I resisted the lure of Facebook for years. I kept a page on the platform and mostly checked it on my birthday to harvest all the good wishes from friends far and wide. But last summer I succumbed and began to visit more frequently. It was great fun to connect with old friends and new, and to exercise my wit against some terribly creative people whose facility with words was both scary and hysterical. But after a few months, I realized that i had become stuck in the web. I was checking FB first thing in the morning and last thing at night with numerous viewings during the day. I realized I was becoming more forgetful than usual and I also saw a big drop off in my ability to sustain my concentration for any length of time. I had to make a change and I announced on my timeline that I was talking a break. I dont know for how long, but I do know that the first few days of being off FB have been a challenge to my brain. I felt like my brain (my second favorite organ as Woody Allen put it in Sleeper) was shrinking! How could this happen to me? I'm smart. I'm informed! I am in control of my technology! Aren't I?
The ubiquity of always on, always-on-us, always connected technology in the form of smart phones and mobile devices has radically transformed the landscape of our interactions, and of our minds and bodies as well. Tech companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars studying the best way to capture our attention when we're facing a screen. They’ve learned that playing a sound while flashing something shiny into the upper right visual field is stunningly effective in attracting our attention. But it comes with a high cognitive price tag attached.
According to Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, as soon as we see that someone has sent us a text or email, most of us drop whatever we are doing in order to respond to the interruption. People think that having their browser, Slack, Facebook, Twitter, email and instant messaging programs all running behind whatever other work application they have open allows them to multitask, and thus be more productive. The research is showing that the reality is just the opposite: multitasking fragments and reduces our attention span and it does so in harmful and possibly irreversible ways. Multitasking can cause new information to be processed by the wrong part of the brain; it can lower our intelligence by as much as ten IQ points. Because it requires decision making, multitasking tires us out faster than monotasking. It increases the production of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline which reduce our ability to access the executive functions that we need for demanding mental tasks. Most insidiously, it activates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop that rewards the brain for losing focus. And let’s not forget that multitasking produces work of inferior quality compared what would be achieved if we stayed focused on a single task from start to finish. If it’s so bad for us, why do we do it?
Multitasking fragments and reduces our attention span and it does so in harmful and possibly irreversible ways. Multitasking can lower our intelligence by as much as ten IQ points!
The followng short excerpt from Levitin’s book posted in The Guardian alerts us to the danger:
“Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitterfeed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.”
There’s an old saying that fire is a wonderful servant and a terrible master. It’s true of technology too. We need to make informed choices about how we use it to keep it in the role of servant and ensure we do not unwittingly allow it to become our master. When it comes to technology, are you as in charge as you think you are?
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