Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

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!

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.

      “Are you listening?” cries the father character in Distracted, a play I saw last weekend in New York. “Name one friend of ours who really listens,” he demands of his wife.

      This fast-paced and often funny play focuses on a couple who are trying to decide whether to medicate their son, who’s been diagnosed with ADD. The play resembles a tv sitcom, with plentiful one-liners, quick-change staging and one-dimensional characters. There is the baffled mom wanting to do the right thing for her son; an angry, hyper dad who sees his son as just another rambunctious boy; an exhausted teacher; prescription-happy shrink, and on and on.

       But there are poignant moments, especially when the play raises questions that transcend the narrow issue of treatments and diagnoses. In these moments, the audience is brought face to face with the deeper costs of our scattershot focus and punctured togetherness. Then, we begin to see the mini-tragedies of mutual inattention that we experience and set in motion each day.

      The dad, for instance, is always hopping up and down, interrupting his wife, checking his pda and storming out of meetings with specialists. So it’s particularly powerful when he suddenly begins his lamentation about listening. Few of the characters truly listen to one another. They’re too busy pursing their own agendas. (How fitting that I sat in front of two couples who chatted to one another audibly throughout the play.)

     Like many people, I noticed a seeming decline in mutual listening in our society, but until I wrote about this skill in my Globe column, I underestimated its importance and complexity. Listening demands practice, patience and critical thinking. It is a learned skill, and a building block of good relations. “Listening is really the skill of being in the conversation, rather than being in your own conversation,” says Jim Bolton, who does corporate training in listening.

      We also can’t really consider how we listen, without thinking about our soundscapes. A new inter-disciplinary field of aural architecture has grown out of early acoustical engineering work. Barry Blesser and others in the field explore the aural aspects of physical spaces, including how they affect relationships. For example, consider how the hushed quiet of a church affects people’s interactions within. Or how television, jet engines and loudspeaker announcements affect the social environment of an airport. Soundscapes aren’t just a matter of volume control, just as listening isn’t simply an act of hearing.

     At the end of the play Distracted, the mom has an epiphany: if her son has an attention-deficit, perhaps he needs more of her attention.  In the closing scene, she and her husband quietly watch as her son dances to his favorite music. Playwright Lisa Loomer told the New York Times that she thought that this scene may be misinterpreted. But I think she got it right. Fractured, frazzled, absent attention is a modern syndrome that we can’t afford to ignore. 

Postscript: After finishing this post, a kind soul sent me a Guardian UK blogger’s piece defending her right to twitter at the theater. Sending Tweets during a show may be rude to the actors and audience, writes Ruth Jamieson, but “not twittering is so rude” to her followers. “They are my priority,” she writes. Remember neuroscientist Susan Greenfield’s controversial remarks about how social networking tools may be infantilizing us - promoting instant-gratification, impulsivity, short attention spans? 

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.