for?

M.S.: I don't want to go that far. This is a huge classification of it depends. Is the anxiety due to the pressures of work? Those 5000 emails that you have to respond to immediately? Is it an issue with workload? Is it an issue of iFatigue due to the flash of the screen? Many issues. I think.

Rob: Have you ever been an expert and are people making claims like that?

M.S.: I have not heard of any and that would be something really interesting to watch. Unfortunately I think it would be an area for abuse unless some really nasty stuff comes out about EMS fields and then at that point the world whole world is going to have to change.

Rob: It's hard for me to imagine that if people are spending eight hours a day of their lives and it's rarely that, usually once they start doing it and they start being at home with them and it's not only eight hours. It's hard to imagine that all the stuff you're talking about doesn't imply to work life as well.

M.S.: Yes. New point to ponder but I don't know how we could put that on an employer per se because this is a world issue. There's a study for you in terms of I don't know how you wouldn't confound variables but just in terms of the people who are on screen for their eight hours a day versus people who aren't and rates of depression and anxiety, life happiness. Yes but good point, something to put out there.

Rob: Yeah ok, what next for you?

M.S.: What next? I really want to continue with public speaking on this to spread the word. I really want to get a balanced, a very balanced discussion going on this. I'm feeling a little bit of social duty coming along with the professional. So that's what I'd like to continue doing.

Rob: Great. Thank you so much. It's been really a pleasure since I've known you from way before this book and you got something really important here and hopefully this interview will help get the word out there.

M.S.: Really appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity to spread the word and it was quite a pleasure chatting with you.