I love the Bing commercials. They feature two people, with one responding to an innocent question posed by the other with a laundry list of related search engine terms and definitions. It’s a clever ad that makes us laugh, because we recognize it as an exaggeration of reality.
When we search for anything online, we typically have to sift through pages of information, some relevant but most not. And often, we’ll start out by searching for one thing and then bump into something even more intriguing and veer off in that direction. We often repeat this pattern many times. Before you know it, the search for “tickets to Hawaii” that you started at 8 pm has morphed into a search of “great battleships of the Pacific” by 10 pm…then “movies by Stanley Kubrick” at 11…and so on ad nauseam. Meanwhile, your wife is angry because you promised to help your son with his homework hours ago and everything else you had planned that evening didn’t get done, such as responding to your sister’s text, friending your old college buddy on Facebook, and responding to someone who flamed you in their forum. You may ask yourself, well…how did I get here?
In fact, there certainly seems to be some neurological basis for our attention dopiness, or more accurately, dopamine levels. As Lucy Jo Palladino explains in her book Find Your Focus Zone, activities such as watching TV or playing video games activate the basal ganglia of the brain, which releases dopamine. When dopamine levels increase, you’re inclined to do whatever it takes to maintain the “high” they generate, but when the levels decrease, you start to look for something new or a “distraction ” to replace that hit. There’s even a theory floating around the scientific community that argues that ADD evolved from a lineage of hunters (the gatherers, of course, are those less prone to wander — physically and mentally).
So the success of Twitter should come as no surprise given the instant gratification it gives us in 140 characters or less. In Wired for Thought, we push the envelope even further, demonstrating that the Internet is beginning to imitate many of the cognitive quarks of humans — both creating and enabling a new evolutionary lineage — which explains why we are as addicted to the Internet as we are to human contact (even more so, in some cases).
But is the Internet, with all of its cool new toys and gazillions of apps, ramping up this process and blowing out our neurotransmitters — and if so, how do we slow down and attain some semblance of focus? Here are five tactics I use: 1. Sleep well: A well-rested brain is less likely to be distracted. 2. Eat well: Good nutrition is important to brain functionality. 3. Minimize stress and anger: it tends to ramp up production of brain chemicals such as norepinephrine and cortisol, which can lead to problems. 4. Watch out for time wasters: It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole while reading blogs (except this one of course) or online forums. Stay focused by setting time limits for online activity. 5. Work smarter, not longer: If you’re working too hard or long hours without a break, your brain will seek out diversions at some point — whether you want it to or not. Schedule breaks in advance; you’re better off putting in six productive hours than of 10 hours of mindless search engine trolling or social networking.
Decades before the debut of the Internet, when television was introduced and mass marketed, some armchair analysts started referring to it as the “boob tube,” meaning a foolish medium that attracted (and diluted) the attention of foolish people through mindless programming. And when the remote control was introduced, the ability to channel surf supposedly gave our attention spans another shot to the chops. Yet as Sam Anderson pointed out in New York magazine, you can track the fear of “memory destroying properties” back to the days of Socrates.