The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

by A. Gazzaley and L.D. Rosen
MIT, 2017, 286 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

hen will I learn? Just as a book with “elementary” in the title is usually difficult, a book that has to tell me that it's “brilliant” on the front cover rarely is.

In this book you'll learn that people actually keep their telephones next to them while eating. Cell phones are giving people shorter attention spans, interfering with social tasks, depriving people of sleep, and causing collisions with telephone poles.

We are information foragers, say the authors. We can't really multitask; we're actually context switching, and it's expensive.

This is mostly lightweight cognitive psychology, and much of it won't be news. It's scientifically accurate, though a bit repetitive. Their graph showing the cost-benefit ratio of jumping to a new task, which they call the Marginal Value Theorem, is repeated numerous times with slight changes. I guess the idea is that people only remember one thing from a book, and they want it to be that graph.

Authors' graph of the Marginal Value Theorem (p. 218, cropped)

The most insightful thing is a quote by Herbert Simon that instead of us con­sum­ing infor­mation, infor­mation actually consumes the attention of its recipients, creating a poverty of attention.

Maybe people do glue their telephones to their faces because they fear missing out, but in my opinion they're actually trying to compensate for the low quality of the information in today's world: TV shows that are mostly ads, web pages that get covered up by pop-ups while you're reading them, and news sites with mostly propaganda. Information foraging is a rational strategy in the age of fake news. We have more information than ever, but its average quality is declining.

Likewise with person-to-person conversations: in the age of PC, when it's dangerous to reveal your honest opinion, conversations are repetitive and predictable. So we try to compensate, jumping around, and end up wasting our cognitive resources by excessive task switching.

The authors say that heavy cell phone users (>10 hours/day) are more susceptible to leisure boredom than “light” users (3 hours/day). They can only study for a few minutes before checking their telephone, which gives them a social reward. The authors say all those tweets and cat videos might be distracting, but prevent kids from reflecting and thinking.

In the last section the authors suggest techniques for improving cognitive control, like video games, meditation, exercise, and getting a good night's sleep. These can work: I once started practicing a video game that involved creating paths in a 2D grid while avoiding obstacles, which were, as I recall, bags of money. My goal was to beat a co-worker who kept posting high scores. I accom­plished that, at least temporarily, but I also became highly skilled at navigating the 2D grid of the local parking lot—and I've never had a bag of money fall on my head since then.

Interestingly, one exercise they omit is practicing turning the cell phone off and going cold turkey. Start small, they suggest, by closing an occasional window instead. Let's not get carried away!

dec 09, 2017; edited dec 10, 2017