Totally distracted from studying by reading on Distraction (from NY Mag)

The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation tells of an all too familiar syndrome of my own. I mean, I grew up distracted by the world around me. Here’s a short snippet as well as some highlights.

In Defense of Distraction
Twitter, Adderall, lifehacking, mindful jogging, power browsing, Obama’s BlackBerry, and the benefits of overstimulation.

Source: New York Magazine

… our attention crisis is already chewing its hyperactive way through the very foundations of Western civilization. Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the “dumbest generation” is leading us into a “dark age” of bookless “power browsing.” Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese. … We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane. (Shakespeare: “poverty hath distracted her.”)

Although attention is often described as an organ system, it’s not the sort of thing you can pull out and study like a spleen. It’s a complex process that shows up all over the brain, mingling inextricably with other quasi-mystical processes like emotion, memory, identity, will, motivation, and mood. … for instance, that when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task or even recall what you’ve been doing once you’re done. … This attentional self-control, which psychologists call executive function, is at the very center of our struggle with attention. It’s what allows us to invest our focus wisely or poorly.

The most promising solution to our attention problem … is also the most ancient: meditation. Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psychologists predict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “secular attentional workouts.”) Meditation can make your attention less “sticky,” able to notice images flashing by in such quick succession that regular brains would miss them. It has also been shown to elevate your mood, which can then recursively stoke your attention …

… because attention is a limited resource — one psychologist has calculated that we can attend to only 110 bits of information per second, or 173 billion bits in an average lifetime — our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. … everything comes down to that one big choice: investing your attention wisely or not. The jackhammers are everywhere — iPhones, e-mail, cancer — and Western culture’s attentional crisis is mainly a widespread failure to ignore them.

A quintessentially Western solution to the attention problem — one that neatly circumvents the issue of willpower — is to simply dope our brains into focus. We’ve done so, over the centuries, with substances ranging from tea to tobacco to NoDoz to Benzedrine, and these days the tradition seems to be approaching some kind of zenith with the rise of neuroenhancers: drugs designed to treat ADHD (Ritalin, Adderall), Alzheimer’s (Aricept), and narcolepsy (Provigil) that can produce, in healthy people, superhuman states of attention. …

One of the most exciting — and confounding — solutions to the problem of attention lies right at the intersection of our willpower and our willpower-sapping technologies: the grassroots Internet movement known as “lifehacking.” … they’d invented all kinds of clever little tricks — some high-tech, some very low-tech — to help shepherd their attention from moment to moment: ingenious script codes for to-do lists, software hacks for managing e-mail, rituals to avoid sinister time-wasting traps such as “yak shaving,” the tendency to lose yourself in endless trivial tasks tangentially related to the one you really need to do. …

“Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement … It’s an indisputable receipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it’s gonna say a lot about who you are as a person.”

The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction. Unwavering focus — the inability to be distracted — can actually be just as problematic as ADHD. Trouble with “attentional shift” is a feature common to a handful of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and OCD. It’s been hypothesized that ADHD might even be an advantage in certain change-rich environments. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that a brain receptor associated with ADHD is unusually common among certain nomads in Kenya, and that members who have the receptor are the best nourished in the group. It’s possible that we’re all evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, a rapidly shifting environment in which restlessness will be an advantage again. …

I’ll leave you to the article (link to full page article if you don’t want to click through 8 pages) to learn about the conclusion.