I recently conducted an experiment on my brain. There were no electrodes, no invasive tools to lift the scalp and dissect the pulpy flesh beneath, nothing more than the attempt to sit perfectly still. It was an experiment I failed. Let me explain.
A regular part of my Saturday morning away from the desk involves listening to
’ podcast, Making Sense. On this recent morning, I went back to a favourite episode from a few years ago, called “The Price of Distraction”. In it, Harris and his guest address the ways in which technology is fracturing our ability to pay attention. I did the obvious thing for anyone who likes a little self-improvement with their morning coffee and vowed to sit still in my armchair and listen to all seventy-two minutes of the podcast while doing nothing but give it my full attention.Punchline: I managed six minutes and three seconds before I lost concentration.
I was distracted by Harris’ discussion of the term “information foraging”. His guest was Adam Gazzaley, who co-authored a book called The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Harris and Gazzaley described modern information foraging in depressingly familiar terms: “[We] self-interrupt and attempt to multitask,” Harris said, which immediately set me off wondering what else I might be doing if I weren’t attempting to unitask. My usual Saturday mid-morning routine consists of housework accompanied by the ambient sound of a podcast. I was suddenly uncomfortable with forgoing the usual overlap of those things to instead do one thing at a time.
I forced my attention back to the podcast. Harris was talking about taking a phone-call while simultaneously scrolling through emails, a cognitive juggling act that (he half-joked) “results in losing thirty IQ points for the purposes of that conversation”. Having no desire to lose any IQ points even temporarily, I took this as a reminder of the challenge. Still, even as I centred my attention on the fascinating details of what these two men were articulating, I kept asking myself why this was a challenge at all. People don’t have to try to enjoy chocolate, or a walk in the woods, or sex, or movies — the pleasure is simply there. So why the need to work to maintain my enjoyment of paying attention?
Part of it comes from the undeniable satisfaction in multitasking. There’s an easily mapped action-reward satisfaction that comes of managing to “tick off” another item from the internal To Do list; this satisfaction is only multiplied by overlapping one task with another. The success of quantity — how many chores are attended to — is vastly simpler to tally than the richer, more meaningful success of a single job done thoroughly and done well.
The hyperabundance of the internet perpetually dangles a carrot before us: there’s always something more compelling elsewhere, something more rewarding, or at least less difficult than what we’re currently attending to. The stick to this carrot is the gut-deep stress caused by attempting to turn away from the television and silence the notifications, to quash the internal alarm that sounds every few minutes to remind you that something fantastically, orgasmically, and possibly temporarily brilliant might be happening elsewhere.
Our sources of distraction seem to promise us that to find the ultimate end of all our searching, we only have to flip a few pages ahead, click that link, switch the channel over, scroll a little deeper into the infinity of the infinity-scroll, pull the screen down with the thumb to load more content, or hit refresh to see if that delicious, red notification will pop onto the screen.
We might even find The Thing, the one to end all of our searching; the cat video to end all cat videos; the Facebook post that will free us, at last, to put down the phone with a sense of completion and walk into that long-forgotten IRL sunshine. If you’d only check your emails or social media, you might finally have that ultimately satisfying experience, the one all of this swiping through websites has been subconsciously directed at.
This isn’t only a matter of worrying that you’re missing out on something great happening elsewhere. It’s also the anxiety caused by the idea that you are getting life wrong — that there’s something you’re supposed to be doing and you cannot tell if it’s this thing or that. Should I go for a run now, or listen to that difficult podcast, or finally begin planning that presentation for work? Well, do all of them at once and you can’t (goes the logic) fail to do the right one. These are understandable if misguided beliefs about how to live life well, responded to with the understandable if misguided attempt to do as much as possible to avoid getting it all wrong.
There’s another motivating factor at play that registers on an intuitive level. It’s a particular dread of boredom, which is disproportionate in its intensity to how benign boredom actually is. The mere anticipation of even a few minutes of boredom seems unbearable, like a kind of torture, even though it cannot hurt you. This repulsion lies beneath our inability to be patient or still in queues, waiting rooms, and all the other situations where we used to idle some time away.
I’m susceptible to this strange phobia. I despise long-distance journeys unless I’m captain of in-drive entertainment and can connect my iPod, with its hundred or so albums, to the car stereo. The thought of being strapped into a vehicle and trapped in silence, or in someone else’s taste in music — which may not be the right kind of music to fully distract me from boredom — is like facing a long stretch in solitary confinement. There’s a song by Twenty One Pilots in which the singer laments the loss of his car stereo, an absence that leaves him driving with only his thoughts for company:
“I hate this car that I’m driving.
There’s no hiding for me.
I’m forced to deal with what I feel.
There is no distraction to mask what is real.”
The available answers to this phobia seem to be either using distractions to hide from the pain of being alone with oneself, or learning to no longer fear those internal monologues. Perhaps we might even learn to turn them into conversations. If the latter, and that’s the one I’d recommend, we’ll each have to find ways to sit in silence. And that’s not always easy.
Although reading is an essential part of my life, for most of 2021 and 2022, I struggled to read like I used to, in unbroken sessions lasting from an hour with ease or half a day with a little effort. Things became so bad that I had to retrain my mind to read with focus, setting a timer on my phone for fifteen-, then thirty-, then forty-five-minute periods in which I forced myself — like a meditative practise — to sit still and bring my mind back to the page each time it wandered. The first time I tried this exercise, I was overwhelmed at the discovery of how tenuous my attention had become. My focus has since returned, thanks to serious effort on my part, but I’m continually surprised at how easily and quickly it can wither, as I periodically lose myself in distraction and have to reset my attention again.
David Foster Wallace said in that over-quoted commencement speech (and here I go, quoting it again):
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to...”
The less practice we have at choosing how and what we think, the more difficult it becomes. And if you aren’t choosing what to pay attention to, something or someone is choosing for you. This is why so many media outlets and companies are motivated to keep you distracted, to keep you looking at all the shiny new things: because if you’re not directing your attention, they get to direct it for you, and they’ll aim it at the things that benefit them.
Ultimately, our ability to pay attention is a form of freedom. We can be masters of our own minds, to the extent that self-control is possible, or we can be slaves to whim. The tech giants and advertising executives have no qualms about this master-slave dichotomy, and are willing to step in and master our attention.
But it goes deeper than resisting corporate control; what we miss, what slips past us while we’re distracted by other things, is life itself. The less distracted we are by the ephemeral, the more we live with what outlasts fleeting moments – which are the things that matter most. By learning to pay attention, we learn to fully live.
Further Reading:
• #226 – The Price of Distraction, Making Sense [podcast] (2020)
• The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, Adam Gazzaley & Larry D Rosen (2016)
• “Car Stereo” from Vessel, Twenty One Pilots (2013)
• This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, David Foster Wallace (2009)