Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

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.

Slow is on my mind, as you’ll see from my last post.

I am writing the foreword to Christine Louise Hohlbaum’s new book, The Power of Slow, due out in November. And as part of my recent Boston Globe column on slow living, I talked to the wiseman of slow: Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slowness and more recently, Under Pressure, a book on the costs of hyper-parenting. Honoré writes about a complex, emotional subject with great clarity and vision; I especially like the way he dips back into history for perspective on our own trying times. He walks a fine line well – calling for change without waxing nostalgic. Honoré spoke from his home in London. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Q - How is the economic climate changing the climate for parenting?

   A - The economic crunch changes the landscape in lots of different ways. In recent years, we wound ourselves up in a kind of hysteria over children. Parenting had become a cross between a competition sport and a consumerist production. … Every human relationship became a transaction. One of the consequences was that we created a culture of almost stultifying perfection. Perfect teeth, perfect vacations, and you want a perfect child to round out the moment. …

    Now we’ve had this economic wake up call. … We’re at one of those rare times when the things that were untouchable and unquestionable are now up for grabs. One of the things that’s on the table is the culture of hyper-parenting. …  More and more people have realized that we’ve lost our bearings when it comes to children. Rising obesity, serious sports injuries at young ages, substance abuse, depression. Millions of kids get up to take a pill just to get through the day. If a society has to medicate children just to survive their childhood, I don’t think it’s the children’s fault.

      Q – Surely, this change isn’t easy. It’s not easy to cut back on busyness, to question what we believe in.

      A - There is a lot of pain out there. It can make people less willing to try to new things. [But] I feel optimistic. [Slow parenting] involves less money and less energy, less running around. It’s a simplification of things. … Now is a time to retrench and reset our family metronome.

   Q - Is there a downside to slow parenting?  

   A – When people talk about anything slow, slow food or whatever, what they mean is not doing everything at a snail’s pace. What ‘slow ‘means is doing everything at the right speed. There are times to be busy, rushing around, and there are times to change gears. If you can get close to your family’s natural tempo, what works best for you as a family, if a family can get to that rhythm - an enriching array of activities, but time and space for boredom, doing nothing - I find it hard to see disadvantages. Finding that correct tempo is not an easy thing to do. My family is sometime a bit too busy. What we’re talking bout here is relinquishing this addiction to perfection. That contributes to making the drumbeat of modern parenting one of anxiety.

     Q – Is this truly a lasting correction, or just a short-term backlash?

     A – The jury is still out. … But the pieces are there for it to be a real change. I could be wrong. I’m not an oracle.

Slow is hot. In recent years, movements have sprouted to explore slow food, slow art and slow family living. It’s a bit hard to fathom what exactly “slow” means in all these contexts. There’s a bit of pro-green living here, anti-materialism, mindful awareness, community-building, all of which loosely adds up to a slowing down in the tempo of life, or at least finding a speed other than high gear. The idea is hard to define, yet also hard to ignore at this moment in time, when so many complex, high-gear economic, medical, education and other systems seem broken.

Curious about the intersection between the recession and rise of slow, I recently interviewed families around Boston for my Globe column about whether their personal budget cuts had inspired slower living. The answer was a resounding yes. Some parents were already trying to simplify, by downshifting kid schedules or getting more eco-conscious, and job losses/pay cuts invigorated these efforts. Others had to cut spending fast, and were surprised by how good it felt to cut back on “must-have” activities, fancy vacations or even hired help. For these parents, slowing down meant depending on their own resourcefulness more than had for a long time. One mom gushed with pride at making her own laundry detergent.

It’s intriguing that for many families, slowing down means stepping “off the grid,” uncoupling from a dependence on complex consumer and cultural value systems. And according to anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter, a collective wish to go it alone is a sign that a complex civilization is crumbling. When highly evolved cultures begin to break down, citizens have little incentive to contribute to the society’s complex  systems and infrastructures. Cultivating one’s own vegetable patch becomes more alluring than buying from the big-box market. Could “slow” be a harbinger of a simplification writ large, aka a dark age? Dark ages are messy, difficult, times of cultural simplification - that are often followed by renaissances. It will be interesting to see where “slowing down” takes us now.

Note: This post first appeared on Boston College’s Work-Family Network, where I occasionally blog.  

Recently, I was asked a good question - why are we as a nation addicted to multitasking? - by Mike Hoyt, the editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this topic.

To preface, let’s just say that this topic couldn’t be more important now. A number of people have been pointing out the links between my book, with its sub-title flagging a dark age, and the economic mess we are in. An overdependence on our machinery as an outsourced brain, a tendency to undercut our powers of focus and attention, a yearning for the instant, push-button answer rather than the hard work of problem-solving - these are some of the reasons why we face such a deep, steep economic dive.

And then there’s the multitasking. Let’s take a look at the blind love of multitasking in our culture today.

First, I think that we can trace a line between our economic habits and culture and the legacy of Frederick W. Taylor, the great efficiency expert. His influence on global capitalism is still enormous. There’s a section in the book that gives detail, but in brief, he forced workers to chop up work into almost interchangable parts in order to make each piece of a task go faster. In turn, his influential teachings eviscerated the organic quality of craftsmanship and in many senses, turned people into machines, as Peter Drucker and others have noted.