The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (The MIT Press)

by Adam Gazzaley

George Miller with the title “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.”16 In this paper, Miller described our limited capacity to store information as having a span that is often defined simply as the longest number of items that can be immediately repeated back in the correct order.

capacity have been shown to be associated with higher-order cognitive abilities related to real-world activities, such as reading comprehension, learning, and reasoning, as well as estimates of intelligence.19 Individuals who have a larger working memory capacity tend to do better on assessments of these skills and measures of general fluid intelligence.

First count from one to ten out loud. Then recite the alphabet from A to J out loud. Those two tasks should be quite easy. But now try combining them by rapidly switching between them: recite A1, B2, C3, and so forth out loud. You will likely sense the limitations imposed by the network switching that is required to do this, as well as notice the cost of being slower—perhaps even making an error or two if you push yourself to perform this rapidly.

Alvin Toffler, described by some as “the world’s most famous futurologist,”

Strikingly, the predictors of a lower GPA from extensive data collected about the students were: percentage of time on-task, studying strategies, total media time during a typical day, and preference for task-switching rather than working on a task until it was completed.

Only one website visited predicted a lower GPA: Facebook.

And it did not matter whether the students visited it once or fifteen times. Once was enough to predict lower school performance.

According to many research studies, most students send and receive text messages during class, and those who do get lower grades.

One study found that those students who used cell phones and texted more often during class showed more anxiety, had lower GPAs, and were less satisfied with life than students who used phones and texted less frequently.

anxiety may be driving the need for young adults to constantly check in with their technology regardless of where they are at the time.

The US National Safety Council estimated that 23 percent of all car crashes, which includes crashes caused by inattention as well as another approximately million crashes for other reasons, involved cell phone use.

David Strayer, a professor at the University of Utah and an expert on the impact of technology on driving, compared cell phone drivers and drunk drivers and discovered that a person using a cell phone while driving and a person with a blood alcohol level above the legal limit have an equal chance of being in a traffic accident.

our relationship with technology has spawned a variety of “conditions” that include phantom pocket vibration syndrome, FOMO (fear of missing out), and nomophobia (fear of being out of mobile phone contact), all of which are centered on a need to be connected constantly.

Another recent study from Dr. Rosen’s lab spearheaded by Dr. Nancy Cheever investigated the role that technology use—or, rather, lack of use—has on anxiety.

One hundred sixty three college students were brought into a lecture hall, with half being told to turn off their phone and store it and all other materials under their seat while remaining quiet and simply doing nothing. The other half of the students were given the same general instructions about storing materials out of sight and doing nothing, but they had their smartphones taken away and replaced with a claim check for later retrieval. Ten minutes later and then twice more during the hour-plus session, each student completed a paper-and-pencil measure of anxiety. The prediction was that the students holding a claim check for their phone would become anxious, and indeed they did—but no more so than the students whose phone was turned off and stored under the desk. More importantly, however, we found that the heaviest users of their smartphones—those who were younger and grew up with technology—showed increased anxiety after just ten minutes of not being able to use their phone, and their anxiety continued to increase across the hour as compared to those who used their phones less. This rise in anxiety is also evident in the prevalence of phantom pocket vibration syndrome.

1 In this research and that of our colleagues, we have shown that although the younger generations believe that they can multitask better than older generations, their real-world behaviors and performance suffer when they concurrently engage in activities using multiple forms of media.

According to two recent studies, three out of four K–12 teachers asserted that student use of entertainment media (including communication tools such as social media) has hurt students’ attention spans a lot or somewhat, 87 percent of teachers reported that the use of technologies is creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans,” and 64 percent felt that digital media “do more to distract students than to help them academically.”

As families and children have embraced these devices, we are starting to discover the impact that these technologically immersive environments have on young minds. Dr. Rosen’s lab examined the relationship between media use among children, preteens, and teens and “ill-being,” which included physical health, psychological issues, behavioral problems, and attention difficulties.

In addition, preteens and teens were less healthy as they played more video games regardless of total media consumption.

Study after study has indicated that too much technology use, whether it be watching television, going on the Internet, using a smartphone or tablet, or playing video games, is associated with deleterious effects on the health of our children.

The statistics are somewhat staggering. The accepted required amount of sleep for children and teens is nine hours per night. In the NSF study only 10 percent of teens got their nine hours on weeknights, compared to 19 percent of preteens and 69 percent of children. Strikingly, 56 percent of teens and 29 percent of preteens slept less than seven hours. At that rate, a five-day school week would generate a massive sleep debt in the majority of teens. Parents most certainly realize this when their teens and preteens sleep in on the weekends in an attempt to pay off that debt.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as well as ADD without hyperactivity, is on the rise among five- to eleven-year-olds, with estimates indicating an increase of 25 percent over the past decade.

35 A recent meta-analytic study, which examined forty-five empirical published research reports on the impact of media use on ADHD among children and adolescents, found significant relationships between the use of television, video games, and general media of either a violent or nonviolent nature and ADHD-related behaviors.

Using a tool called “Six Elements Test”—which has research participants devise a plan, schedule work, and keep track of time—children, preteens, and teens with ADHD attempted fewer tasks, showed poorer planning, demonstrated worse goal management, and exhibited reduced working memory than normal cohorts, all integral parts of cognitive control that are required for peak intellectual performance.

In a 2011 report, the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media declared that social media might be a potential cause of “Facebook Depression” that, they claimed, develops when

preteens and adolescents spend excessive time using social media.

Those teens and adults who had more Facebook friends and who talked on the phone more often showed less depression.

Some studies have found a clear negative association between Facebook and other technology use with mood—particularly violent video game playing—among preteens, high school students, and young college-age adults in the United States and around the world.

Even after controlling for how much media the student used each day as well as personality traits such as neuroticism and extraversion, both of which have been shown to be related to depression, they found that students who engaged in more media multitasking showed more symptoms of depression as well as more symptoms of social anxiety. In fact, media use in general was not associated with social anxiety, but media multitasking, attempting to use more than one media form at the same time, was related to social anxiety. In the previously mentioned study that examined predictors

Researchers Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell have presented evidence that over the past two decades the level of narcissism in college students has increased dramatically.

In the study out of Dr. Rosen’s lab mentioned earlier in this chapter with respect to symptoms of depression, three different uses of technology predicted increased symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder: having more Facebook friends (the opposite result found for depressive symptoms), using Facebook more on a daily basis, and using Facebook more for managing one’s impression including posting comments and/or posting pictures of oneself.56 These Facebook behaviors may reflect an individual’s baseline difficulties with cognitive control, including an inability to attend to material that is not related directly to him or her, and suggests that excessive social media may exacerbate symptoms of narcissism.

Teresa Belton, an educator from the University of East Anglia, further displayed concern for children, our most avid of the high-tech users, when she opined, “Whenever children are bored, they’re likely to turn on one of those electronic things and be bombarded with stimuli from the external world rather than having to rely on internal resources or devise their own activities.”

anxiety disorders have increased twentyfold in the past thirty years. One in five people suffered from an anxiety disorder in the last year, and 28.8 percent will suffer from one at some point in their life.19 More seriously, half of all young people, between eighteen and thirty-two, suffered from an anxiety disorder during the past year. How much of this can be attributed to technology use, and how might that anxiety influence our propensity of interrupting our attentional focus?

Although FOMO may sound rather trite, it is a real phenomenon and reflects deep feelings of anxiety.

The power of social media to increase our anxiety has been shown in numerous studies. In a study by Dr. Rosen’s lab described in chapter 7, we examined which technology and media sources predicted certain psychiatric disorders.25 In this study of more than 1,000 adults, we found that clinical symptoms of OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder—were

our smartphone is a major contributor to our anxiety. In one survey of 3,800 adults, Cisco Systems reported that nine in ten adults under the age of thirty fear not having their mobile phone.

55 percent of women would rather leave home without makeup than leave home without their phone.

UK-based study found similar results among 1,000 British adults, where 66 percent (and 77 percent of young adults) feared losing or being without their phone, which was an increase of 13 percent in a similar study performed just four years prior.28 In a study discussed in detail

We believe that the main aspect of modern technology that has contributed to this shift is that all three game changers increased not merely our access to information, but notably to a particular type of information: communication. The ability to connect with other people, anywhere, all the time, has changed dramatically with the advent of email, mobile phones, texting, social networks, and myriad ways for one person to connect to another electronically. We hypothesize that this has put pressure on our expectations of interconnectivity and that has resulted in the emergence of heightened levels of anxiety accompanied with FOMO, nomophobia, and phantom pocket vibrations.

With so much anxiety being generated, it is hardly surprising that many of us are feeling compelled, some almost to the point of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, to engage with our technology.

First, there are approaches that, although distinct in their implementation, are similar in that they expose individuals to specifically tailored environments, interactions, and experiences that stimulate brain plasticity. These include both traditional and modern approaches of education, meditation, nature exposure, cognitive exercises, video game training, and physical exercises.

Second, and by far the most widely engaged approach to impact cognition for individuals with deficits, is the ingestion of designer molecules, also known as drug treatment. Third, there are interventions—neurofeedback and brain stimulation—that may seem more natural in the world of science fiction but are

Parents’ thoughts are frequently occupied by how a grade will facilitate their children getting into a university, and not on whether they are sufficiently learning the intricacies of manipulating numerical information that will benefit them throughout their lives. Nor is the emphasis on the development of their cognitive control abilities.

There seems to be a tension between this traditional model that has largely focused on the delivery of information content and the goal of developing the core information-processing abilities of the brain.

It is important to be aware that not all video games are created equal. Some may yield great benefits, others may have no effects on our cognitive abilities at all, and others may even have negative effects. The action video game world has been plagued with claims that they are actually dangerous. Some evidence has supported the claim that violent video games have been associated with a desensitization of players to violence and decreased empathy, although much debate continues over causality.37 There is also concern about addictive behavior and other negative impacts of video games on real-world behaviors. For example, self-reported attention measures in children and adolescents, notably ADHD-like symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity, were significantly correlated with the amount of video game exposure.

three main game changers—the Internet, smartphones, and social media—have forever altered our mental landscape.

Recall the cognitive control limitations that we presented in chapter 5 in the domains of attention (selectivity, distribution, sustainability, processing speed), working memory (capacity, fidelity), and goal management (multitasking, task switching). As described, high-tech influences stress these limitations in just about every possible way: they challenge our attention abilities via frequent distractions, fragment our working memory and diminish its fidelity through interruptions, and drive us to excessive multitasking and task switching, all of which introduce performance costs.

encouraged to find JOMO or the “joy of missing out.”

technology. A person who is detoxing initially reports feeling a sense of anxiety for all that he or she is missing out on, which seems to abate over time. However, upon returning to their tech-rich world, detoxers find themselves even more buried in the text messages, phone calls, emails, and social media posts that they missed. Given that the average teen sends and receives about 3,200 texts a day, that the average adult gets hundreds of email messages a day, and that most people’s social media feeds are bustling with dozens of daily posts, comments, and photos, returning to the “real” world after detoxing means

hours of getting back to any semblance of a state of normalcy. And “normal” means that even while “catching up” on missed connections, new ones are arriving, often punctuated by insistent alerts and notifications, all reminders that taking an extended break means more work and ultimately more stress.