The Distracted Mind

I’ve been more conscious about maintaining focus this week. It’s probably because I’ve been reading The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen. The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, they discuss the issue of cognitive control with many examples coming from Gazzaley’s neuroscience lab. Part II covers behavior in our high-tech milieu, an area that the psychologist Rosen has been studying for decades. Finally Part III is titled “Taking Control” and discusses how we can improve cognitive control and possibly even modify our behaviors.

You’ve got a goal to get something done. But then the distractors seem to attack in full force. Your mind wanders. You check your text messages. A sound in the background catches your attention. Or you get interrupted when the phone rings or your computer beeps saying you’ve got mail. In Chapter 1, the authors ask “Why are we so susceptible to interference?” It turns out our cognitive control is rather limited. (Cognitive control is defined in the book as “our ability to carry out [high-level] goals [that are] dependent on an assemblage of related cognitive abilities.”) Our ancient brains “have a restricted ability to distribute, divide, and sustain attention; actively hold detailed information in mind; and concurrently manage or even rapidly switch between competing goals.”

The authors make an evolutionary argument that we are wired to take interest in novelty in a broad sense, but especially information in a narrower sense. Thus, the theoretical framework presented layers an “optimal information foraging theory” on top of Charnov’s evolutionary marginal-value-theorem (Figure below from the Wikipedia link). Like a squirrel foraging for acorns that has to figure out when at some point to switch trees because of diminishing returns, so are our brains wired to flit from one information source to another. Except that high-tech advances and particularly the world of information at the touch of your cellphone exacerbates the situation immensely.

Being professors, the authors discuss the effects of the Distracted Mind on students and education. The studies showing how often we are “distracted” even in a 15-20 minute time block are astounding. Having read the book, I’m now much more conscious of my mind wandering when I’m doing any task that requires concentration – reading an information-laden book such as The Distracted Mind for instance. Worse, the experiments show that cognitive control peaks in one’s early 20s (the age of college students!) and then declines. Children can be easily distracted, but holding one’s attention is actually challenging for older adults. For those of us “over the hill”, it turns out that the main challenge is being able to switch back to the main task after interruption. And these studies were for healthy older adults independent of dementia-related illnesses.

None of us really multi-task because of our limitations in three key areas: attention, working memory, and goal management. We don’t parallel process; instead we perform task-switching. And task-switching gets harder as you age. I’ve been taking these lessons to heart this month. The past couple of weeks I’ve essentially concentrated on research and writing at work, thus putting off class prep. I’m very pleased that I finished a full draft of a manuscript yesterday. Just in time for me to go to a conference in DC, although my presentation is only tangentially related to the work in the manuscript. I did devote all of Monday to preparing the slides for my presentation; I finished a full draft and then haven’t looked at them since. I’ll have my second go at it when I’m in DC or in an airport/airplane.

The second change I’ve made is to reduce my internet surfing and social media outside-of-work. I don’t do much social media to begin with (just FB), but I’ve cut down to checking once a week. I’ve also reduced my news reading from every day to every other day, and not reading all the difference sources from my foraging habits in a single sitting. While I do “surf” the net at work, it tends to be work-related, i.e., I’m reading about science or education. I’ve also started to consider the period before going to bed. I turn off my cellphone and laptop earlier in the evening, and I’m trying to progressively reduce the amount of light so that my body starts to build melatonin. Sleep is really important for the brain, and being plugged-in and stimulated by blue-spectrum light is not helpful.

How will I pass on some lessons to my students? I’m thinking of using the “five minutes before class” with a slide that discusses something related to focus and distraction. Maybe I’ll put up a pithy phrase or claim, and discuss it with the students! That might be a way to help them build up more metacognitive practices, something that Gazzaley and Rosen suggest in their book!