<blockquote>"
...Studies suggest that nearly a third of workers feel they do not have time to reflect on, or process, the work they do, with more than half juggling too many tasks simultaneously that they find it difficult to get jobs done.
Distraction is part of the human condition. But now every force conspires to magnify that inattentiveness: technology means that distraction is everywhere.
...
...we graze separately from food in the kitchen and plug into our own TVs, computers and games consoles in different rooms within the house.
...
One of the worst culprits in distractingour attention from one another is, of course, television.
More than half of children aged between eight and 18 live in homes where TV is on most of the time - and the effects are clear.
With the TV in the background, research suggests that those under the age of three become far less focused in play activities that are crucial to their development.
...
Depending too heavily on technology as our guide also derails the painstaking work of adding to our storehouses of knowledge.
That's because anything that we want to learn must be entered into our long-term memory stores via mental processing that can take days and even months to accomplish.
When we try to store or retrieve memories at the same time as dividing our attention, we do as about as well as if we were drunk or sleep-deprived.
Does this matter? Yes, because to build such memories is to construct the treasure trove of know-how and understanding which makes each of us unique as an individual.
Collectively, these memories contribute to the body of wisdom which we pass on to the next generation and without them we will be unable to progress as a society over time.
Consider too the losses which might have resulted had the great thinkers of the past been working in our world of scatter-gun thinking.
How would Shakespeare have fared as a playwright had he been constantly distracted by emails? Would Isaac Newton ever have described gravity had a text message drawn his attention away from the falling apple at just the wrong moment? And how would The Hay Wain have turned out had John Constable been too busy playing video games to put brush to canvas?
The choice is ours. We can carry on as we are or we can cultivate a renaissance of attention. If we fail to achieve the latter, then the innovations which are among our greatest accomplishments will prove our downfall, stoking a culture of ignorance and forgetting and plunging us into a dark age indeed. "</blockquote>
Information overload: Switch off your mobile, iPod, and emails - technology is turning our brains to mushBy Maggie Jackson
30th July 2008
SourceNot long ago, I decided to get together with an old school friend I hadn't seen for years.
Emails sallied back and forth, like bumper cars bouncing off one another, with no solid hits.
After repeated cancellations and postponements, we finally set a date for lunch.
Arriving at his office, I waited while he finished a meeting, took a phone call, dashed around.
It was long past midday when we hurried to a nearby cafe, then he mentioned that he'd eaten already.
I gulped a sandwich, he half-heartedly sipped a soft drink then raced back to work. It was all very friendly yet afterwards I stood on the street corner for a few minutes feeling unsettled.
I thought we were going to catch up but instead I got the face-to-face equivalent of one of those fast-moving montages you see in pop videos.
During our brief time together, my friend joked uneasily about his inability to focus on anything in life.
We all share the joke. Studies suggest that nearly a third of workers feel they do not have time to reflect on, or process, the work they do, with more than half juggling too many tasks simultaneously that they find it difficult to get jobs done.
Distraction is part of the human condition. But now every force conspires to magnify that inattentiveness: technology means that distraction is everywhere.
We're almost always within reach of something to fill our brains. Mobile phones, iPods, portable DVD players, television, email, games consoles, Facebook, personal data assistants .. . the list goes on.
How often do you sit in the car without turning on the radio or enter a hotel room without switching on the TV?
Even places that once offered some quiet respite from the electronic buzz all around us - the cafe, the waiting room - are now connected wirelessly to the world wide web.
The result is that people are so dazed they have almost no time to reflect on the world around them, much less their futures.
Amid the glittering promise of our new technologies and the wondrous potential of our scientific gains, we are nurturing a culture of fragmentation and detachment. In this new world, something is missing and that something is attention.
We are able to tap into 50 million websites, 1.8 million books in print, 75 million blogs and other snowstorms of information, but we increasingly seek knowledge in Google searches that we digest on the run while juggling other tasks.
Through technology we can contact millions of people across the globe at the touch of a button, yet more and more we connect with even our closest friends and family via instant messaging, and the fleeting meetings we do have are punctuated by pings and beeps and multi-tasking.
Day by day our hectic lives erode our capacity for deep focus and awareness, so much so that I often wonder whether future generations will even experience the hard-fought pleasures of engaging deeply in thought and conversation.
Will focusing become a lost art, quaintly exhibited alongside blacksmithing at the historic village ('Look, darling, that man in twentieth-century costume is doing (cite)just one thing!')? How did we get to this point?
Perhaps we should blame men like Frank Gilbreth, an eccentric American inventor who turned his home into a time management laboratory at the turn of the 20th century and discovered that he could cut 44 seconds from his morning shaving routine by using two razors at once.
Gilbreth became one of the pioneers of time and motion studies, and the drive towards greater efficiency in the workplace which lies behind our obsession with multi-tasking today.
Supporters of such ideas included Lenin, who proposed that they should be adopted throughout the Soviet economy. But the dangers of pushing humans beyond their natural limits were obvious from the start.
Gilbreth abandoned his double-handed shaving method after finding that he had to spend two minutes every day applying bandages to all his cuts - his bleeding face was perhaps an early metaphor for the potentially fatal consequences of when humans try to take on too much at once.
Professor David Meyer knows better than anyone about such tragedies.
In 1995, his 17-year-old son Timothy was killed when his car was hit side-on by a distracted driver who failed to stop at a red light.
Today, as head of the University of Michigan's Brain, Cognition and Action Lab, Meyer warns anyone who will listen about the dangers of multitasking.
It's an unrecognised scourge, he believes, akin to cigarette smoking a generation ago.
'By the time they reach middle age, people who are frequently distracted at work can show the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers,' he says.
'These include irreversible brain damage caused by the release of toxic biochemicals into the bloodstream during periods of great stress.'
Meyer believes that we should not use the phrase 'multi-tasking' at all because, in reality, there are very few things that humans can do at exactly the same time.
We may think that we can read emails while chatting on the phone but both activities use the language channels in the brain which are unable to process all the information from the two at once.
What happens instead is that we are forced to switch very rapidly back and forth between them, giving the illusion that we are doing both together but performing neither as effectively as we would if we gave it our exclusive attention.
This explains why it is dangerous to talk on a mobile phone while driving - clogging the language channels we need to understand road signs.
There is an even bigger problem if the person we are speaking to is describing what something looks like.
As soon as we attempt to picture it, the brain's visual channel becomes blocked and we lose our sense of the road.
It takes only milliseconds for the brain to swap from one task to another, but even that short time span can result in shattered lives if a car suddenly pulls out in front of you at the very moment you are talking to your partner about what colour to paint the living room.
The dangers of this 'inattentional blindness' were demonstrated by psychologists at the University of Illinois who asked adults to talk via a microphone with someone in another room while studying photographs of various traffic scenes.
They frequently failed to see details such as children running into the road, even though they were looking directly at the pertinent area of the screen.
Another disturbing experiment at the same university involved subjects watching a short video of a game of basketball and counting how many times the ball was passed by one team.
Half were so engrossed in noting the throws and catches that they failed to notice a woman in a gorilla suit who walked calmly among the players for nine seconds, pausing briefly in the middle of the screen to pound her chest.
Told later about the gorilla, many test subjects refused to believe it existed until shown the film a second time. This highlights another problem, that we often vastly overestimate our ability to multi-task.
Much though we complain about interruptions at work, almost half of them are self-initiated.
We have trained ourselves to think that we can move happily from one thing to another and back again but we spend a great deal of time trying to piece our thoughts back together when we return to the original work in hand.
According to a survey earlier this year, the average British employee does just four hours of productive work a day, much of the rest of the time spent dealing with the disruption of unnecessary calls and emails.
With our different technological gadgets competing for our attention like needy toddlers, this lost productivity - totalling almost 24 weeks a year for every worker - costs the UK economy £140billion annually.
It is also taking its toll on people's health, with three-quarters of those interviewed saying they are stressed because of too many distractions, not least internal emails.
One in three people said they would like to see these banned, since 40 per cent were sent by colleagues sitting less than 100 yards away.
This is another problem with our high-tech world - its tendency to distract us from real contact with the people around us.
Today we can check-in at an airport, make a restaurant reservation, order our groceries, plan a holiday, take money out of our bank accounts, and perform a multitude of other activities, all without talking to a single person.
We even have DVD players in the backseats of cars so that parents can filter out their own children, and this failure to pay proper attention to each other continues in the home.
Living in worlds of our own making, we graze separately from food in the kitchen and plug into our own TVs, computers and games consoles in different rooms within the house.
We dip back into family life when it suits us but still stay tuned to other worlds and better opportunities, with the virtual becoming the preferred reality.
A recent study suggested that parents and children come together in a room just 16 per cent of their time at home.
True, hours don't automatically translate into intimacy but if we can't be bothered to spend time with each other, in the fullest and richest sense, we lose the opportunity to form those deeper bonds which really matter.
One of the worst culprits in distractingour attention from one another is, of course, television.
More than half of children aged between eight and 18 live in homes where TV is on most of the time - and the effects are clear.
With the TV in the background, research suggests that those under the age of three become far less focused in play activities that are crucial to their development.
Moving-from toy to toy, they forget what they were doing when they were interrupted by an interesting snippet of the show and, not surprisingly, parents are also distracted, interacting 20 per cent less with their children during a programme.
Upstairs, their older siblings may well be doing their homework using the internet.
Faced by a tsunami of largely unsifted, unedited information-they often don't know how to separate the wheat from the chaff or how to use what they harvest in a thoughtful way.
Grasping at the first answers that pop up from search engines, they seem unaware that these reveal no more than 15 per cent of the information available with sites which have paid for top billing, or are the most frequently looked at, appearing highest in the rankings, regardless of merit.
This attempt to Google our way to wisdom is clearly flawed. An executive at a top company of accountants recently confided in me his deep concerns that young workers are less and less able to concentrate, think deeply, or mine a vein of inquiry.
Depending too heavily on technology as our guide also derails the painstaking work of adding to our storehouses of knowledge.
That's because anything that we want to learn must be entered into our long-term memory stores via mental processing that can take days and even months to accomplish.
When we try to store or retrieve memories at the same time as dividing our attention, we do as about as well as if we were drunk or sleep-deprived.
Does this matter? Yes, because to build such memories is to construct the treasure trove of know-how and understanding which makes each of us unique as an individual.
Collectively, these memories contribute to the body of wisdom which we pass on to the next generation and without them we will be unable to progress as a society over time.
Consider too the losses which might have resulted had the great thinkers of the past been working in our world of scatter-gun thinking.
How would Shakespeare have fared as a playwright had he been constantly distracted by emails? Would Isaac Newton ever have described gravity had a text message drawn his attention away from the falling apple at just the wrong moment? And how would The Hay Wain have turned out had John Constable been too busy playing video games to put brush to canvas?
The choice is ours. We can carry on as we are or we can cultivate a renaissance of attention. If we fail to achieve the latter, then the innovations which are among our greatest accomplishments will prove our downfall, stoking a culture of ignorance and forgetting and plunging us into a dark age indeed.
Adapted from Distracted: The Erosion Of Attention And The Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson, published by Prometheus Books. To order a copy at £15.99, log onto www.amazon.co.uk.