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February 28, 2019
We are self-interrupting and not even aware of how often we are diverting our attention from our main task—in
EDUCATIONAL INTERFERENCE
one study found that nine in ten students used their laptop computers for nonacademic reasons during class time, while another study found that 91 percent of students reported texting during class.31
Terry Judd, a professor at the University of Melbourne, monitored more than 3,300 computer session logs from 1,229 students studying in the computer lab and found that the average time on task was only 2.3 minutes; multitasking was the name of the game, with less than 10 percent of the sessions being devoid of task switching to something other than studying, which turned out to be primarily checking email, texting, and social media.
EXPECTATIONS
An early example is the standard telephone. When telephones had successfully penetrated society and became a common way to communicate with family and friends, our expectations were clear: if the phone rang and rang and rang and nobody answered, then we knew that we had to try to call again later. When answering machines became available and were positioned next to the phone, the expectation was that a message left during the day would likely be heard when the receiver arrived home (assuming he or she checked the machine and noticed the number indicating awaiting messages), and a return call
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If our text message is not responded to immediately, we attribute motivations to the recipient—“She must be mad at me”—or if we comment on someone’s Facebook post and he doesn’t immediately respond or, at the least, “like” our comment, we get miffed and feel rebuffed. As more of our personal communications move from the real world to the virtual world, more opportunities arise for others to not meet our expectations.
If, for example, your manager sends a group email, once the first person responds the clock is ticking; if you do not jump on the email chain and chime in, you are not meeting the new norms of instant communication. It doesn’t matter if you are working arduously on a project for that very same boss; the expectation is that you immediately cease what you are doing—clearly interfering with your train of thought—and respond, lest you be judged negatively.
Essentially, the workplace has become, owing to our new response time expectations, a 24/7 experience. And, as we have said before, even vacations do not allow us to escape from being “always on, always available.”
Dr. Rosen’s research
Minute-by-minute observations showed that the typical student couldn’t stay focused on work for more than three to five minutes. As a measure of school success, students were asked to provide their grade point average (GPA), which was on a consistent four-point scale regardless of school level. 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.
fifteen-minute sample, we uncovered a fifth predictor of a lower GPA. 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.
Laura Bowman and her colleagues at Connecticut State University, students were randomly assigned to three groups to read a book chapter and take a test.2 One group simply read the chapter and took the test. The second group first completed an instant message conversation with the experimenter and then read the chapter and took the test. The third group started to read the chapter, were interrupted with the same instant message conversation, which was delivered in pieces at various times during the reading, and then took the test. This latter group was designed to simulate the typical studying
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multitask tax all aspects of cognitive control and lead to many all-nighters or at best constant late-night study sessions.
Washington State University attempted to pinpoint the consequences of a variety of technology uses while studying and discovered that the top three activities of studying students were listening to music, texting, and social media.
The students were asked to report on their “mobile phone interference in life” (MPIL),
Only texting and social media while studying were correlated with higher MPIL. As the authors predicted, music did not have the same association. In other words, students who texted or used social media while studying reported that their mobile phone interfered in their lives more than students who listened to music or did not multitask while studying.
Dr. Rosen’s lab, students were sent varying amounts of text messages at crucial points of a videotape lecture and asked to respond.10 Those who received eight text messages during the thirty-minute lecture performed an entire grade lower in a test of the lecture material than the average of those who received no texts or only four texts.
study of more than 770 college students discovered that students who used more interfering technology in the classroom also tended to engage in more high-risk behaviors, including using alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and other drugs, drunk driving, fighting, and having multiple sex partners. Overall, it appears that college students who use inessential technology either during class sessions or while studying face difficulties on both an academic and personal level.14
limitations in attention involves what is called “attentional blindness.”
This occurs when your top-down control focuses your selective attention to such a degree that you are not aware of bottom-up stimuli, even stimuli that may normally seem so novel or salient you would expect to notice them.
“invisible gorilla ex...
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In the classic version, study participants are asked to watch the video and count the number of passes between members of the white-clad team. Somewhere in the middle of the video a woman dressed in a black gorilla suit walks between the players, beats her chest, and moves out of the video scene.
roughly half do not report seeing the gorilla at all.15
Hyman had a clown, fully clothed in a bright purple and yellow outfit, with large shoes and a bright red bulbous nose, pedal a unicycle around a large open square that is traversed often by most campus students during a typical day.
When asked if they saw anything unusual, only 8 percent of cell phone users reported that they saw the clown.
When asked directly if they saw a clown, still only one in four of the cell-phone-using students reported seeing it compared with half of single walkers, 61 percent of music listeners, and 71 percent of walking pairs.
Imagine a squirrel so involved in eating his acorns that he totally ignores a predator, and you have the unlikely parallel to this occurrence in the animal world.
Cathy Cruz Marrero was walking in a mall while texting on her phone and fell headfirst into a fountain.
Recent research has shown that simply using a phone while walking modifies the walker’s step width, toe clearance, step length, and walking cadence and makes him or her more prone to injuries even without an automobile involved.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported on their website that in 2011, 3,331 people were killed nationwide and 387,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving an inattentive driver.24
This is such a serious issue that Matt Richtel of the New York Times won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism for his series of articles on this topic called “Driven to Distraction.”
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.27
American Automobile Association found that “common voice tasks are generally more demanding than natural conversations, listening to the radio, or listening to a book on tape,” supporting the conclusion that this approach still uses significant amounts of our limited attentional resources.
Strayer and his colleagues analyzed the driver–passenger exchanges and discovered that, for the most part, the passenger either reminded the driver to perform the task of exiting the highway at a rest stop or simply stopped talking as the decision point approached, allowing the driver to attend to the driving task alone.
Studies have shown that drivers are actually just driving and not doing any other activity only 46 percent of the time.
To sum up, the research done in the workplace suggests that we are trying to cram too many tasks into too short a time because we respond as though an alert—usually about an incoming communication—is a command to drop whatever we are doing and reorient our attention to a new patch of information. In addition, while we are usually able to accomplish this (and even faster, according to Gloria Mark’s work), we pay a huge price in terms of anxiety and stress.
RELATIONSHIPS
In her 2011 book titled Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Dr. Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor and one of the pioneers of the study of our relationship with technology, argues that our Distracted Mind is removing us from “real connections” and offering only “sips of connection.”44 Turkle sums up her view of the negative impact that technology has on our attention and our important relationships, saying, “As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.” She further talks about the negative impact that she sees in parenting: “Young people must
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A 2014 Pew Internet & American Life Project report found that one in four cell phone owners in a marriage or partnership felt that “their spouse or partner was distracted by their cell phone when they were together.”45
This has become such a concern of young adults that some play a game called “cellphone stack” where everyone at the table places their phone in the center of the table, one on top of the other, and whoever looks at their device before the check arrives must pay the entire bill.
Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein of the University of Essex examined the impact of simply having a phone present during an interpersonal social setting.46 In two face-to-face studies, the researchers had two people who had never met spend ten minutes either having a casual conversation or discussing meaningful personal matters. In one condition, a mobile phone—not belonging to either of the participants—was placed either on a nearby table within full view but not in the direct line of sight of either one, or was absent and replaced by a similar-size notebook. Following the short
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MENTAL, EMOTIONAL, AND PHYSICAL HEALTH
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.
Phantom vibrations are an interesting phenomenon. A mere ten years ago, if you felt a tingling near your pants pocket you would reach down and scratch the area to relieve the presumed itch.
Two studies have discovered that nearly everyone experiences these false vibrations often.
Dr. Rosen’s lab spearheaded by Dr. Nancy Cheever investigated the role that technology use—or, rather, lack of use—has on anxiety.51 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.
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.
Sleep
Photopigment cells in the retina at the back of your eye help control the release of melatonin. In order to produce white light, technology screens must emit light at multiple wavelengths, including blue short wavelengths. When you are exposed to blue light, the
