Quotes About Attention

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

media aren't just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.

When our brain is overtaxed, we find "distractions more distracting.

our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot," he wrote. The content of the medium is just "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." P 4

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started.

The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.

never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.

Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.

Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.

When we're online, we're often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.

Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere."51

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.

The experiment suggested a strong correlation "between the number of links and disorientation or cognitive overload," wrote Zhu.

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.

when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18% of it.

How do users read on the web?" he asked then. His succinct answer: "They don't."38

Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an "ecosystem of interruption technologies,

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54

Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an "ecosystem of interruption technologies," as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.23

A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we're searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole. We don't see the forest when we search the Web. We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.

Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no," says Grafman. "The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem." You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.