micro-feeling adding to your life versus what you are giving up by dividing your attention?”
• • •
Media, television networks, and even some schools are finding that their only choice is to play into our acquired attention deficit disordered brains and create shorter programming, send out constant reminders about school-related events on websites and Twitter pages, and write countless blog posts in order to reach this new type of increasingly addled mind.
The media has been equally affected. I remember writing two-hundred-fifty-word articles for the MTV News website and being asked to cut them down to just one hundred or one hundred twenty-five words because our audience would get bored and click away. (Thank God; it became outrageously tiring to find two hundred fifty words to say about Miley—this of course was before her 2013 VMA “performance.”) In one year, the suggested word count went down to seventy-five or even fifty —barely enough words to convey anything remotely journalistic beyond a bulleted list of comments and a joke or two.
The constant distractions and all our time online are clearly affecting our brains and may even be leading to new challenges in learning. Matt Richtel’s 2010 New York Times article “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” featured a group of bright kids who were failing many of their classes because they did not have the attention span tofinish the assignments, and in some cases even forgot to do homework. They were consistently plugged in—surfing the Web, texting, playing video games—and younger brains, which are still developing, get used to this behavior. Richtel wrote, “ ‘Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,’ said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston.” Dr. Rich and other experts are worried that staring at screens will rewire kids’ brains, with harmful and lasting effects. Teachers are concerned that their students can’t concentrate at all and that they are leaving high school with less-than-ideal reading, writing, and discussion skills. Some teachers are resorting to reading books aloud in class because students can’t focus long enough to read twenty pages of a chapter at night.
These detrimental effects are more obvious in developing brains but can be seen in adult brains as well. Nonstop distraction hinders productivity.According to a 2011 study by Cisco, 24 percent of college students and young professionals “experience three to five interruptions in a given hour, while 84 percent get interrupted at least once while trying to complete a project.”Further, a recent study of university students found that those who multitasked heavily in a variety of media—texting, instant messaging, Facebooking, and tweeting while at work or a social gathering—were less likely to process information in a meaningful way. They had slower response times, were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, were unable to switchtasks easily, and retained useless information in their short-term memory. In other words, they may not have been born with ADD, but it certainly seems as though they acquired it.
Perhaps we were never meant to multitask. After all, according to the aforementioned study of university students,“processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition.” Further, psychiatrist and author Edward M. Hallowell describes multitasking as a“mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” It’s why your mom told you to turn off the TV while doing your homework,why some companies are now preventing their employees from using some social media sites, and why people have died while texting and driving. As Dr. Richard Cytowic explains on his Fallible Mind blog,“The same
• • •
Media, television networks, and even some schools are finding that their only choice is to play into our acquired attention deficit disordered brains and create shorter programming, send out constant reminders about school-related events on websites and Twitter pages, and write countless blog posts in order to reach this new type of increasingly addled mind.
The media has been equally affected. I remember writing two-hundred-fifty-word articles for the MTV News website and being asked to cut them down to just one hundred or one hundred twenty-five words because our audience would get bored and click away. (Thank God; it became outrageously tiring to find two hundred fifty words to say about Miley—this of course was before her 2013 VMA “performance.”) In one year, the suggested word count went down to seventy-five or even fifty —barely enough words to convey anything remotely journalistic beyond a bulleted list of comments and a joke or two.
The constant distractions and all our time online are clearly affecting our brains and may even be leading to new challenges in learning. Matt Richtel’s 2010 New York Times article “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” featured a group of bright kids who were failing many of their classes because they did not have the attention span tofinish the assignments, and in some cases even forgot to do homework. They were consistently plugged in—surfing the Web, texting, playing video games—and younger brains, which are still developing, get used to this behavior. Richtel wrote, “ ‘Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,’ said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston.” Dr. Rich and other experts are worried that staring at screens will rewire kids’ brains, with harmful and lasting effects. Teachers are concerned that their students can’t concentrate at all and that they are leaving high school with less-than-ideal reading, writing, and discussion skills. Some teachers are resorting to reading books aloud in class because students can’t focus long enough to read twenty pages of a chapter at night.
These detrimental effects are more obvious in developing brains but can be seen in adult brains as well. Nonstop distraction hinders productivity.According to a 2011 study by Cisco, 24 percent of college students and young professionals “experience three to five interruptions in a given hour, while 84 percent get interrupted at least once while trying to complete a project.”Further, a recent study of university students found that those who multitasked heavily in a variety of media—texting, instant messaging, Facebooking, and tweeting while at work or a social gathering—were less likely to process information in a meaningful way. They had slower response times, were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, were unable to switchtasks easily, and retained useless information in their short-term memory. In other words, they may not have been born with ADD, but it certainly seems as though they acquired it.
Perhaps we were never meant to multitask. After all, according to the aforementioned study of university students,“processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition.” Further, psychiatrist and author Edward M. Hallowell describes multitasking as a“mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” It’s why your mom told you to turn off the TV while doing your homework,why some companies are now preventing their employees from using some social media sites, and why people have died while texting and driving. As Dr. Richard Cytowic explains on his Fallible Mind blog,“The same
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