We usually joke that our consideration spans have dropped considerably lately with the rise of digital applied sciences and screen-centric leisure, however there may be sound science to again up this commentary. In reality, a shorter consideration span is solely one aspect impact of a latest explosion of display distractions, as neurologist and creator Richard E. Cytowic argues in his new e-book, “Your Stone Age Brain within the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload” (MIT Press, 2024).
In his e-book, Cytowic discusses how the human mind has not modified considerably because the Stone Age, which leaves us poorly outfitted to deal with the affect and attract of contemporary applied sciences — notably these propagated by large tech corporations. In this excerpt, Cytowic highlights how our brains wrestle to maintain up with the lightning-fast tempo at which trendy know-how, tradition and society are altering.
From an engineering perspective, the mind has fastened vitality limits that dictate how a lot work it will possibly deal with at a given time. Feeling overloaded results in stress. Stress results in distraction. Distraction then results in error. The apparent options are both to staunch the incoming stream or alleviate the stress.
Hans Selye, the Hungarian endocrinologist who developed the idea of stress, stated that stress “will not be what occurs to you, however the way you react to it.” The trait that enables us to deal with stress efficiently is resilience. Resilience is a welcome trait to have as a result of all calls for that pull you away from homeostasis (the organic tendency in all organisms to keep up a secure inside milieu) result in stress.
Screen distractions are a major candidate for disturbing homeostatic equilibrium. Long earlier than the appearance of private computer systems and the web, Alvin Toffler popularized the time period “info overload” in his 1970 bestseller, Future Shock. He promoted the awful thought of eventual human dependence on know-how. By 2011, earlier than most individuals had smartphones, Americans took in 5 occasions as a lot info on a typical day as they’d twenty-five years earlier. And now even at the moment’s digital natives complain how burdened their continually current tech is making them.
Visual overload is extra probably an issue than auditory overload as a result of at the moment, eye-to-brain connections anatomically outnumber ear-to-brain connections by a few issue of three. Auditory notion mattered extra to our earliest ancestors, however imaginative and prescient steadily took prominence. It may deliver what-if situations to thoughts. Vision additionally prioritized simultaneous enter over sequential ones, which means that there’s all the time a delay from the time sound waves hit your eardrums earlier than the mind can perceive what you’re listening to. Vision’s simultaneous enter implies that the one lag in greedy it’s the one-tenth second it takes to journey from the retina to the first visible cortex, V1.
Smartphones simply win out over typical telephones for anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary causes. The restrict to what I name digital display enter is how a lot the lens in every eye can switch info to the retina, the lateral geniculate, and thence to V1, the first visible cortex. The trendy quandary into which now we have engineered ourselves hinges on flux, the circulation of radiant vitality that bombards our senses from far and close to. For eons, the one flux human sense receptors needed to remodel into notion concerned sights, sounds, and tastes from the pure world. From that point to the current now we have been in a position to detect solely the tiniest sliver of the whole electromagnetic radiation that devices inform us is objectively there. Cosmic particles, radio waves, and cellphone indicators move by means of us unnoticed as a result of we lack the organic sensors to detect them. But we’re delicate, and extremely so, to the manufactured flux that began within the twentieth century and lies on high of the pure background flux.
Our self-created digital glut hits us incessantly, and we can’t assist however discover and be distracted by it. Smartphone storage is measured in tens of gigabytes and the exhausting drive of a pc in terabytes (1,000 gigabytes), whereas information volumes are calculated in petabytes (1,000 terabytes), zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes), and past. Yet people nonetheless have the identical bodily mind as our Stone Age ancestors. True, our bodily biology is amazingly adaptive, and we inhabit each area of interest on the planet. But it can’t probably sustain with the breathtaking velocity at which trendy know-how, tradition, and society are altering. Attention spans determine prominently in debates about how a lot display publicity we are able to deal with, however nobody considers the vitality price concerned.
A much-cited research carried out by Microsoft Research Canada claims that focus spans have dwindled to under eight seconds — lower than that of a goldfish — and this supposedly explains why our means to focus has gone to hell. But that research has shortcomings, and “consideration span” is a colloquial time period reasonably than a scientific one. After all, some folks’s Stone Age brains have the capability to compose a symphony, monitor the information stream from a nuclear reactor or the area station, or work out heretofore unsolvable issues in arithmetic. Individual variations exist within the capability and talent to deal with nerve-racking occasions. To give California its due, Gloria Mark on the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues at Microsoft measured consideration spans in on a regular basis environments. In 2004, folks averaged 150 seconds earlier than switching from one display to a different. By 2012 that point had fallen to 47 seconds. Other research have replicated these outcomes. We are decided to be interrupted, says Mark, if not by others, then by ourselves. The drain on our switching is “like having a fuel tank that leaks.” She discovered {that a} easy chart or digital timer that prompts folks to take periodic breaks helps so much.
Neuroscience distinguishes sustained consideration, selective consideration, and alternating consideration. Sustained consideration is the power to deal with one thing for an prolonged interval. Selective consideration speaks to the aptitude for filtering out competing distractions to stay with the duty at hand. Alternating consideration is the capability to change from one job to a different and again once more to the place you left off. In phrases of the vitality price incurred by repeatedly shifting consideration all through the day, I concern now we have hit the mind’s Stone Age restrict. Exceeding it leads to foggy considering, decreased focus, thought blocking, reminiscence lapse or precision calipers, any device shortly involves really feel like an extension of oneself. The similar applies to sensible gadgets. Two centuries in the past when the primary steam locomotives reached a blistering velocity of thirty miles per hour, alarmists warned that the human physique couldn’t stand up to such speeds. Since then ever-faster automobiles, communication strategies, jet planes, and electronics have subtle into the tradition and develop into absorbed into each day life. In earlier occasions fewer new applied sciences appeared per decade, fewer folks have been alive, and society was a lot much less linked than it’s at the moment.
By distinction, the invention, proliferation, and evolution of digital know-how have put the established order in fixed flux. Unlike analog counterparts resembling a landline phone or a turntable, sensible gadgets repeatedly demand and command our consideration. We have conditioned ourselves to answer texts and incoming calls the second they arrive. Admittedly, typically jobs and livelihoods do depend upon an instantaneous response. Yet we pay a worth when it comes to vitality price incurred by continually shifting and refocusing consideration.
This excerpt has been edited for type and size. Reprinted with permission from “Your Stone Age Brain within the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload” by Richard E. Cytowic, printed by MIT Press. All rights reserved.
