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Book Summary & Highlights: The Distracted Mind By Adam Gazzaley & Larry Rosen

Book Summary & Highlights: The Distracted Mind By Adam Gazzaley & Larry Rosen

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Pub Date:

2016

Amazon Summary

Most of us will freely admit that we are obsessed with our devices. We pride ourselves on our ability to multitask—read work email, reply to a text, check Facebook, watch a video clip. Talk on the phone, send a text, drive a car. Enjoy family dinner with a glowing smartphone next to our plates. We can do it all, 24/7! Never mind the errors in the email, the near-miss on the road, and the unheard conversation at the table. In The Distracted Mind, Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen—a neuroscientist and a psychologist—explain why our brains aren't built for multitasking, and suggest better ways to live in a high-tech world without giving up our modern technology.

The authors explain that our brains are limited in their ability to pay attention. We don't really multitask but rather switch rapidly between tasks. Distractions and interruptions, often technology-related—referred to by the authors as “interference”—collide with our goal-setting abilities. We want to finish this paper/spreadsheet/sentence, but our phone signals an incoming message and we drop everything. Even without an alert, we decide that we “must” check in on social media immediately.

Gazzaley and Rosen offer practical strategies, backed by science, to fight distraction. We can change our brains with meditation, video games, and physical exercise; we can change our behavior by planning our accessibility and recognizing our anxiety about being out of touch even briefly. They don't suggest that we give up our devices, but that we use them in a more balanced way.

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Big Ideas

Goal Interference

Goal interference occurs when you reach a decision to accomplish a specific goal (e.g., retrieve something from the refrigerator, complete a work assignment, engage in a conversation, drive your car), and something takes place to hinder the successful completion of that goal. The interference can either be generated internally, presenting as thoughts within your mind, or generated externally, by sensory stimuli such as restaurant chatter, beeps, vibrations, or flashing visual displays. Goal interference, originating from either your internal or external environments (often both), can occur in two distinct varieties—distractions and interruptions—based on your decision about how you manage the interference.
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Distractions are pieces of goal-irrelevant information that we either encounter in our external surroundings or generate internally within our own minds. Distractions are pieces of goal-irrelevant information that we either encounter in our external surroundings or generate internally within our own minds.
The difference from distractions is that interruptions happen when you make a decision to concurrently engage in more than one task at the same time, and even if you attempt to switch rapidly between them.

Power Of The Pause Between Stimulus And Response

“As described, brain evolution led to the insertion of a critical time delay that disrupts the reflexive nature of the perception-action cycle so that the neural processes that underlie goal setting—evaluation and decision making—may be engaged. This extraordinarily important pause in the cycle disrupts our reflexive responses to environmental stimuli, allowing us to generate top-down goals. These goals exert influence over both our perceptions and actions, which compete with those powerful bottom-up forces. But setting goals is not enough to affect our lives and the world around us; we need to enact our goals. The mediators of our top-down goals comprise another amazing collection of abilities that fall under the umbrella of cognitive control. This includes three major faculties: (1) attention, (2) working memory; and (3) goal management, each consisting of subcomponent processes. It is this battery of cognitive control abilities that allows us to interact in our complex world in a dynamic and goal-oriented manner. And with varying degrees of success, it is what allows us to resist the negative impact of goal interference. To understand the essence of the Distracted Mind, we need to carefully dissect these core abilities of our mind and appreciate their strengths and limitations.”

Marginal Value Theorom

“In chapter 1, we introduced the marginal value theorem (MVT), which has been used for decades to explain why, how, and when animals take the time and energy to travel to a new patch with additional food, rather than gather dwindling food resources from their current patch. In its simplest form, the MVT explains the cost-benefit relationship of remaining in a good patch versus moving to a new patch, with an animal’s drive to survive as the instinctive force to accumulate resources. An animal’s ability to find nourishment by spending an ‘optimal time’ at one source before traveling to another is a critical factor in its survival. ... We propose that a human information foraging model, and specifically the MVT, can also be used to explain why we media multitask so avariciously. It may explain, for example, why we choose to: (1) stop working on a document we are reading online to check our smartphone for an incoming alert, (2) open a new tab to search for additional information on an unrelated topic, and (3) decide we need to text a friend to arrange an evening out, all before returning to our document. And then we are faced with having to remember where we were and rebuild the mental representation of the material in the document.”

Value Of Metacognition On Info Overwhelm

“On top of the direct impact of changes in anxiety, boredom, and accessibility induced by modern technology on the Distracted Mind, there also seems to be an important role played by poor introspection into our own minds and its vulnerabilities and how this may affect our performance. This lack of metacognition—awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes—impacts the MVT model in two ways. On the right side: not understanding the benefits of remaining in an information patch and not appreciating our internal states of anxiety and boredom. On the left side: not accurately evaluating the consequences of moving to a new patch, that is, a lack of understanding of the performance costs of multitasking and task switching. Many people believe that we are most productive if we spend ‘just a few moments’ dealing with that incoming message or searching for that tidbit of information, rather than sustaining our attention on a task, and resisting distractions and the allure of interruptions. As described in previous chapters, this belief is misguided and causes countless problems both in terms of productivity and in preserving our physical and mental health. The truth is that we are mostly oblivious to the toll that constant task switching generates. We convince ourselves that we can handle it b/c we mistakenly believe that we possess a brain that is built for multitasking; or, b/c we do it all the time, we feel that we must have become really good at it.”

Contents

Highlights

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At our core we are information-seeking creatures.

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We have come to believe that the human brain is a master navigator of the river of information that rages steadily all around us. And yet we often feel challenged when trying to fulfill even fairly simple goals. This is the result of interference—both distractions from irrelevant information and interruptions by our attempts to simultaneously pursue multiple goals.
Goal interference occurs when you reach a decision to accomplish a specific goal (e.g., retrieve something from the refrigerator, complete a work assignment, engage in a conversation, drive your car) and something takes place to hinder the successful completion of that goal.
Distractions are pieces of goal-irrelevant information that we either encounter in our external surroundings or generate internally within our own minds. Distractions are pieces of goal-irrelevant information that we either encounter in our external surroundings or generate internally within our own minds.
The difference from distractions is that interruptions happen when you make a decision to concurrently engage in more than one task at the same time, and even if you attempt to switch rapidly between them.
Interruptions such as these are often referred to as “multitasking,” defined as the act of attempting to engage simultaneously in two or more tasks that have independent goals. The word “attempting” is used here because, as you will see later in the book, multitasking may be the behavior you decide to engage in, but when it comes to what actually occurs in your brain, the term “task switching” is a better description. Interestingly, the actual content of goal interference can be the same for distractions and interruptions. In our example, thoughts of your boss’s impression of your work quality were the source of interference for both internal distraction and interruption, and an overheard conversation was the source of both external distraction and interruption. What distinguishes distractions from interruptions are your intentions about how you choose to manage them; either you attempt to ignore them and carry on with your original goal—distraction—or you engage in them as a simultaneous, secondary goal—interruption. Despite both of these being types of goal interference, different brain mechanisms underlie the performance impairment they generate, as we will discuss later.
Our cognitive control abilities that are necessary for the enactment of our goals have not evolved to the same degree as the executive functions required for goal setting. Indeed, the fundamental limitations in our cognitive control abilities do not differ greatly from those observed in other primates, with whom we shared common ancestors tens of millions of years ago.4 Our cognitive control is really quite limited: we have a restricted ability to distribute, divide, and sustain attention; actively hold detailed information in mind; and concurrently manage or even rapidly switch between competing goals.

Evolutionary Perspective: Why Do We Engage In Noisy Environments

Despite an emerging awareness of our sensitivity to goal interference and the widespread negative impact it can have on our lives, most of us engage in interference-inducing behaviors, even when distractions and multitasking may be completely avoidable. Interference-inducing behaviors involve intentionally placing oneself in a distracting environment (e.g., going to a crowded, noisy coffee shop to write a book) or engaging in multitasking behavior (e.g., writing a book while listening to music and routinely checking incoming texts and email). Almost no one seems to be immune to engaging in these behaviors. And so a fascinating question remains—why do we do it, even if we understand that it degrades our performance?

1. It's Fun Because It's Novel And Immediate, Which Our Brain Loves

A common explanation that is offered in response to this question is that it is simply more fun and rewarding to engage in multitasking compared to single tasking. There certainly appears to be truth in this assertion. Individuals report that enjoyment is a factor in Internet-based multitasking and that performing additional tasks while watching TV ads increases overall task enjoyment.11 Also in support of this view, physiological signs of increased arousal are associated with switches between multiple types of content on a single device.12 In regard to rewards, researchers have shown that novelty is associated with reward processing in our brains.13 This is not surprising, as novelty seeking is a powerful driving force to explore new environments, and thus offers clear survival advantages. The novelty load is undoubtedly higher when frequently switching between new tasks than when just staying put, so it is logical that the overall reward gains, and thus the fun factor as well, are heightened when multitasking. In addition, the act of receiving an earlier reward is often more highly valued, even if a delayed reward has greater overall associated value.14 This phenomenon, known as the “temporal discounting of rewards,” is a strong influence on impulsive behaviors and so may also play a role in the inherent drive to seek the immediate gratification that comes from switching to new tasks sooner rather than later.

2. We Are Information-Seeking Creatures

But we have always had plenty of opportunities to rapidly switch to novel, and thus more rewarding, alternative tasks. It seems that there is something more going on here than general reward seeking and fun. What is it about the modern technological world that has resulted in this frenzied multitasking behavior? In this book we will explore a novel hypothesis: We engage in interference-inducing behaviors because, from an evolutionary perspective, we are merely acting in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive to seek information. Critically, the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world perpetuate this behavior by offering us greater accessibility to feed this instinctive drive and also via their influence on internal factors such as boredom and anxiety.
We engage in interference-inducing behaviors because, from an evolutionary perspective, we are merely acting in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive to seek information. Critically, the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world perpetuate this behavior by offering us greater accessibility to feed this instinctive drive and also via their influence on internal factors such as boredom and anxiety.
The fact that ignoring is an active process is critical to understanding the Distracted Mind because it emphasizes that it takes resources to filter out what is irrelevant.

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“The brain has allowed us to perform extraordinary feats from discovering general relativity to painting the Sistine Chapel, from building airplanes to composing symphonies. And yet, we still forget to pick up milk on the way home. How can this be?”
“Technology has also rapidly invaded our language. Every year the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words that it feels deserve to be part of the English language.”
“In a laboratory study, a researcher from Virginia Commonwealth University observed college students during a three-hour study session using video cameras and eye trackers and found that on average, students spent more than an hour listening to music and showed thirty-five interruptions of six seconds or longer, totaling twenty-six disrupted minutes in just three hours.33”
“Dr. Rosen’s lab showed that, when asked how easy or difficult it was to pair a variety of tasks together, members of younger generations reported that they felt that it was rather easy to pair most tasks, while those of older generations felt that only more well-practiced tasks could be easily combined.”
“Some consumer experts point to a benchmark that when 50 million people have used a product it is considered to have “penetrated” society.”