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February 28, 2019
Modulation does generate a contrast of relevant representations against background activity, but this is not accomplished solely by enhancing of representations of the relevant signals. It also involves the suppression of representations of irrelevant information.
Decades of research have now shown that while focusing on relevant information is of course critical to accomplishing our goals, ignoring irrelevant information is just as important.
suppression of irrelevant information in your brain is not a passive process, but an active one that generates contrast between neural patterns and thus finely sculpts how we experience the world based on our goals.
study performed in the Gazzaley Lab, we showed young adults a series of two faces and two nature scenes presented one at a time in a randomized order
We found that there was more activity when our participants were attending to scenes than when they were passively viewing them, which we labeled enhancement—a neural measure of focusing—and that there was less activity when they ignored the scenes than when they passively viewed them, which we referred to as suppression—a neural measure of ignoring.
The fact that ignoring is an active process is critical to understanding the Distracted Mind because it emphasizes that it takes resources to filter out what is irrelevant.
In another study, we used electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of electrical brain activity during this same task
there is greater and faster neural processing when attending, and lesser and slower processing when ignoring.
WORKING MEMORY After spotting the stream, our ancestor darts for cover and holds visual details of the scene he just saw in his mind—for example, where the brush was located in relation to the steam. He actively maintains this information in mind until he feels it is safe enough to poke his head out and begin his search for the jaguar.
Our current understanding is that the prefrontal cortex mediates the modulation of activity in the sensory cortex during working memory using the same networks that are used for selective attention when a stimulus is present in the environment. This is how we keep information alive in our minds when it is no longer right in front of us.
GOAL MANAGEMENT While he unsuccessfully searches for the jaguar, our ancestor decides to throw a stone into the water to induce some movement. And so, after he ducks for cover, he searches for the perfect stone, all the while continuing his original goal of jaguar searching, as well as maintaining a detailed visual image of the stream and brush on the left bank.
our brains switch between tasks—they do not parallel process.
So, while the behavioral goals may have been to multitask (and thus “multitasking” is an appropriate term for this as a behavior), the brain itself is network switching.
Alvin Toffler, described by some as “the world’s most famous futurologist,” penned his classic book Future Shock, which warned that we were entering an era of “too much change in too short a time.”
Toffler’s first wave—spanning three thousand years—was labeled an agricultural or agrarian wave, where technologies were designed to aid farming and replace the older hunter–gatherer society.
The second wave, spawned by the development of the steam engine and the industrial revolution, replaced agrarian technologies with those of factories and production systems and lasted three hundred years, one-tenth as long as the first wave.
Toffler labeled his third wave the “computer wave” but also referred to it as the “global village,” “information age,” “space age,” and “electronic era.”
progression of the information age from a standalone computer with limited capabilities to our current day where nearly everyone carries a powerful computer in his or her pocket or purse.
fourth wave as the “Information Age,” which is composed of a series of five smaller wavelets
4.1, the first part of the Information Age, started when the Internet began to gain traction in the 1990s, and we reveled in our ability to access information that before was accessible only through libraries, dictionaries, or encyclopedias.
Wavelet 4.2—which we have dubbed the beginning of the “communication era”—was highlighted by the universal adoption and use of electronic mail.
America Online—who coined the somewhat obnoxious announcement “You’ve Got Mail”—helped
Wavelet 4.3 denoted a major change in that we no longer were tied to a single location such as our work desk to gain access to information; instead we entered a “mobile era,” with the rising popularity of rather large portable computers, which then morphed into laptops, notebooks, PDAs, netbooks, and eventually, early cell phones.
4.4, included “social communication” or “virtual communities” and changed our one-to-one communication via email to one-to-many communication via social media.
Age wavelet, number 4.5, introduced a major game changer, as the rather limited-function cell phone was replaced by the “smartphone,” with all of the functions of a computer—making our ability to tap into information even more portable—plus a telephone, a music player, a video player, a camera, and nearly every possible source of information at the touch of an icon or a few simple taps on a glass screen.
We are moving toward the implementation of technologies that revolve around our brains and our bodies, as evidenced by the European Commission’s Human Brain Project and President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative as well as the rise in neuropsychological research using tools such as fMRI, EEG, and fNIR
consumer experts point to a benchmark that when 50 million people have used a product it is considered to have “penetrated” society.
Cellular telephones reached the 50 million mark in twelve years, and then the Internet changed the entire dynamic.
Within four years of its introduction, the Internet penetrated society.
MySpace, the first truly popular social network, required slightly less than two and a half years to penetrate society;
YouTube, the popular video-sharing website now owned by Google, took just one year to top the 50 million user mark, and nearly all major websites and apps that followed—including Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and others—did so in record time.
MySpace, as Dr. Rosen said in an earlier book aptly titled Me, MySpace, and I, was just too artsy and too “youngish” to appeal to the masses.
Facebook started at Harvard University as a means of connecting university students.
Facebook opened to the masses in 2006, and at the latest accounting is now the largest “country” in the world.
With the rapid rise of these websites, the Internet has truly emerged as a platform for the masses, and as of 2016 the majority of activities are social and informational in nature.
Age wavelet started with personal data assistants such as the Palm Pilot and first gained universal popularity with the introduction of two devices, the iPhone and the Blackberry. Ostensibly, the Blackberry was a business device, while the iPhone—introduced in 2007—was touted as more of a personal device, or as Steve Jobs said, “a revolutionary product that changes everything.”
Statistics show that smartphone users pick up their phone an average of 27 times a day, ranging from 14 to 150 times per day depending on the study, the population, and the number of years that someone has owned the smartphone—those who have owned a smartphone longer check it far more often than those who have recently obtained a phone. Often there is no good reason for them to do so; 42 percent check their phone when they have time to kill (which rises to 55 percent of young adults), while only 23 percent claim to do so when there is something specific they need to do.10
55 percent of adults access their phone while driving their car, 35 percent use their smartphone in a movie theater in spite of multiple admonitions prior to the movie, 33 percent use one on a dinner date, 32 percent of parents can’t resist checking in while they attend their child’s school function, 19 percent admit to using theirs in church, 12 percent use theirs in the shower (you can buy a waterproof case if you can’t live without your phone while you bathe), and even 9 percent use them during sex.11
three in four smartphone users admit to being within five feet of their phone day and night, and 75 percent of teens and young adults sleep with their phone next to their bed either with the ringer on or with the phone set to vibrate. Nearly eight in ten smartphone users reach for their phone within fifteen minutes of awakening, and 62 percent grab their phone immediately upon opening their eyes
younger adults switched from task to task twenty-seven times per hour—once every two minutes—the older adults were not all that great at maintaining their attention either, switching tasks seventeen times per hour, or once every three to four minutes. Former Microsoft executive Linda Stone dubbed this constant multitasking “continuous partial attention.”
When Twitter first appeared we used to shake our head at the impossibility of putting our thoughts into “only” 140 characters. Now this appears normal and fits our task-switching lifestyle. When was the last time you read a book, a long article, or literally anything more than a page or two without taking a quick peek at your phone or web browser or without the television on in the background?
Eye-tracking studies show that when we read a webpage or any text on a screen we don’t read it the same way that we read a book.21 Rather than our eyes passing from word to word along each successive line of text, we tend to read in an “F” pattern, where we read the top and left sides of the page, with a brief foray into the text somewhere in the middle, rather than the complete page line by line. Add in hyperlinks, ads, multimedia videos, scroll bars, and all of the other enticing distractions on a webpage, and it is not surprising that we have difficulty attending to anything for more than a
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recent study from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Akamai Technologies demonstrated our collective impatience by collecting server data from 23 million online video views; the data showed that average viewers begin to abandon a video if it takes
more than two seconds to buffer, and 6 percent more viewers click on something else every additional second of buffering.
These quantitative data, collected without the knowledge of the viewers, corroborate survey and experimental data highlighting what was originally dubbed the “four-second rule,” referring to the time that an average online shopper is likely to leave a website for another if it does not download.
WORKPLACE INTERFERENCE
One field study that followed workers for two weeks discovered that they were interrupted 4.28 times per hour by email and an additional 3.21 times by instant message communications.26 And these communications appeared to have a strong draw for the employees, since 41 percent of them responded to the email immediately and 71 percent responded to an instant message immediately.
On average, the workers spent ten minutes dealing with the alerts and then took an additional ten to fifteen minutes to return to their appointed task, often visiting several other applications in the interim.
This study also found that people are responding like Pavlov’s dogs to incoming email communication, waiting only an average of one minute and forty-four seconds to open that message. Strikingly, 70 percent of those alerts were attended to within six seconds, which is about the time it takes a phone to ring three times.
