Driven to Distraction

In the late 1920s, a Russian-born psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik found herself sitting in a crowded Viennese coffee house, wondering how the waiters could accurately recall the minute details of numerous orders without committing them to paper. That casual observation proved to be the basis of a paper published in 1927, in which she laid out what came to be known as the Zeigarnik Effect. Her now-famous thesis was that the human mind is better at remembering incomplete tasks, an insight that proved useful to generations of marketers and managers, who devised ways of leveraging our mental response to interruptions and manipulating individuals into buying products or completing tasks more efficiently.

I first learned about the Zeigarnik Effect on a fascinating website titled Interruptions in Human-Computer Interaction (interruptions.net), which gathers the work of a diverse collection of researchers — social scientists, software engineers, psychologists, and neuroscientists — who study what may well be the defining condition of the information age: chronic distraction.

During the past three or four years, quantum leaps in wireless digital technology have brought us to the point where high-powered portable devices permit us to be in constant contact with one another, to access vast storehouses of digitized entertainment, and to plug into the Internet virtually anytime, anywhere. The unveiling earlier this year of Apple’s new iPhone anticipates an era dominated by a gadget that effortlessly functions as a cellphone, a personal digital assistant, and a camera; holds hundreds of hours of digital music; streams high-resolution digital video; receives digital satellite radio and maybe even television; and offers full Internet access regardless of the time of day and where the user happens to be.

Even before this all-in-one technology makes its grand debut, we are revelling in the miracle of nearly ubiquitous connectivity. But all this access has not come without a psychological cost that is ultimately rooted in the way our brains function. If we now find ourselves adrift in an ocean of information, our mental state increasingly resembles the slivered surface of a melting glacier. As the dozens of studies at interruptions.net attest, we have created a technological miasma that inundates us with an inexhaustible supply of electronic distractions. Rather than providing necessary interruptions to assist us in focusing on the incomplete task at hand, as Zeigarnik proposed, the deluge of multi-channel signals has produced an array of concentration-related problems, including lost productivity, cognitive overload, and a wearying diminishment in our ability to retain the very information we consume with such voraciousness. It may be that our hyper-connected world has quite simply made it difficult for us to think.

The irony is that one of the fundamental promises of information technology — the radical improvement in the efficiency of our interactions with one another — is being undermined by the technology’s enormous capacity to overwhelm us with information and thus short-circuit our need to concentrate. Cognitive psychologists are beginning to understand why the human brain isn’t well suited to the sort of communications environment we’ve built for ourselves. Yet in post-industrial urban societies, few of us are willing or able to disengage, because going offline in a wireless world is no longer an option. This raises a pair of tough questions: Do we control this technology or has it come to control us? And have we arrived at a point, fifteen years after the advent of the web, where we need to rethink our relationship with a technology that may well be altering the way our minds function?

This isn’t going to be a Luddite rant. Like many people, I spend much of my working day in front of a computer screen. I have instant access to information I could never have obtained even a decade ago. At the same time, I find myself asking why phrases like “train of thought” and “undivided attention” are part of our linguistic geography, and what’s become of the underlying mental states they refer to. It often seems as though the sheer glut of data itself has supplanted the kind of focused, reflective attention that might make this information useful in the first place.

The dysfunction of our information environment is an outgrowth of its extraordinary fecundity. Digital communications technology has demonstrated a striking capacity to subdivide our attention into smaller and smaller increments; increasingly, it seems as if the day’s work has become a matter of interrupting the interruptions. Email for many people has become an oppressive feature of work life. MySpace, YouTube, chat rooms, and the blogosphere, for all their virtues as new mediums of political debate and cultural activity, have an amazing ability to suck up time. During this decade, executives and the political class became literally addicted to BlackBerrys, and these devices are now being taken up by consumers who obsessively check them while waiting for coffee or minding the kids at the playground. Information workers spend their days pursuing multiple projects that involve serpentine email threads, thousands of files, and endless web searches. Paradoxically, the abundance of information begets a craving for even more, a compulsion that results in diminishing returns and is often remarkably undiscerning. Scientists at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center have labelled this kind of online behaviour as “information foraging” and coined the pithy term “informavores” to describe this new species.

The technology, in theory, has the ability to emancipate individuals from tedious minutiae: we no longer need to memorize vast amounts of quotidian information (phone numbers, addresses, trivia of any sort) because a digital version is always retrievable. So, in principle, we should have more mental space to focus on the things that are important to us. And yet, the seductive nature of the technology allows us to sample almost anything and, when addicted to this foraging of bits and bytes, focus on nothing. The resulting cognitive overload has become the occupational hazard for the technorati.

Some years ago, researchers surveyed managers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Two-thirds reported stress, tension, and loss of job satisfaction because of cognitive overload. “Information is relentlessly pushed at us, and no matter how much we get we feel we need more, and of better quality and focus,” wrote David Kirsh, a Toronto-born expert in cognitive science who runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego. When I spoke to him recently, he said his basic concerns about information fragmentation hadn’t changed, and the problem may accelerate with the new portable technologies that have turbocharged the data environment.

The mechanics of cognitive overload are similar to the problem of insufficient ram. “In most models of working memory and attention, everything has to go through a central executive processor before being passed into long-term memory,” explains Frank Russo, an assistant professor of psychology at Ryerson University. Our built-in cpus are found in the brain’s frontal lobe. These centres need time to “rehearse” or “scaffold” incoming information by building the neural circuits on which the data will eventually be stored. “If it is not rehearsed enough or elaborated upon,” Russo told me, “the information never makes it to the long-term store.” When someone is bombarded by data, the executive processor doesn’t have the time or the resources to encode everything and starts to show signs of fatigue.