Social media is bad for mental health right? Well... it's more complicated than that. In this episode, we discuss the ways in which novel digital technologies can also improve mental health, and how an evolutionary perspective on tech helps illuminate its dual effects of harming and healing.Tanay Katiyar is a PhD student, co-supervised by Amy Orben and Nikhil Chaudhary, at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU) and the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Drawing on frameworks from cognitive science, evolutionary psychiatry and anthropology, he is currently investigating how our contemporary living conditions and digital environments both protect from and leave us vulnerable to mental health problems in novel ways. He studied economics as an undergraduate in India, and then did his masters in cognitive science at the ecole normale superieure in Paris. He is also a host of the Cognitations podcast, which is dedicated to cognitive science and interviews many renowned scholars across the psychological sciences.

This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.