Is technology your friend or your master? Is the omnipresence of digital screens eroding our quality of life? Richard Cytowic, clinical professor of neurology and rehabilitation medicine in the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, addresses these questions in his new book, “Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload” (MIT Press). In a conversation with GW Today, Cytowic talked about how our limited attention can survive the glut of distraction, and the wisdom of regularly powering down.
Q: In your new book, you say that our brains are not equipped to handle all the distractions of contemporary life. How can we manage that problem?
A: The best way would be to turn your phone off or put it face down. But most people can’t or won’t do that. In the book, I explain that people don’t realize how their screens and devices are distracting them. I look at my email when I get up in the morning, and then I don't look at it again until 4 p.m. That’s part of the solution—to not look at it.
Q: Some writers have observed that the internet had the potential to make us smarter and more connected but has instead dumbed us down in our silos. Do you agree?
A: Ha! It doesn’t make us more connected. It makes us more isolated. “Social media” is an oxymoron. It’s not making us more social at all. When the internet first came into being, I was thrilled that I could write a message to friends in England or in some other far-flung time zone and not worry about the time differences. But then the internet became just a flood of junk from everywhere, and our communications with friends got lost in the shuffle. We have no way to filter all that unwanted content out.
Our attention spans have simply gone to hell. And people are so focused on their phones that they walk into telephone poles and step into traffic. Selfies kill more people than shark attacks. You can Google “selfie deaths” and read about people who take selfies in dangerous situations, trying to get something post-worthy, and then end up killing themselves. These devices have a way of sapping our attention spans until we are not aware of anything else going on around us.
Q: Hasn’t every new technology sparked fears about a crisis of attention?
A: Well, yes, that’s true. Socrates said the invention of writing would kill our ability to remember anything. That’s a very old complaint. Much more recently, people said TV and comic books were going to cause brain rot, and they didn’t. But screen saturation, I think, is at such a level that we can’t deny that it’s doing something negative to us.
Q: Does your worry about screens extend to the movies?
A: I don’t think movie screens are a problem, because we’re looking at them in a certain context. When we’re watching a film, we’re not being distracted by other things. We watch a film for about 90 minutes, and we’re focused on it, as long as we’re not looking at something else on our laptop or iPad at the same time. We follow the story in a linear pattern, and we’re not interrupted by all sorts of stuff. But when we’re looking at our phones or other digital screens, we are constantly being distracted. The screen robs your attention from what you’re actually trying to do. We’re being distracted from our lives!
Q: Some have argued that the human brain wasn’t built to pay sustained attention.
A: When our brain evolved in the Stone Age, you were dealing with your small peer group. Everybody knew one another. And things didn’t change much unless there was some kind of external threat. Things were pretty calm and steady. There wasn’t much out of the ordinary that happened. And when it did, it threw us into an alarm. Today, things are changing so rapidly, so quickly, every day, many times an hour, that our brain isn’t prepared for it.
Our brains are change agents. We’re alert to any change. So there we were, hunting, gathering, socializing, and all it took to put us on high alert was a strange noise, the snap of a twig, the growl of an animal, a smell of smoke. But that didn’t happen very often. The brain is not meant to be “on” 24/7. It’s not meant to be stimulated constantly. We need off periods, periods of silence. That’s why taking a walk around the neighborhood and just looking at the trees is hugely beneficial—without your phone, of course—because you’re shut off from this constant cacophony that usually accompanies our day. Just sitting outside under a tree is enough, because natural spaces are very restorative.
Go outside, take a walk, look up at the buildings, the sky, the clouds, the trees. Go look out the window. It only takes 30 seconds of doing nothing, and that’s like throwing the circuit breaker on this relentless busyness and hyperfocus on screens. It’s like an instant meditation.
Q: You’ve said that the popular notion that we use only 10% of our brains is a canard. Why?
A: If 90% of our brains went unused, then evolution should have discarded it long ago, because it’s hugely energy-intensive to maintain it if it’s doing nothing. Of course, it is doing something, all the time. The secret is what we call sparse coding, which explains how a small amount of synaptic discharges can convey itself to an enormous amount of the brain. To be energy efficient, the brain uses 1 to 16% of its cells at any given moment. All of it’s being active, but not all at the same time. We’re using a small percentage in any given instance to take care of whatever needs to be handled.
Our brain has a fixed bandwidth of attention and energy that is overwhelmed by modern life. No amount of diet, exercise, Sudoku puzzles and supplements is ever going to increase the amount of bandwidth that our brain has to work with. We have to learn to work with the bandwidth that we’re given. We have to be smarter and wiser.
