Too much information!

Abstract

The outlook is cloudy, with prevailing mists. And for once, I'm not talking about the weather! Faster than most of us appreciate, our mental lives have been transformed by computers, cellphones, and pagers. In less than two decades, consumer electronics have shaped human ecology, and the jury is still out about whether that's a good thing. Surveys show that we are working longer hours, and spending increasing time struggling to process blizzards of data. Thanks to e-mail and networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn, all kinds of strangers – Burmese monks, grad students, corporate goons, and Nigerian lottery scammers – now have access to our minds. You've probably already heard this general argument – perhaps on one of the more than 70 million blogs, or 150 million websites, the numbers of which are reportedly expanding at the rate of approximately 10 000 an hour. Or possibly a friend has forwarded you the gist of it, via one of the more than 210 billion e-mails sent each day. But the warning bears repeating, in particular for those of us whose jobs demand we plow through the static for useful bytes of knowledge. In an interview last year with Discover magazine, the science fiction author and futurist Vernor Vinge predicted that, in time, we will be using technology “to create, or become, creatures of superhuman intelligence”, connected to one another by means of an evolutionary leap he calls “the singularity”. What I see as most singular today, however, is how so many people feel so overwhelmed, mentally exhausted, and emotionally fragile. A principal reason is that most of us are struggling to adapt Cro-Magnon brains to modern demands by “multitasking”, even as evidence suggests that it's a losing strategy. The cognitive scisentist David Meyer, at the University of Michigan, points out that while multitasking implies doing two or more things at once, we're actually toggling back and forth between tasks, a behavior that leads to more wasted time, errors, and stress than would result from focusing on one goal at a time. Jackson, nonetheless, hopes for what she calls an attention renaissance, inspired by the work of dogged cognitive researchers such as Michael Posner at the University of Oregon. Posner leads a field that has helped make “executive functions” – in short, the skillful management of attention – a popular catchphrase in the study of learning styles. Executive functions are a set of abilities, based in the brain's prefrontal cortex, including organization, sustained attention, and short-term memory. All of these tend to be impaired in children with attention deficit disorder (ADD), and, in our data-driven world, are likewise under siege in the rest of us, as never before. The psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, co-author of Driven to distraction, the first popular book on ADD, reports that he's seeing proliferating cases of what he calls “attention deficit trait”, a culturally induced attrition of clear thinking. I thought about executive functions just yesterday, while driving with my 10-year-old and listening to radio news about the crashing economy, swerving to avoid a truck just as my child piped up with one of those birds-and-bees questions so popular at that age. I've contemplated executive functions, too, at recent conferences I've attended, during which I've joined other impolite participants by typing away on my laptop, dividing my mind between note-taking, e-mails, and internet surfing. Fortunately, a lot of presumably more disciplined people than myself have been thinking about executive functions too, studying the genetic and environmental factors that sustain or erode them, and exploring ways we can improve them. Posner and his colleagues, for instance, have developed a 5-day, computer-based regimen that has been shown to improve self-control and working memory in preschoolers. Once we identify distraction as a danger, we can take up yoga, count our breaths, and celebrate secular Sabbaths without screen-time. With increasing self-control, we might even be able to refrain from talking on the cellphone while driving, or forwarding that e-mail chain letter. After all, these small acts of disciplined rebellion, multiplied, may be our best collective hope of escaping a singular data avalanche.