How the Omnipresent Cellphone Trains Our Brains to be Distracted

Do you feel like it is difficult to pay attention to just one thing for a long time? Joe Kraus puts his finger on the problem in the following video (be sure to watch the first minute or so, there is a hilarious commercial from Microsoft at the front end of Kraus’ presentation):

There are some very insightful comments in this video. You can read the transcript here, but I thought I would highlight some of the best moments:

Kraus tells us that our culture of distraction–driven largely by the omnipresence of the mobile phone–is pushing away from attention toward distraction. Carrying a cell phone is a lifestyle choice for distraction.

I’d argue that what’s happening is that we’re becoming like the mal-formed weight lifter who trains only their upper body and has tiny little legs. We’re radically over-developing the parts of quick thinking, distractable brain and letting the long-form-thinking, creative, contemplative, solitude-seeking, thought-consolidating pieces of our brain atrophy by not using them.

The result of carrying a cell phone is that we now feel anxious if we have nothing to do. In my previous post I pointed to research which calls this “arousal addiction.” Instead of letting ourselves enjoy a quiet moment to reflect, pray, or just be, we quickly pull out our cell phones. The bad part about this is that filling every quite gap in our day with stimuli is a choice against creativity. Creativity requires boredom. Don’t believe me? Consider:

Where’s the #1 reported place where people get insight? The shower. Why the shower? In the shower, there’s not much else to do. We’re relaxed. Our mind wanders but it’s not constantly being bombarded with new information (at least until we can take our phones in the shower which I’m sure is being worked on…). The shower time is GAP time. Time for our minds to make subtle connections and insights. Creativity REQUIRES gap time.

Gaps used to happen all the time. Now they’re disappearing. You’re eating lunch with a friend and they excuse themselves to the restroom. A gap. Now, you pull our your phone because being unstimulated makes you feel anxious. Waiting time in a line at the bank? Used to be a gap. Now it’s an opportunity to send an email or a text.

We didn’t think gap time and “boredom” were valuable. Now that we’re losing it, we get a sense of just how valuable it was.

Simply put, at the heart of creativity, insight, imagination and humaneness is an ability to pay attention to ANYTHING – our ideas, our line of thinking, each other. And that is what’s most threatened.

Have you built intentional gap times into your days or week? Kraus makes two major recommendations to help us train the rest of our brains:

1. Take a weekly sabbath from technology. There seems to be a growing awareness of the need for this in our culture today. I love how its a not-so-subtle reminder of Scriptural principles.
2. “ACTIVELY TRAIN your long-form attention and mindfullness. For some that means leaving the phone and going for a 15 minute walk. For others it means meditating. For others it means attending church or temple. Whatever form it takes, make it a DAILY practice of slowing down. Train that part of your brain.”

In light of his advice, I can’t stop thinking about how tablets and phones are designed to be devices of distraction and how this affects our approach to spiritual disciplines. Let’s encourage our young people to turn off their phones and read Scripture from a book (see my post on this topic)!

Related Articles:

• Is There Value in Boredom? (joshchalmers.wordpress.com)
• Do Cell Phone Change What it Means to be Human?  ( joshchalmers.wordpress.com)
• Tablets Are Destroying Stories (Micah Baldwin – learntoduck.com)

Lost Cell Phone Statistics

Have you ever lost your cell phone? If you haven’t yet, its likely you will, since each day 7 million dollars worth of cell phones are lost globally.

According to Symantec’s Lost Cell Phone Study about half of lost cell phones will be returned to their owners, but not before private data is violated. Wouldn’t it be helpful if we could just build them into our brains already?

The following infographic provides a load of interesting statistics regarding “The World of Lost Smartphones.”  

A Healthy Technological Home

John Dyer, author of From the Garden to the City has an excellent blog post on how to create a healthy technology atmosphere in your home.

The idea is to put a technology basket by the door where everyone dumps their tech for a set amount of time every evening.

Read the full article here:  Why You Need a Technology Basket at Home

Digital Brains: Offloading Memory to Our Devices

Have you heard of nomophobia yet? It is “the fear of being without your cellphone.” From Wiki,  it comes from “no-mobile.” People are so addicted to their cellphones that at least one counseling site actually lists it as a new phobia.

 

Whether you know someone who could be described as a nomophob or not, the fact that the word even exists should help us  understand why a recent study has concluded that “we are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools.”

Our brains are becoming hybrids with our computers. We are offloading so many of our thought processes to our digital devices that we barely have the capacity to remember certain things anymore.

The study concludes: “The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows.” Without Google I can rack my brain for hours trying to figure out where I read that certain bit of essential trivia!

An article called “Dumbed-Down Dialing” from the New York Times reports that many cellphone users don’t use phone numbers anymore since they simply look up names instead. If you read the article you will discover a oh-so-sad story about a young man who lost his cell phone at the beach and was stranded because he couldn’t remember his girlfriend’s number. I guess this explains why there is a need for a word like nomophobia.

Every new tech brings a trade-off. With the cell phone we trade off the opportunity to practice dialing phone numbers, and as the Times reports, it is the act of rehearsal that locks in long-term memory. Before digital address books “you might be exposed to a phone number hundreds of times. But now you just look it up. Technology has taken that rehearsal process away from us.” Is this bad? Not until you are stranded at the beach!

Related articles

• Are You A Nomophobe? (q104.radio.com)
• Are you nomophobic? (daniweb.com)