Driven to Distraction

While “memory” is a word that has been appropriated by the information technology world, human and digital memory function very differently. Absent corrupted documents or bugs, the act of saving a file means saving it in its entirety, with an understanding that when it is retrieved the file will be in the state the user left it. Human memory is much more error-prone and subjective. Our memories decay and reshape themselves over time. To appreciate the contrast, imagine if you saved a document and when you reopened it the text contained only the parts that pleased you.

Russo illustrates the point with an experiment he does for his students. He shows them a video of a group of young men and women tossing two basketballs among themselves quite rapidly. The students are asked to count the number of passes. At a certain point in the video, a man in a gorilla suit walks through the frame. After the video, when the students are asked if they noticed anything odd, about a third say they didn’t see this absurd disruption. “I use this experiment to demonstrate the point that perception and memory are not like running a tape,” Russo says. “We do have selective attention and we miss things, especially if we’re very focused on a particular task.” As Jeffery Jones, an assistant professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University, puts it,”There seems to be a limit to the amount of information we can process at one time.”

It’s not just a matter of quantity either. Kathy Sierra is a Boulder, Colorado-based educator who designed and created the bestselling “Head First” software-development guides, which are based on neuroscience research about cognition and human memory. In developing her approach, she pored over evidence that revealed how the human brain, from an evolutionary point of view, remains a machine programmed primarily to look out for its owner’s survival, like the threat of an approaching predator. “Our brain cares about things that are very different than the conscious mind wants to learn,” she says. It is geared to respond to novel, surprising, or terrifying emotional and sensory stimuli. Her conclusion: the fast-paced, visually arousing hit of video games is intensely captivating for the human brain, whereas the vast amount of text found on websites, blogs, and databases tends to wash over us.

The human mind, well-suited as it is for language, has always adapted to new information technologies such as the printing press and the telephone, so why should the latest generation be any different? It may be partly a matter of the quantity of information at our disposal, and the speed and frequency with which it comes at us. The research on cognitive overload and multi-tasking reveals that our brains are ill equipped to function effectively in an information-saturated digital environment characterized by constant disruptions. While there’s much hype about how young people weaned on the Internet and video games develop neural circuits that allow them to concentrate on many tasks at once, the science of interruptions suggests our brains aren’t nearly that plastic.

Russo cites epidemiological studies showing that drivers who are talking on a cellphone are four times more likely to be involved in an accident than those who remain focused on the road. Aviation experts have understood this phenomenon for years. A large proportion of plane crashes involving pilot error can be traced to cockpit interruptions and distractions. A 1998 study pointed out that when people are engaged in highly familiar or routine tasks — the things we say we can do in our sleep — they become vulnerable to distraction-related errors because the brain is, essentially, on autopilot and doesn’t recover well when it is called on to respond to information that is unpredictable, even casual conversation. “Cognitive research indicates that people are able to perform two tasks concurrently only in limited circumstances, even if they are skillful in performing each task separately,” concluded a recent nasa study on cockpit distractions. That’s why pilots are required to keep banter to a minimum.

Multi-tasking, however, is the signature behaviour of the wired world. We spend our days ricocheting between websites, blogs, our own files, and the various communications devices demanding our attention. Ironically, humans have misappropriated the nomenclature of digital technology to describe this phenomenon. The phrase “multi-tasking,” David Kirsh observes, was invented to describe a computer’s capabilities, not a person’s.

Yet wireless devices encourage ill-advised multi-tasking: driving and checking BlackBerrys; talking on the phone and reading email; working on two or more complex projects at once. In corporate meetings, participants discreetly text one another or check email while the boss is talking. University classrooms are now filled with students tapping away at their wireless laptops. They may be focused on a document or a website related to the lecture or they may not. Digital technologies invite disruption and pose a daunting challenge to the possibility of a group of individuals applying their collective attention to a particular chore.

Not surprisingly, a growing body of scientific literature has demonstrated that multi-tasking in an office setting is a recipe for lost productivity — a message that runs directly counter to the way many companies want their employees to work. When someone is bouncing between complex tasks, he loses time as the brain is forced to refocus. An American Psychological Association study has found that those “time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks.” When multi-tasking, the brain’s executive processor performs a two-stage operation: the first is “goal shifting” (e.g., shifting from editing a text file to checking email), and the second is “rule activation” (turning off the learned rules for editing on a word processing program and turning on the rules for managing the email program that’s being used). According to the apa, Joshua Rubinstein, a psychologist with the US Federal Aviation Administration, determined that “rule activation itself takes significant amounts of time, several tenths of a second — which can add up when people switch back and forth repeatedly between tasks. Thus, multi-tasking may seem more efficient on the surface, but may actually take more time in the end.”

Uncontrolled interruptions create a similar cognitive response. You’re working on your computer and the cell rings, the BlackBerry buzzes, or the incoming email notification pings. Out of a sense of urgency, curiosity, or simply a craving for a distraction from an arduous task, you break away to deal with the interruption, which may be something very simple (a quick cellphone exchange) or something quite complex (a detailed email from a coworker that’s been marked urgent). In other cases, the interruption leads you off on an entirely new tangent and you may not end up returning to the original project for hours. By that point, you have forgotten where you were or you may have closed windows that now need to be found and reactivated. It’s like putting a novel down for days and then discovering you need to reread the last chapter in order to figure out what is happening.

When a large British company evaluated the emails sent by its employees, it discovered that almost 30 percent were unnecessarily copied, irrelevant, or difficult to understand. The annual cost in lost productivity was estimated to be about £3,400 per person, or almost £10 million across the firm. Those numbers don’t include the time lost as employees try to get back on task.