Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

Good news – our collective public discussions about technology may be maturing. I see evidence every day that we’re beginning to have nuanced, balanced discussions on distraction, overload and hyper-connectivity. Exhibit A: see the article in today’s NY Times, “Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price.”

As Carolyn Marvin wrote in her classic book When Old Technologies Were New, public conversations around new technologies are first dominated by the engineers and marketers who brought these inventions into being. In other words, the geeks rule. This occurred in the age of the telephone and light bulb, and it’s been true in recent decades. That’s one reason why I was determined in the 1990s to begin to write about the social impact of technology on humanity. Non-technologists deserve a place at the table as we shape our relationship with the Machine. I’m not a Luddite simply if I’m skeptical about technology.

To Matt Richtel’s good article, I’d add a couple of points. First, in different eras in history, societies prize specific types of attention. In the Industrial Age, people began to venerate rigid, unbending focus. “Pay attention” became the mantra, because humans needed to adapt to bureaucratic and mechanized ways of living and working in schools, offices and even at home. The life of the farmer or craftsman – with free-flowing schedules and human-centric rhythms – was receding. Instead, people lived to the pace of the clock, the bell and the machine.

Recently, the pendulum has swung the other way. We have been worshipping split-focus, multitasking and other time-splicing. We’ve been trying to supercede the fetters of both biology (sleep, rest) and the clock (agenda, schedules) by multitasking – by layering time. And so we’ve deluded ourselves into believing that splitting our focus – distraction - is the new ticket to efficiency.

Can we discover the middle ground? We need to multitask, skim and split our focus in order to deal with the oceans of possibility at our fingertips via the web. We also need rigid focus – aka concentration – in order to go deeply in problem-solving and relations. But let’s start thinking of these various types of attention as options, as arrows in our quiver, rather than as zero-sum, winning-or-losing cognitive styles.

Last week, I wrote about Ellen Galinsky’s important new book , Mind in the Making, on the seven life skills that every child needs today. Recently, I caught up with Galinsky and asked a bit more about the book’s genesis and her views on learning. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

MJ – What vision of learning did you have for the book?

EG - We’re born engaged in learning, because it’s basically a survival skill. If we couldn’t figure out the world, we wouldn’t survive. For a long time, we’ve understood learning as the acquisition of content and facts. More recently, there’s been a push for learning skills that will help young people when they reach the workforce. In writing the book, I was particularly interested in the kinds of learning that can help children now and will also help them in the future. I thought a lot about moving from a 20^th-century to a 21^st-century view of learning. We get stuck in an either/or situation: either content, or skills. To me, the point is, it has to be both.

MJ – In what other ways are you trying to broaden our definitions of learning?

EG - When parents are asked what they want for their children, most say they want them to be caring, contributing people who have meaningful lives. They don’t want them just to become successful in academics (which of course is important, too). The skills I’m writing about are for a well- rounded person, not just a one-size-fits-all person. A person on Twitter wrote me that the reason she likes the book is that: “Your message is clear: The self-motivated, independent children who are resourceful and know how to cooperate are our future.”

MJ – It seems to me that the seven skills you’ve highlighted are also fairly low-tech, and I love that about the book. They’re based on simple, everyday activities that any parent can inspire and guide.

EG – I remember meeting a low-income parent who said that she wants the same things for her child as a rich parent can give their children. In writing the book, it was important to me that whatever I was suggesting be something that any parent could use for children of any age. Often it is the simple things done differently – “simon says” played the opposite way – that promote learning. I will be appalled if people take this and make stuff that parents have to buy. Of course, it’s the job of marketing and product developers to find things to sell us. But we’ve been promised quick fixes with Baby Einstein or Brainy Bay: “do this, and then you will have a child who’s a genius.” We’ve been through that, and hopefully we’ve learned from that. Learning should be fun. If it’s just drill and practice for your 2 year old, that’s not good. I used to watch in horror as a friend drilled her baby: “This is a lesson about balls.” As I watched, I was thinking, “Just let him explore the ball. Ask him questions that promote his interest.” What I found consistently is that children are born with all the right equipment to gain knowledge. They have what I call in the book an object sense, a numbers sense, a people sense. The brain is wired to understand knowledge in specific ways.

MJ – How have our views on childhood changed in regards to learning? We used to have a Lockean view of children, that they are a “tabula rasa” or blank slate, needing to be filled with facts. Or we had a perspective inspired by the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that children are naturally gifted with curiosity and other traits that become devalued by schooling. Where are we now in our views of children?

EG – We have had a burst in knowledge about child development, particularly with neuroscience and with the ability to study children’s learning from many different disciplines. This knowledge has taken us beyond the “tabula rasa” or “put them in the sun, and water them and they’ll grow” viewpoints. There are no genetic expressions without experience, nor vice versa. For example, we used to think there are nine different types of temperament, and children are born with one of them. Now the latest thinking on temperament is that children vary in terms of how they react to new experiences, and how they regulate their responses. It’s much more of a process than a personality type. We also now know that children’s brains are wired in ways that enable them to grasp complicated knowledge. For example, work by Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin shows that babies have the ability to grasp which sounds in their language or languages go together. It is a process of detecting patterns in what she calls a “sea of sound.” But we have to build on this knowledge to promote the learning of life skills and content.

MJ- The idea that learning opportunities are all around us, every minute of the day is both inspiring and perhaps daunting to parents today who are so anxious about raising children the “right way.” What would you say about today’s anxious parents?

EG – There are so many people who criticize parents about their desire to do the right thing. As parents we’ve always started out wanting to be perfect and that probably is a good thing. We then realize we have to be good enough. I have studied parental growth and development and think that that needs to be understood by all those who write about parents – and by parents ourselves. When we reach the ‘good enough’ stage, we tend to relax and enjoy the process more.

MJ - What surprised you as you researched and wrote the book?

EG – Although I have an extensive background in child development and its research, creating this book felt like such a learning adventure. That to me was the biggest challenge of the book: to capture in words the mystery, the excitement, the wrong turns researchers made, to tell the story of researchers as people. That’s why I told the story of Dan Stern, who became a baby researcher because, as a toddler himself who could speak only Czech, he spent months in an English-speaking hospital, where he learned to watch behavior, since he didn’t understand language.

When I was getting ready to start to write a chapter, I would immerse myself in reading the interviews I had done with researchers. I would immerse myself in the research, then I’d go find out things I didn’t know. Then I would put it all aside and write the story I was discovering as an outline. As I was writing the outline, I was seeing so many new connections. Those connections always surprised and delighted me.

Ellen Galinsky’s new book isn’t for the faint-of-heart. Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs is inspiring, even joyful, and an essential handbook for any parent. But it’s provocative. In essentially teaching adults how to instill a love of learning in children, Galinsky also may change how we see learning - for the better.

Consider the seven skills that Galinsky chooses: focus, perspective-taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges and self-directed learning. These essential and complex skills are a far cry from the reading, writing and arithmetic goals and drills that still dominate teach-to-the-test schools. They’re also a gentle, crucial reminder of the importance of “upgrading the human” in a world mesmerized by computational, tech-driven and store-bought lessons. Finally, as Galinsky notes, these seven skills are capabilities for lifelong learning.

“These skills are not only important for children; we as adults need them just as much as children do,” she writes. “And, in fact, we have to practice them ourselves to promote them in our children.”

That true of perspective taking. We teach children etiquette and problem-solving, even discussion and debate. But rarely do we help kids learn how to understand the perspectives of others, despite the importance of this skill to social relations, school learning, and even a child’s sense of security. After all, understanding how other people operate helps you get along with peers, parents, teachers and later with bosses. It’s the starting point of lifelong “emotional intelligence.”

By highlighting the work of top researchers, Galinsky shows how parents can teach perspective-taking, and how infants and toddlers are astonishingly ready to learn. Even 6-month-olds have a rough sense of others’ goals and intentions, and 18-month-olds understand that people can have different tastes than they do. Cultivating this nascent skill can be simple: the kids of parents who talk about people’s feelings more, have better perspective-taking skills.

Galinsky isn’t the first to begin thinking about new literacies for the digital age. I recently discovered the important work of Guy Claxton, a UK professor who argues that we have to prepare students for lifelong learning by teaching them dispositions – such as curiosity, courage or reflection.

Or consider the words of the new Rhode Island School of Design president, digital designer John Maeda: “I sense a real shift going on in the world from the global and technological back to the local, the human and the authentic. … Policymakers and employers should take note: the power of the visual, the tactile, the nonlinear – of the artful, open-minded thinking – is something that we can no longer afford to discount.”

These important thinkers all understand that “how” we learn is as crucial as “what” we learn. And the impact of this change in mindset is enormous, as Galinsky’s compilation of research shows repeatedly. Focus can predict literacy, vocabulary and math skills in preschoolers. Rich, idea-laden talk between parents and children is correlated with higher IQ at age three. Motivated learners see setbacks as chances to try harder or use different strategies. They don’t “wilt” in the face of challenges.

Again and again, I was surprised and delighted by these and other research findings in Mind in the Making. They underscore the growing realization today that babies and children are highly capable creatures, ready and eager to learn. As Galinsky teaches us, we all need to be their partners in learning.

Next Post: A Q and A with Ellen Galinsky

“Information becomes a distraction, a diversion… ” With those few words, President Obama recently created a stir about technology’s effect on our lives.

During his commencement speech at Hampton University, Obama said: You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments – some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and IPads and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. … We can’t stop these changes, but we can channel them, we can shape them, we can adapt to them.”

Bloggers lambasted the president as a “technophobic old fogy” and implied hypocrite for critiquing the very gadgets that were used to propel him to office. But many technorati were so shocked by his seeming criticism of the gadgetry that they missed the president’s important points about our 24/7 media environment. (And perhaps some of the grads missed these points, too, given that at least a few right behind him on the podium were texting during his remarks. Check it out on YouTube.)

First, was he really criticizing iPads? No, he wasn’t singling out gadgets or calling them “bad” or “good.” He was citing the tools that bit by byte in total create an escapable 24/7 info flow that often distracts us from what’s important in life. Luddite? No, Obama was taking an important, needed stand on a trend that, as he said, puts “new pressure on our country and on our democracy.” Simply put, deluges of accessible info don’t automatically produce good thinking. Tech-fluency doesn’t always equate with the ability to create knowledge. We are mistaken if we think that simply having the tools and the access to information will put our country and our young ahead in coming years.

Why? First, being barraged by info makes people “check out” – they are literally paralyzed by choice. That’s been proven again and again in psych studies. This is one reason why whatever pops up first on Google is “good enough” for many of us. One small but in-depth study by the Associated Press found that consumers 18-34 were “snacking on the news,” unable to go beyond barrage of daily sound bites and headlines – despite a hunger for a deeper understanding of current events.

Second, ease of access is not an end point. To read or research or think critically involves discomfort – confusion, uncertainty, effort. And those are precisely the kinds of states of mind that are devalued in today’s point and click world. When we’re literally enveloped in information, it’s easy to become sated with what comes easily. And it’s easy to gravitate to the fluff – the celebrity or self-help trivia that diverts us from learning how to green the earth or battle racism. Obama was correct: info-tainment is the new soma.

Finally, the info-stream can’t help us, if we can barely pay attention. It’s important to remember that the personal context of our information-gathering is splintered, fractured and hence, corrosive to learning. We rarely pay attention to one thing, so it’s no wonder we can’t separate the wheat from the chaff in the info-floods. The students texting behind Obama’s back are a sad emblem of our inability to focus on the thorniest problems of our day - and on each other.

I’m not trying to pick on students in general; most that day were obviously riveted and engaged. Besides, haven’t we always tuned out when we’re tired or bored? Absolutely. Haven’t students always passed notes or whispered during lectures? Of course. We didn’t invent inattention in 2010.

But watch the texters listen to Obama – laughing as he made a serious point, eyes glazed over as he spoke of the pressures facing educators and students in the 21^st century. Perhaps you’ll wonder, as I did, if a student – whatever his or her political affiliation - can’t sit on a podium with the U.S. president and fully attend to 20-minute remarks, then what can capture that student’s uninterrupted attention? They may even have been texting or tweeting about the speech. But that still adds up to split-focus – a diminishing of the attention needed to fully digest his words.

If the real-time, in-the-flesh president is a distraction, then perhaps our addiction to technology is threatening – not just pressuring - our democracy.

A plethora of great soon-to-be-published books have just crossed my desk, and I’m determined to read and blog about them soon - from Ellen Galinsky’s Mind in the Making to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Hats off to them for their great work, now and in the past. More later.

But tonight I’m quickly giving a little airtime to a little known academic study from about 40 years ago: Roger Hart’s Children’s Experience of Place.

Hart spent two years in a small New England town, following around children as they built forts in their backyards, fished at the local river, explored, bicycled, roamed and wandered. It seems amazing that his depictions of life not that long ago seem worlds away from the indoors-centric, cyber-dominant, car-oriented lives of our kids today.

Hart has some wonderful observations.

- “Small patches of dirt throughout the town are the most intensively used of all children’s places.”

- “It is notable that the most important qualities to the children of this town - sand/dirt, small shallow ponds or brooks of water, slight elevations of topography, low trees and bushes, and tall unmanicured grass - are systematically removed from all new residential areas, even the highly applauded new towns”

- Children like to find small places, as “places of retreat, to look out upon the world from a place of one’s own, as places for experimenting with how to put things together… In each of these activities a child is probably exploring his or her relationship with the environment, both social and physical.”

“The large amount of time spent by children deeply involved in modelling the environment in micro-scale” — i.e. building forts or houses out of tree branches and found items or tracing towns and cities in the dirt or sand  – “is one demonstration of their desire to give order and meaning to the larger environment which lies beyond their physical grasp.”

Today, I’ve heard it argued that the Net is kids’ backyard. This is a space for a thin kind of social connectivity, and for exploring worlds largely of adults’ imaginations. But the virtual isn’t a space for coming to grips with one’s own place in the physical world, or for exploring the planet earth.

Consider that natural spaces - even a walk in the park - diminish symptoms of ADHD and improve focus in children even without attention deficiencies. Consider that kids in an age of alarming obesity are spending just 30 minutes of unstructured time outdoors - a week! Consider that kids today are living under a kind of house arrest, unable to walk to school, play outdoors, explore their own communities.

That’s quite a contrast to the world that Roger Hart found in a small New England town.

Hats off to people like Lenore Skenazy and Richard Louv who are fighting to get kids back outside.

It’s dark, cold and the headlines are gloomy. Perhaps that’s why I can’t seem to pick up a paper or magazine without seeing an article about happiness.

Pointing out that employee satisfaction is hitting record lows, the Wall Street Journal visits with corporate consultants who advise gratitude and meditation to dig ourselves out of the doldrums. New York magazine lists 50 steps to “simple happiness” – whatever that is. (No. 10 – offer to help a person with a stroller up a set of stairs – a very New York moment of unhappiness for parents.)

As you can tell from these examples, the emphasis of most happiness “treatments” today seems to be the quick-fix. Get a massage, change your thinking, write thank you emails. It’s happiness in a hurry. Or is it? As I wrote in a guest blog for Gretchen Rubin’s Slate column, “simple things make me content.” And simple things – a nice cup of tea or a chat with a friend – do make humans happy. After all, small moments and actions are the threads that make up the fabric of our lives.

That’s one clear take-away from Rubin’s new book, The Happiness Project, which came out last month. Rubin spent a year trying out all sorts of resolutions to improve her vitality, marriage, parenting, friendships and more. And as she studied happiness, she found that often the small steps had a big effect. A small treat, not a river of splurges, is the trick.

Even the study of happiness isn’t writ large, so to speak, Rubin notes to her surprise. “I often learn more from one person’s highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies,” she writes. In sum, the specifics work. Don’t lose the trees for the forest, you could say. That’s a satisfying morsel of news.

I often talk to groups about the costs of distraction. I speak about problem-solving, information overload, engagement, fragmented “presence,” and our deep-seated need for rich, complex social interaction. And intriguingly, what people wind up discussing most is the social cost of distraction. High-level bankers, corporate executives, educators and parents alike viscerally lament an era when we’re more often connected to a machine than to a human.

That’s why a recent New York Times article about attention and medical errors in hospitals caught my eye.

Just last week I blogged about medical errors due to distraction, and how California hospital nurses are taking steps to reduce interruptions during the dispensing of medicine. The Times article by a San Diego physician provides a perfect follow-on, in discussing how growing procedural efforts to reduce errors in work sometimes lead the profession to overlook their duty to attend to the patient.

Dr. Dena Rifkin begins the article with a compelling story of saving a young woman’s life simply by listening closely and spotting symptoms that her doctors had missed. She also tells of being present when a close family member was treated in a cursory and hurried fashion that missed important clues to his real condition.

Rifkin links these alarming stories to a “fundamental problem” of healthcare today: “a change in focus from treating the patient toward satisfying the system.” Doctors attend to “benchmarks and check boxes,” more than to the sick human. A patient’s treatment can meet “all the current standards for quality care” yet offer “an utter lack of human attention.”

“As a profession, we are paying attention to the details of medical errors – ambiguous charts abbreviations, to vaccination practices and hand-washing and many other important, or at least quantifiable, matters,” writes Rifkin.

“But as we bustle from one-documented chart to the next, no one is counting whether we are still paying attention to the human beings,” she writes. “The best source of information, the best protection from medical error, the best opportunity to make a difference” are the patients, she writes. “We must remember the unquantifiable value of asking the right questions.”

Well said. Whether we are pilots or nurses, doctors or parents, bankers or students, we need to step back and re-examine our relationship to the machine. A life that is foremost computational, quantifiable and clock-driven is dehumanizing. In sickness and in health, we should be restoring our machines to their rightful places as tools, not looking to them as panaceas.

The word panacea derives from the Greek for “all-healing.” But that’s what machines are not.

Interesting tidbit of news with possibly large implications.

BBC Radio contacted me last night asking for my comment on the news that Denmark is allowing top students to take university entrance exams with Internet access. Apparently, the government argues that facts and figures are culled from the Net anyway, not memorized, and the real point of exams is to test reasoning.

Certainly, this experiment isn’t surprising in an age when memory is a little-valued tool. As Plato predicted long ago, writing will spell the death of memorization. Oral cultures live and die by the strength of memory, but the written - then printed, and finally digital - Word made memory superfluous. We can look something up in the portable, accessible info-stores at hand.

Should we miss memory? It wasn’t all that long ago that schooling was still built on a bedrock of memorization, and that texts were known so deeply that they arguably became a part of the reader. We’ve moved away from an oral culture more recently than we might imagine.

I don’t think we should overly worship memory  - the committing to heart of epic poetry by schoolchildren etc. I’m not nostalgic for the day when schoolwork meant memorization, to the detriment of critical thinking. Still, to increasingly depend on a machine to do your thinking, computing and remembering risks, in my view, diminishing, not extending, our capabilities.

A second drawback to Net access during exams is that it’s likely to undercut any test of reasoning through sheer distractability. Even a brief visit to the boundaryless Net too often becomes an extended series of digressions, a journey conducive to “power-bouncing” across a sea of data. The temporal lipping back and forth between Net and exam further could interrupt the analytical thinking that we hope takes place during an exam.

  The argument that kids already multitask their way through their studies holds little merit for me. We need more deep focus and analysis not less, if we are to raise thinking beings in a complex age.

It’s late, and I’m flying to the Midwest tomorrow, so this will be short. But I want to chime in a bit on a new, small but important research study out of Stanford this week. There are already a number of media outlets writing about the study, which in a nutshell indicates that heavy multitaskers aren’t doing their juggling all that well. This is important. While we’ve seen a tremendous body of research showing that most multitasking is inefficient and error-prone, somehow there’s always been an assumption by many that heavy multitaskers can “do it” well. And that doesn’t appear to be true. Practice does help a little. For instance, air traffic controllers can scan a screen and juggle flights better than laypeople. But heavy multitasking doesn’t help boost focus or thinking skills, at least according to this study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by veteran researcher Clifford Nass and colleagues.

When asked to do simple task-switching in a lab setting, students who were heavy media multitaskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant data, and even did a lousy job of remembering what they were supposed to be doing. Wow. “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,” said researcher Eyal Ophir in a Stanford press release. ”The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.”

Sure, lab experiments aren’t the end of the story. But the study - which I’ve read in the original - clearly shows that heavy multitaskers are deficient in voluntary cognitive control while trying to perform simple task-switching. In other words, they are poor at controlling their focus, and “suckers for irrelevancy,” as Clifford Nass attests. That’s a disturbing finding, whatever cognitive benefits we may later discover in multitasking.

Certainly, attention is so all-encompassing and so crucial to our survival that we’re often not aware, so to speak, of how much information we’re processing in our environment and within what William James called our “stream of consciousness.” We are in many senses born interrupt-driven; to survive we have to be ever-alert to new stimuli in our environment. (And work by Jonathan Schooler indicates that mind-wandering may be good for creativity.) But at the same time, effortful attention, along with working memory, are keys to pursuing our goals. If we can’t sort out the irrelevant in a simple brief lab task, chances are we’re not doing such a great job in the wider, complex world. (And given the plasticity of our brains, it’s not unimaginable that heavy multitasking does shape and even undermine our ability to focus deeply, evaluate and assess the information around us.)

 Drinking from the fire hose of media today may have its benefits, just as videogaming has been found to boost some types of visual attention. But let’s keep the big picture in mind. If we sacrifice cognitive control in the name of high-speed, reactive, distracted living, then the costs of multitasking will be steep indeed.

 In “Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration,” John Tierney asks  “is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction” and quotes author Winifred Gallagher as advising ear plugs, as one protection from distractions.

   But that’s the wrong question to be asking – and ultimately a counterproductive response - as we search for ways to protect our focus in the digital age.

    By arming ourselves with ear plugs, iPods and noise-cancelling headphones (yes, people wear these at work now), we’re essentially creating an arms race of self-defense systems against the noise and interruptions of others. With our gadgets, we’re erecting fiefdoms of quiet that we scramble to make impenetrable against the incursions of others.

     There are two chilling implications of this trend. First, by doing so, we are effectively giving up on notions of mutual respect for shared public spaces. The onus is now on you to create your own bubble of focus, rather than on another to respect your right to quiet.  I sense that this is why, in the libraries where I write and research, so many people increasingly chat on their cell phones, and are angry when a librarian or fellow patron asks them to disconnect. There is no sense of mutual responsibility for maintaining a collective space.

    Second, when we barricade ourselves so eagerly against distractions, we’re losing opportunities for the serendipitous encounters that are at the heart of public life, especially in cities. In order to relate to others, we need to have a “disposition to be vulnerable to others,” says UCLA linguistic anthropologist and MacArthur fellow Elinor Ochs. When we are eternally plugged in and connected elsewhere – even at home, we lose our willingness to take a chance on interacting with others.

     There are times to tune out the world, of course, but a much better way to pushback on our climate of distraction is to find ways to respect one another’s right to focus, as well as to strengthen our own skills of attention. No ear plugs can do that.