Are We Becoming McThinkers?

“We are on the verge of losing our capacity as a society for deep, sustained focus. In short, we are slipping toward a new dark age.” Bill McKibben

It’s the Boiled Frog Problem: If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it’ll naturally hop right out again. But if you put the same frog in a pot of cool water and turn on the heat, it’ll stay in the pot because it will not notice the gradual changes in the environment around it. In the end, it’s cooked.

Like slowly heating water, technologies have immersed our waking lives in their environment, vying for our attention, luring us with novelty and transient offers of virtual connectedness, and providing us with endless and varied access to information and entertainment. Our media environment is hot and getting hotter.

Evolving or Devolving?

Many believe we as human beings are evolving to handle multitasking and 24/7 communication. After all, middle school children regularly do their homework while IM’ing six friends, monitoring cell phone calls, and watching a ball game on TV, while some hardrock music plays in the background. Office workers get interrupted on average every three minutes, half the time by themselves. Often this frenetic pace is considered inevitable, the cost of improved productivity and expanded time and leisure options. But is there a cost to our brains as well, or is this just a necessary condition of life in the twenty-first century? After all, what could possibly be wrong with our cell phones, our laptops, our iPods, and constant information feeds?

Actually, plenty, as Maggie Jackson sees it. Her highly readable book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, asks some fundamental questions about how all this intrusive and pervasive technology is changing how we live and what it means. Jackson defines a “dark age” as a time of cultural collapse characterized most prominently by a significant decline in literacy. Our split-screen, nomadic existence is destroying our ability to focus, to think critically, and to connect with our inner selves as well as with others. What looms on the horizon is an era of shadows and fear, where, in spite of the superficial abundance of daily life—our hundreds of cable channels and countless choices of breakfast cereals—we still face at bottom an abiding sense of impermanence and uncertainty.

Driving toward Distraction

The myriad claims on our attention have created a society of multitaskers. Multitasking enthusiasts often claim that this capability is best learned when young: Those over thirty (or perhaps it’s forty) never learned to multitask as children. They weren’t exposed to the multiple data sources and information channels that the younger generation considers its usual daily fare. But at the risk of being cast into the “old fogies” bin, we would like to point out that many recent studies in neuroscience as well as in education show that the younger generation is not any better at juggling multiple activities than their elders.  Nor are they particularly adept at accessing information on the Internet. Consider the following facts:

Ø       Playing a TV game show in the background cuts the time one- to three-year-olds play with their toys and lowers their ability to focus by 25%. Instead children move distractedly from toy to toy without really focusing on anything, even for a minute or two.

Ø       Both children and adults watching TV look away from the set as many as 150 times per hour.

Ø       People of any age watching TV news with a data crawl at the bottom of the screen retain 10% fewer facts about the stories on the main screen.

Ø       People can hold one to four chunks of information in their active memory at any given time. If their active memory is saturated, they are much more likely to lose focus altogether.

Ø       A study of political science and sociology majors at the University of California at Berkeley found that while only 7% rated their overall ability to find information sources as poor, fully 80% of them got poor or failing grades on a comprehensive test of those search skills.

Ø       In a UCLA test, students in their twenties were asked to perform a simple task and then asked to multitask by switching back and forth between two tasks. The students could still perform the tasks while switching but could not remember what they had done as well as they could when focused on a single task. In order to learn, the researchers concluded, it’s important to do one thing at a time.

Anatomy of Attention

But Jackson’s book is more than just a diatribe against multitasking. It analyzes the anatomy of attention, how our capacity for attention gets compromised, and what that means. Attention entails focus, judgment, and awareness. In losing the ability to sustain attention on a single thing, we lose our ability to think deeply, and we lose interpersonal connections, too. As a result, the world flattens, it thins out.

When external surveillance and regulation gain dominance, the ensuing control obviates the need for self-discipline as well as the opportunity for trust. Our social and geographical mobility and the rapid technological changes have weakened our sense of self. Oddly, a loneliness and detachment characterize our mobile selves: ‘The vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach.” Critical thinking has become a rare quality because our tools—the Internet, search engines, hypertext, multiple communications devices, and infotainment choices—favor skimming “worlds of infobits.”

The Unenlightment . . .

One of the more disturbing trends is our love affair with machines, our fascination with robots, and our desire for machines that are not just our tools but are parts of ourselves. This desire, Jackson says, reflects a lack of inner will and the loss of the means to really connect with each another. What kind of people are we becoming if we relate more to robots than to other human beings? At least, she consoles herself (and us) there will never be a “prosthesis for the human spirit.”

So are we really headed for another dark age? Jackson’s subtitle is somewhat misleading. The author vacillates: A dark age of illiteracy and cultural collapse may be ahead of us, but she invokes Hannah Arendt to inconclusively conclude that it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen. Arendt’s essay Men in Dark Times observes that the bright spots in the darkest of times “may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, kindle.  . .  . Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun.” Posterity must be the judge.

Or a Renaissance?

Increasing the book’s uncertainty on this point, Jackson herself sees an escape from McThinking in a possible renaissance of attention. Current research about attentional control—how to nurture and strengthen it—coupled with proof that our brains remain plastic throughout our lifetimes, does provide Jackson with some reasons to hope. Techniques from meditation to mental exercises both in the classroom and on the computer can help people of all ages. Will we take advantage of these new tools or simply sink into a dulling and ever more pervasive state of distraction? Will we learn to exercise our willpower to improve attention or just continue to flit about from our Blackberrys to our cell phones to our laptops, iPods, and TVs?

Possibly, but many signs point in other, bleaker directions. One recent disturbing study found that freshmen who ranked in the middle of their class in critical thinking skills ended up ranking lower by the time they graduated—no better than the seventieth percentile when they repeated the same test in their senior year. And, given the fact that most college graduates today believe that knowledge is a matter of opinion and only 30% can read a simple document like a food label, it’s hard to be optimistic. It’s likely they are all at risk of being as thoroughly cooked as that poor boiled frog.

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More information . . .

Buy Distracted at Amazon

Visit molecular biologist John Medina’s multimedia website, Brain Rules, where he discusses the conditions and behaviors required to nurture your brain

Google, Intel, Microsoft, and other technology companies are joining together to develop strategies for combating information overload.