Are we not behaving like medieval peasants, begging at the court of King Zuckerberg, for crumbs of attention from his table?
We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and we can reclaim them back from the forces that have stolen them, from us…..
By Nazarul Islam
It is difficult to realize that we are living in an age where ‘attention’ is under serious crisis— something that is analogous to our obesity crisis, or the climate crisis. Today’s average college student now spends just 65 seconds on each of his assigned tasks. And the average office worker spends just three minutes, at a specific task. Even the average Fortune 500 CEO only gets 28 minutes of uninterrupted focus a day. Most of us are responding to this crisis by blaming ourselves.
When I felt my own attention fraying, I’d say to myself— you’re weak, you’re lazy, your willpower isn’t strong enough. But then I spent three years travelling to many countries of the world, taking time to talk to over 200 of the leading experts on this subject. I learned from them that this is in fact a systemic crisis — one that is happening to all of us — and it requires systemic solutions.
Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts on children’s attention problems, shared with me that we need to ask if we are now living in an “attentional pathogenic environment,” one in which tasks that require deep focus like reading a book, are becoming more and more like running up a down escalator with each year that passes.
Professor Barbara Demeneix, a French scientist, told me: “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” I have learned that there is scientific evidence for 12 factors that can degrade our attention — and many of those factors have been rising dramatically in the past few years. The truth is your attention has not collapsed.
It was simply stolen by these big and powerful forces. You haven’t become weak. You’ve been hacked. Interestingly, technology— which is normally the first cause we think of — is playing a significant role, but it isn’t the biggest of the causes. To get out of this crisis — to get our brains back — we need to first understand these 12 causes, and then deal with them….one at a time!
Professor Earl Miller, one of the leading neuroscientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has also shared: “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” Yet the average young person now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. But when neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually, as Miller has explained, “juggling”!
In other words, they are only switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-by-task and all that comes with a cost.
Mr. Miller’s expert opinion was that “your performance drops. You’re slower – All as a result of the switching.” All this feels like a small effect but it degrades your attention and thinking by a startling amount. One study at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to take a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages.
The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 per cent worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30 per cent. But it gets worse still. Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon has also found that if you are interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus you had before you were disturbed. So if your screen time shows you spend three hours a day on your phone, you are losing much more.
Yet we are surrounded by apps like Facebook that are designed to interrupt you and get you to pick up your device and start scrolling. There are two levels at which we need to respond to this crisis. The first is as isolated individuals, by making changes in our own lives and our children’s lives, to protect ourselves from the 12 forces invading our attention. To name just one that really helped me: I bought a K-Safe, a small plastic safe that will lock away your smartphone for however long you tell it to.
I imprison my phone and get four hours of undisturbed time every day. There are many methods like this. But we have to be honest with people — individual changes alone will help, but they will only get us so far. At the moment, it is as though we are all being covered every day with itching powder, and now the person pouring the itching powder on us is saying: “You know, you might want to learn to meditate — then you wouldn’t scratch so much.”
That’s fine, meditation has real value. But we need to band together, and collectively take on the forces that are pouring this powder on us, to stop them.
Just as women needed (or need) a feminist movement to gain control of their bodies and their lives, I believe we now need an attention movement to reclaim our brains. We can tackle the deep causes of this crisis. To name just one: for as long as social media companies have a business model where they profit from interrupting and distracting us, they will find ever-more sophisticated techniques to do it. We need to force them to adopt a different business model.
There’s a precedent, as the technologist Jaron Lanier has pointed out. In the 1970s, we learned that the lead that was found in our paint and our gasoline was damaging our children’s brains. So we banned the lead in paint and gasoline. We still paint our homes and drive our cars but without lead.
We now need to do the same with the factors that are ruining our attention today. This requires a shift in perspective. We need to stop asking for tiny tweaks. Are we not behaving like medieval peasants, begging at the court of King Zuckerberg, for crumbs of attention from his table?
We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and we can reclaim them back from the forces that have stolen them, from us…..
[author title=”Nazarul Islam ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nazarul-Islam-2.png”]The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.[/author]
