Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

My HuffPost blog from the weekend on the pros and cons of new apps that screen out digital distractions for us:

Last night, I got a PTA alert about a software application that allows users to block access to email and websites such as Facebook, while retaining use of the larger web for self-selected time periods. Parents and educators alike are buzzing about this new cure for our distracted, multitasking children.

The name of the app? SelfControl.

Certainly, children are inundated with info-streams, enticing video playgrounds and constant opportunities to visit the virtual party of Facebook. The average 8- to 18-year-old devotes more than seven hours and 38 minutes to entertainment media on a typical day, according to theKaiser Family Foundation. About half of young people use media most or some of the time they’re doing homework.

At the same time, young children and even teens often don’t yet have the cognitive capability to say no to distractions. The parts of their brains — the frontal lobes — that underlie higher-order will and thought continue to develop into their 20s.

Still, will flipping a switch to darken distractions help children to cultivate their powers of self-control? Or is such software just a quick fix for a hurried age? Similar software — “Freedom,” “Concentrate,” “Cold Turkey” — is proliferating. Are we once again leaping to adopt technologies, and then asking questions about how they shape us?

Humans, of course, are tool users. We close doors to create privacy. We reach for Post-It notes and apps to augment memory. Perhaps SelfControl, a free OS X application developed in 2010 by a high school student who is now an undergrad at Columbia University, helps augment our will power by guarding the boundaries that we repeatedly fail to respect ourselves. Sometimes our monkey minds do need external handcuffs.

But we should think more carefully about how we’re using SelfControl and other such apps, and whether we really want to hand them off to young children as ready solutions for taming overload.

At the least, using this app should be accompanied by lots of conversation about the ways we use technology and the subtle value systems that accompany their use. We’ve long equated speed with intelligence in the U.S.; the first hand up in the classroom is considered the smart kid. If we dole out apps such as “focus” or “will power” or maybe someday “empathy” to our children, we are subtly giving them the message that complex, difficult human faculties can be obtained with a click. That’s akin to doling out Ritalin while ignoring the environmental factors that have been shown to influence attention-deficiencies.

Placing these apps center-stage in our battle to tame technology ignores the effort and time needed to nurture self-control — and ultimately diminishes a sense of our own potential. It sounds passe to talk about patience as a “virtue,” as my Depression-era Dad did. But mastering a skill would be a hollow achievement if we could do so in a digital instant.

And as decades of research by Roy Baumeister, Walter Mischel and others show, self-control is a difficult skill that’s worth mastering. Along with intelligence, will power is arguably the most crucial means to a successful school and adult life. And it can be trained.

How do we help children cultivate their willpower? Teach them to respect the integrity of a moment. An interruption has ripple effects, breaking into and potentially clouding ongoing thought, while boosting stress and the risk of error, a wealth of studies show. Heavy multi-taskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Stanford’s Clifford Nass.

Set up rules about media use. Sounds basic, but just three in 10 children under 18 are given any parental rules about how much TV and other media they can consume. Helpless parents now feel they cannot shape our increasingly all-embracing media environment. Yet when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media, studies show. Moreover, the very existence of a reasonable rule effectively shows children that the seeming unmanageable in life at least partially can be tamed.

Sure, when my teenage daughters are under deadline, inundated, and over-caffeinated, they might want to download SelfControl for a while. But as my 10th grader said with a laugh when I told her about this application, “Mom, that’s not self-control!”

First one, then another… at the showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I attended last weekend, numerous people walked out of the movie. By the third or fourth exodus, I noticed that viewers were exiting in the film’s most still moments: when the camera lingers on retired spy George Smiley, pensively sitting alone in a pub or when he gives a long, tipsy monologue about his encounter with Russia’s top spymaster. The action had slowed, the hunt had paused – and some voted with their feet.

It’s intriguing that this complex remake of John Le Carre’s classic thriller seems to divide us. Critics, as far as I can see, are mostly laudatory – extolling the cinematography, superb acting, the complex story line. But we, the viewers, seem to love or hate the film; only two of 34 reader-reviewers on The New York Times.com give the movie a score of three out of five. Most rate the movie one/two or a four/five, detesting the film as “slow” and “sluggish” or praising it as  “brilliant” and “engaging”  - and the naysayers outnumber the fans.

Writes marsacademy:  “This film may not find a huge audience, because it has a quality of watchful stillness at its core, which is very unlike what the public expects of a ‘spy film.’ It is not an ‘action’ movie.”

Well put. I think that’s precisely why people were walking out. It’s just a movie of course, and excitement is subjective; your terrifying Ferris Wheel ride could be my aerial nap. But it’s perhaps a mark of our times that people could line up so vehemently in opposite corners over action vs. stillness. Although many of us increasingly battle for calm, we’re still surrounded by – and strongly influenced by – a culture of the quick hit, push-button, the ever-rising tide of busy-ness. After all, adrenaline is as addictive as drugs, studies show.

We may be so shaped by the gadget as appendage, tv as white noise and chit-chat as interaction that it seems stifling to be confronted by stillness. If so, we will surely miss out on the second and third layers of life, or the mysteries that perhaps even our best spymasters may never solve. Hurry past quiet, and we cease to see, as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “allegory hard as a figured shield … polished until its undersurface surfaced, like peat smoke mulling through Byzantium.”

In life as in movies, we have to pause to see what’s beneath the polish.

Heading toward the often stressful, overly complicated, ironically fatiguing holiday season, I had a small epiphany. I’d been trying once again to figure out how to be zen about the big family get-togethers that can fray even the most solid nerves.

Dynamics are never easy in any household, much less a series of households brought together as much through blood as love. And I have many weaknesses in such situations: a sensitivity to pick up on the pettiness that a less-observant person doesn’t see, an amateur anthropologists’ tendency to analyze things, an idealistic notion that conversation should be a back-and-forth, not a monologue.

But this year I took a page from landscape painting, and learned a simple, perhaps obvious lesson: what not to focus on. Intriguingly, the genre of landscape painting that we know so well – the Hudson River school, Canaletto’s Venetian scenes – did not exist in full bloom before the 18^th century. Pre-Enlightenment, artists typically depicted a landscape as a backdrop to a religious scene or a portrait. A natural scene was not the main subject of a canvas. Why?

People saw themselves within the land; they were farmers, landowners, conquerors. But they did not see themselves stepping back and viewing the land and their surroundings. Once we could view nature as a landscape, we could see it with fresh eyes.

The lesson here in some ways is the art of focus. Sometimes one needs to focus on a troubling relationship, certainly. But at other times, perhaps it’s best to take a step back and put a relationship in wider perspective. Chances are, you’ll see new facets of the situation by seeing the big picture – and you’ll realize that petty differences are unimportant.

Try it: picture your family as a landscape. It could be a grand canyon, or a churning sea, or a dramatic series of mountain peaks. View each person as just one wave, hill or chasm. Suddenly, you’re able to focus on the larger, beautiful, frail, wondrous fuller scene of life. And you’ll maybe learn something new about family dynamics. Ah, zen!

For Aristotle, practical wisdom was a key to the good life. He believed in flexibility in thought and in learning from experience, not in cold calculations or in rigid rules. Someone who tries to live their life by applying unbending rules to situations of uncertainty or conflict is like an architect who tries to measure a fluted column with a straight ruler, he wrote. Aristotle taught us to be “ready for surprise” and “prepared to see,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum says.

Could story-telling help give today’s beleaguered doctors the gift of Aristotle’s practical wisdom? Could simply sharing tales from the trenches help them become more flexible thinkers?

I recently visited with a young family doctor who sees storytelling as a way to push back on the relentless, dehumanizing emphasis on efficiency in health care. Storytelling allows doctors to pause, “make peace with bad outcomes, honor patient relationships, and process the meaning in our work,” says Hugh Silk, associate professor of family medicine and community health at UMass Medical School in Worcester. He didn’t mention Aristotle, but the parallels are striking to me. Our narratives are a living form of practical wisdom that highlights the particular, the unique, the mutable in life. They both reflect and cultivate the kind of nimble, responsive knowledge that we need in a time of overload, speed and tech-centrism.

Weaving storytelling into the fabric of doctoring isn’t easy. When Silk began sharing around stories and poems by family medicine and community health staff, there was some initial grumbling. Although patient identities are hidden, some feared that lawyers would scour the often raw, candid pieces for potential lawsuit fodder. Others feared that the stories contravene patient privacy. But now the “Thursday Morning Memo” listserv is read by 450 people in the department and beyond. And the idea is being adopted by three other UMass primary care specialties, an expansion celebrated October 5 with a reading and reception. As well, the school’s family medicine residents now are given time several times a year to reflect, and assigned two reflective essays, based on home visits to patients.

Is this worthwhile? Perhaps it’s a mistake to expect neat metrics from a part of life so achingly mysterious and immeasurable. It is interesting that Silk’s efforts fall at the crossroads of two swelling movements in medicine. “Narrative medicine,” pioneered by Columbia’s Rita Charon, links the study of literature with stories from the medical front, mainly to inspire practitioners to listen attentively to their patients. At the same time, medical educators are becoming more interested in reflective writing as a means of inspiring their students to pause, digest and better understand their learning. Again, there are skeptics, yet both movements show intriguing gains: more empathy, better diagnostic skill, less burnout – more joy.

And the stories? Let them speak for themselves. If you can, take a minute and read “Primary Care Ride,” the story of a family doctor who, upon learning of the death of his 10-month-old patient, was torn deeply between doing his bureaucratic duty and listening to his heart. It’s a story of practiced wisdom, flowering within one of life’s darkest moments.

In our rising push for speedy and computational decision-making, we tend to worship “blink” – the power of “thinking without thinking,” as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. We want the fast answer, the magic bullet. Push, click, fix.

Now, it’s great that intuition has been brought in from the dustbin of psychology. For so long, rational, analytic thinking took precedence in most walks of life, and intuition was disparaged as a women’s trait. (In the 19th-century, women weren’t thought capable of higher forms of thinking, such as analysis and logic.)

And certainly, gut instincts can be accurate, especially if we have some expertise with the question we’re mulling and when the environment in question is relatively predictable. Those are some of the guidelines offered by Nobel-winning economist Danny Kahneman and pioneering decision-making researcher Gary Klein. 

But read the literature closely and you’ll find that our faddish worship of “blink” is as off-kilter as our previous tendency to ignore intuition. Blink and Think go hand in hand.

Consider this. A veteran firefighter confronted with a blaze will take a look, and intuitively sense a way to fight the fire. His intuition is actually a form of pattern recognition, based on his long experience. What’s going on with this fire? Bingo – this blaze is an explosive gas fire needing x,y,z. He intuitively senses a solution – then evaluates the option, mentally turning it over to see if it works, Klein’s decades of work has found.

Or what about the creator who sees a new way to look at the world? She might open up the aperture of her thoughts, exploring all options, until intuitively struck by a new way to frame the question. At this point, reflection is needed to shape this fuzzy intuitive way forward.

These two types of intuition – holistic and inferential, in the words of researcher Jean Pretz – work closely with reflective analysis. We need to reflect in action – in the moment. And we need to reflect back on our actions, as Donald Schon once wrote. Blink alone can’t be the end of the story.

As well, reflection can help us uncover our hazy, subtle, potentially important intuitions, ensuring that we have more “data” – explicit and tacit – at our fingertips, says researcher Erik Dane. The Rice business school assistant professor is studying whether mindful attention can boost awareness of intuitive judgements. If you are highly attentive to changes in your inner and external environment, you’re likely more nimble and a better decision-maker, Dane is discovering in field studies.

If intuition was scorned as women’s work and rational reflection was revered as a male sport, perhaps we need a more androgynous approach to thought? Or at the very least, let’s start to appreciate that our decision-making is quite often a marriage of our own minds.

Just got back from the Business Marketing Association’s annual conference in Chicago, where I spoke on a general session panel entitled “The @Work State of Mind.” Rick Segal, president of the ad firm GyroHSR, moderated.

The boundaries between home and work are gone – that’s not news. But we’re still dealing with the fallout. At BMA, I noted that the division between these spheres was a short-lived Industrial Age experiment. Remember, the weekend and the vacation are recent (and fading) inventions.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re returning to an agrarian past. In the pre-Industrial past, the work-life blend stemmed from a restriction of human experience. People were rooted, and hewn to biological or cultural time flows. Now, work-life integration is due to an expansion of experience – a collapse of distance and a rush past the shackles of the clock. We’re free-floaters, for both better and worse.

We’re in constant “on” mode, a tempo that is inspiring and exhausting. Fellow panelist Eduardo Conrado, chief marketing officer at Motorola Solutions, told of being home, yet “snacking” on information all the time. A new study reports that 30 percent of mobile workers wake up at night to check email. (A blurring of sleep and wake?)

We’re having trouble finding the time and resources to pay attention deeply. Dalton Conley of NYU pointed out research showing that multitasking affects memory. When we juggle while trying to learn, we can’t recall the newly learned information deeply, and so cannot transfer this shallow learning to new situations. The opportunity is squandered.

Three-quarters of workers say they don’t have enough time with their children, even while studies show that parental time spent on childcare is at record highs. Why the disconnect? Multitasking. People feel time-starved, because they’re with their children, yet mentally away. As panelist Johnna Torsone, HR director at Pitney Bowes, pointed out, we have wonderful new ways to connect; she skypes with her West Coast grandson. But we can’t nurture deep relations without face time, and without at least sometimes preserving what I call the integrity of the moment. It’s essential to our humanity.

The implications for marketers? First, nurture ways to step in and out of the flow. Being immersed, hurried, interrupted and reactive is antithetical to deep thought and relations – and informed decision-making. Second, highlight stories. Narrative is more important than ever as essential form of meaning-making in a complex society. It’s a terra firma in this free-floating world. As Jerome Bruner notes, stories are mankind’s way of  wresting meaning from surprise – from the times when something went awry.

Gyro kindly bought 100 copies of Distracted as a giveaway. As I signed them, people expressed their concern again and again for their children’s future. A world without deep focus is untenable, and we know it.

I recently attended an intriguing dinner in Brooklyn Heights, initially set up to talk about the gift and burden of our longer lives.

The impetus was a visit by Jay Goldfarb, an American who runs a healing therapies retreat center in Switzerland. (As we nibbled on cheese and crackers, we talked about the last brown bear left in his part of the Alps.) Goldfarb recently created the Legacy of Wisdom project, an online compendium of video interviews with important thinkers from Mary Catherine Bateson to Ram Dass.

Goldfarb’s mission is age-old: preserving knowledge for future generations. But our new longevity now colors this quest. So many more of us will live to 80, 90 or 100 in good health. How can we collectively and individually harness the power of these added years? How can we ensure that the second half of life is meaningful, giving and “worthwhile” – by whatever definition we give to that term?

As I look around, I see many in my 50-something generation peering into the future, and seeing a frightening void, not a gift. They see a society that still does not value older minds. They feel economically insecure, and worry how they will support themselves with dignity during multiple future decades. Tackling these fears will be part of the challenge of cultivating the newly elongated second half of life.

The delicious grilled fish dinner was generously hosted by Mary and Tom Rothschild at their apartment overlooking the East River. As the founder of the non-profit Healthy Media Choices, Mary does pioneering work helping families, children and educators become more intentional about their use of media. Her husband Tom, a Quaker, is a mediation attorney who has written thoughtfully about the importance of silence.

Richard Lewis attended, too. He is a gentle poet and teacher whom I’ve long wanted to meet. Through his Touchstone Center, he’s spent decades helping children connect to their imaginations, through nature. We looked at one of the tiny seashells that Lewis uses in his work. Each child becomes a caretaker of this visitor from the sea; the shell is a jumping off point from which he/she can imagine worlds beyond their own. The essence of Lewis’ wide-ranging work, it seems to me, is reuniting children with a sense of possibility.

I didn’t take notes, but the memory of this dinner lingers. The hurried, pressured, test-driven nature of schooling today concerned us all.  Do children have time to daydream and play, spend time outdoors and chase a stray thought? Mary raised my use of the term “dark age” in the subtitle of Distracted, meaning an era that often is technologically inventive, but leads to cultural losses over time. I spoke of technology as potentially dehumanizing, and Jay pressed me to articulate what I meant. I responded that we are patterning ourselves after the machine, prizing point-and-click, easy answers and shallow communications. “We are not gadgets,” to paraphrase Jaron Lanier.

Into the evening, we talked about the astonishing scientific potential within our grasp. What could and should be passed on to future generations? What is wisdom? At one compelling point in the evening, Richard Lewis told us that his 18-year-old daughter recently had promised to carry on his decades-long work via the Touchstone Center.

A timely book inspired me to blog about this spring dinner. In Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Father Richard Rohr writes about finding our way in later life. In the first half, we are preoccupied with achievement and performance – and finding our identity. Later, we need to find the task within the task – to understand why we’re doing what we do. In particular, we grow by tapping our failings, a challenge that many people refuse to face. “We are a ‘first-half-of-life culture,’ largely concerned about surviving successfully,” he writes. His message originates in a Christian perspective, yet serves us all, I believe. Remember this, Rohr writes, “your second journey is yours to walk or to avoid.”

Let’s get walking. Are you game?

We’ve all heard of the distracted pilots who overshot the Minneapolis airport. But did you know that medical errors due to distraction place many people in danger every day?

A reader sent me a fascinating dispatch from the medical world on a series of San Francisco-area programs to reduce medical errors while nurses are dispensing medications. Nurses reduced their errors nearly 90 percent at nine Bay-area hospitals over the past year, and a key to the effort lay in new techniques to reduce distractions.

You can imagine what happens. Hospitals are busy places, with the level of care growing more complex by the day. A nurse dispensing medicine at bedside gets interrupted, mixes up one medicine for another, and the results can be fatal. Errors in administering medicine cause 400,000 preventable injuries in hospitals and $3.5 billion in extra medical costs annually, according to the Institute of Medicine.

The focus on distractions at Kaiser South San Francisco Medical Center began with orange vests – similar to those construction workers wear, according to an article in Nursezone, an online news site for the field. Quality-control nurses thought that wearing the vests as a kind of walking “do not disturb” sign could reduce interruptions during pill dispensing.

At first, floor nurses balked, seeing the vests as “cheesy” and “demeaning.” But first results showed that two units cut their errors in half in just four or five months simply by using the vests and educating nurses about reducing distractions.

The word spread throughout the hospital and across the Kaiser system, and a test of nine hospitals reduced medical dispensing distractions about 88 percent in the past year. The larger program includes many more safety steps from checking patient identity twice to turning up the lights and – my particular favorite – turning down the television. (I recall taking my then-two daughter to the dentist for the first time and watching amazed as the hygienist tried to give her a first brushing lesson with the tv blaring. Since then, I’ve always switch off the tv when a dentist or assistant come in the room.)

As a result of the intervention, giving medicines is “a more focused process,” says Suzi Kim, RN, BSN, and a staff nurse at Kaiser West Los Angeles hospital. Without interruptions, “we can think clearly.”

And if hospital staff can think clearly, perhaps they can do more to see and treat the whole human being. I hope so. As important as these anti-distraction programs are, procedures shouldn’t be the end of the story. While medical folks need to focus to do their work correctly and to problem-solve, they also need to restore focus to their interaction with the patient.

That’s the topic of my next blog, which will run tomorrow.

Months ago, Cali Williams Yost had a wish. In her FastCompany blog, she hoped that Distracted would start an attention movement similar to the new environmentalism sparked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And indeed, wherever I speak, people everywhere are asking, ‘where do we start? How do we regain our focus and spark the ‘renaissance of attention’ that you describe in your book?’

Well, that nascent movement just may be starting to pick up speed. Some signs:

 People are talking. There are debates and discussions everywhere about our crisis of distraction. At work, people are drilling down into the roots of overload. At home, parents aren’t smiling much anymore about their kids’ addiction to texting. A new study showing the inefficiencies of multitasking is inspiring heated debate. (See my previous post on the research.) This is important. It’s time to come together and focus on the problem. That’s how solutions get sown.

 People are acting.  A Seattle University communications professor recently held an innovative faculty workshop on the impact of distraction on student life. Professors everywhere are frustrated by a chronic lack of attention in the classroom. But organizer Mara Adelman coaxed the discussion beyond griping and finger-wagging.

At the workshop, faculty talked about setting up clear, firm rules on tech use in class and holding kids accountable – no attention, no recommendation. But faculty also did a lot of soul-searching, according to the wonderful website that Adelman set up to keep the momentum of the event going. They talked about collectively working through “technoquette” issues, role modeling focus in their lives, and reminding one another and students how opportunities for connection and conversation are lost amidst epidemic distraction. One faculty member wrote later, “I used to complain about distraction but never spent time to analyze this problem. This workshop made me sit down and find ways to control distraction in my personal life and in the classroom.”

This is exciting, and it’s not a one-off example. I’ve heard of others crafting training events based on my book and other resources. Add to this the uptick in both state and employer bans on driving distracted, and I see the makings of a 360-degree movement.

Write to me if you have ideas on how to move the process forward!

PS – Check out this great blog post by Andrea Saveri, one of my favorite thinkers, on multitasking and the often overly simplistic discussions that erupt when we debate about the impact of technology on our lives. Hear, hear!

No one likes to be called a baby, whether they are age five or 35. That’s one reason why recent comments by British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield that today’s technologies may be “infantilizing the brain” are inspiring heated debate – and plentiful misunderstanding. I don’t agree with all that she said about virtual social relations, but she’s right to raise these fears. Only through well-reasoned public discussion and careful research can we begin to understand the impact of digital life on our social relations and on our cognition. Recently, I was asked by the Neuronarrative blog to comment on the brouhaha:

What did she say? In a statement to the House of Lords and in interviews, Lady Greenfield first pointed out that our environment shapes our highly plastic brains, and so it’s plausible that long hours online can affect us. She’s right. “Background” television is linked to attention-deficient symptoms in toddlers. High stress impedes medical students’ mental flexibility. I agree that “living in two dimensions,” as she puts it, will affect us.

As a result of video games and Facebooking, are we acting like babies, living for the moment, developing shorter attention spans? Again, she’s right to worry. Facebook and video games aren’t passive. Yet much of digital life is reactive. We settle for push-button googled answers, immerse ourselves in “do-over” alternate realities, spend our days racing to keep up with Twitter, email and IM. This way of life doesn’t promote vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity – skills sorely needed in this era.

Consider this issue as an imbalance of attention. Humans need to stay tuned to their environment in order to survive. We actually get a little adrenaline jolt from new stimuli. But humans need to pursue their goals, whether that means locating dinner or hunting for a new job. By this measure, our digital selves may be our lower-order selves. As ADHD researcher Russell Barkley points out, people with the condition pursue immediate gratification, have trouble controlling themselves and are “more under the control of external events than of mental representations about time and the future.” He writes that ADHD is a disorder of “attention to the future and what one needs to do to prepare for its arrival.” Today, as we skitter across our days, jumping to respond to every beep and ping and ever-craving the new, are we doing a good job preparing for the future?

Finally, Lady Greenfield spoke about two types of social diffusion prevalent in digital living. First, she correctly points out that today’s fertile virtual connectivity has a dark side: it’s difficult to go deeply when one is juggling ever-more relationships. This is both common sense, and backed up by research showing that as social networks expand, visits and telephone calls drop, while email rises. Second, Lady Greenfield observed how virtuality distances us from the “messiness” and “unpredictability” of face-to-face conversations. In other words, digital communications can weaken the very fabric of social ties. As I wrote in my book Distracted, an increasingly virtual world risks downgrading the rich, complex synchronicity of human relations to paper-thin shadow play.

If it weren’t for the Net, I likely wouldn’t have found out about Lady Greenfield’s comments, nor been able to respond to them in this way. Yet going forward, we need to rediscover the value of digital gadgets as tools, rather than elevating them to social and cognitive panacea. Lady Greenfield is right: we need to grow up and take a more mature approach to our tech tools.

Addendum: SharpBrains.com recently published part two of my interview with them.