YOUR PHONE IS KILLING YOUR ATTENTION SPAN
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| YOUR PHONE IS KILLING YOUR ATTENTION SPAN |
Multi-screening trains consumers to be less effective at filtering out distractions—they are increasingly hungry for something new. This means more opportunities to hijack attention.
—Consumer Insights, Microsoft Canada, 2015
THE FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND about our attention spans is that distraction is our default. Human beings are naturally distractible because, in nature, things are often trying to kill us. We want our attention to be drawn to changes in our environments because those changes might indicate a threat.
But why is staring at our phones so much more distracting and compelling than, say, scanning our surroundings for tigers? In The Distracted Mind, neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry Rosen suggest that it’s because our phones (and, for that matter, the internet) satisfy another evolutionary quirk: our desire for information.
In other words, our brains both prefer and are programmed to seek out and be distracted by new information. And that’s exactly what our phones encourage them to do.
ONE OF THE REASONS OUR brains prefer distraction to concentration is that concentration requires our brains to do two difficult things at once.
The first is to choose what to pay attention to. That job falls to a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for so-called executives (or “top-down”) functions, such as decision making and self-control.
In many ways, the prefrontal cortex is what makes us human. If we didn’t have control over our attention, we couldn’t think abstract and complicated thoughts.
But just like a muscle, the prefrontal cortex can become tired if we ask it to make too many decisions—a condition known as “ decision fatigue.” When our prefrontal cortex becomes tired, our focus wavers and our minds wander. We lose our ability to distinguish between what’s important to pay attention to and what’s not. The more information we’re presented with, the more of a problem this becomes. (As a relatively new part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex is also one of the weakest. Under stressful conditions, it tends to freak out and hand the reins to more primitive areas of our brains—which is not a good thing, considering that we often reach for our phones out of stress.)
The second task required for concentration doesn’t get as much, well, attention. But it’s just as important—if not more so: we need to be able to ignore distractions.
Unsurprisingly, ignoring distractions is tiring work, and the less we practise it, the worse at it we become. When our strength is exhausted and we can no longer block extraneous information, we lose our focus. We go back to our default state of distraction.
IF YOU’VE NOTICED THAT READING a book or printed newspaper doesn’t feel the same as reading the same material on your phone or computer, you’re not crazy. It’s not the same.
When we read a book or the paper, most of the distractions we encounter are external—a barking dog, or the sound of a vacuum cleaner. This makes it relatively easy for our brains to decide what’s important and to ignore what’s not.
But when we read on a phone or computer, links and ads are everywhere. (For now, at least, most ebooks are a glorious exception.) From our attention spans, this is problematic in at least three ways.
Unlike a dog barking in the background, online distractions are embedded in what we’re trying to focus on. This makes it very difficult for our brains to distinguish between what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Trying to absorb the meaning of a word without noticing its link is like trying to count a dog’s whiskers (long hair on face) while the dog is licking your face: nearly impossible, and almost definitely unpleasant.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORSE OUR FOCUS gets, the more valuable we become. Just as social media companies make money by stealing (and then selling) your attention, informational websites make money by distracting you. Even subscription-based sites, such as newspapers, depend on page views and click-throughs for revenue. That’s why online articles contain so many links and why slideshows are so common. Focus isn’t profitable. Distraction is.
Thanks for reading, As Always,
ANKURJIT KALITA
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