The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (15 page)

• • • • •

This is why a TED Talk lecture, for example, can be even more engaging on your computer screen than it was in person. In a lecture hall, you are charged with mustering your own attention and holding it, whereas a video is constantly triggering your orienting response with changes in camera angle and lighting; it does these things to elicit attention
out of you
. “Televisions and computers,” says Gentile, “are crutches for your attention. And the more time you spend on those crutches, the less able you are to walk by yourself.”

So now, just as the once useful craving for sugar and fat has turned against us in an environment of plenty, our once useful orienting responses may be doing as much damage as they do good. Gentile believes it’s time for a renaissance in our understanding of mental health. To begin with, just as we can’t accept our body’s cravings for chocolate cake at face value, neither can we any longer afford to indulge the automatic desires our brains harbor for distraction.

“In my opinion,” he told me, “we’ve focused for thirty or forty years on the biological and genetic aspects, which has allowed us to come up with all these drugs to handle attention deficit disorder, but we’ve been focused on only half the equation. We’ve focused exclusively on the nature side of things. Everyone seems to think attention problems are purely genetic and unchangeable except by medication.”

Given that children today spend so much more time in front of flashing screens (more than ten hours per day, when “multitasking” is accounted for), it would be a willful kind of ignorance to assume so much sparking of our orienting responses wouldn’t rewire the brain. “We’re now finding,” Gentile told me, “that babies who watch television in particular end up more likely to have attention deficit problems when they reach school age. It’s pretty obvious: If you spend time with a flickering, flashing thing, it may leave the brain expecting that kind of stimulation.” And it’s not just infants who need to be protected from such flashes. “We’ve found that
whenever kids exceed the one to two hours
of recreational screen time a day the AAP [American Academy of Pediatrics] recommends, levels of attention issues do go up an awful lot.”

I stopped him there. “One or
two
hours of screen time a day? That’s the recommendation?”

“Yes.”

“Does
anybody
meet that standard?”

“Well, no. Probably not.”

• • • • •

It’s not merely difficult at first. It’s torture. I slump into the book, reread sentences, entire paragraphs. I get through two pages and then stop to check my e-mail—and down the rabbit hole I go. After all, one does not read
War and Peace
so much as suffer through it. This is not to disparage the book itself, only the frailty of its current readers. It doesn’t help that the world at large, being so divorced from such pursuits, is often aggressive toward those who drop away into single-subject attention wells. People don’t
like
it when you read
War and Peace
. It’s too long, too boring, not worth the effort. And you’re elitist for trying.

War and Peace
is in fact thirteen hundred (long) pages long and weighs the same as a dead cat. Each of its thirty-four principal characters goes by three or four different (Russian) names. The aristocrats portrayed often prefer to speak in French, which is odd considering they spend much of their time at war with Napoleon. In my edition, the French is translated only in tight footnotes, as though the translators (Pevear and Volokhonsky) mean to say, “Really? You want us to do
that
for you, too?” There are also hundreds of endnotes, which are necessary to decode obscure sayings and jokes, so I flip about once each page to the rear of the tome, pinching down to hold my place at the front. (Endnotes: the original hyperlink.) It is, manifestly, the product of a culture with far fewer YouTube videos than our own.

In order to finish the thing in the two weeks I have allotted myself, I must read one hundred pages each day without fail. If something distracts me from my day’s reading—a friend in the hospital, a magazine assignment, sunshine—I must read two hundred pages on the following day. I’ve read at this pace before, in my university days, but that was years ago and I’ve been steadily down-training my brain ever since.

Whether or not I’m alone in this is an open question. Numbers from the Pew Research Center and Gallup survey suggest that reading levels in fact have remained relatively constant since 1990.
Curiously, the largest hit
that book reading has taken seems to have occurred somewhere in the 1980s. Then again,
the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) released a massive and scathing report in 2007 that claimed Americans are indeed spending less time reading, that their reading comprehension is eroding, and that such declines “have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications.” Nearly half of all Americans from eighteen to twenty-four, apparently, “read no books for pleasure.”

How are we to square those numbers? Perhaps by focusing less on quantity and more on quality. The NEA report may have come to such wildly different conclusions from those of Gallup and Pew because the NEA is interested in “literary” reading. The report states explicitly, “Literary reading declined significantly in a period of rising Internet use.” The NEA was also concerned with quality of reading environment, noting that a third of reading by young adults is accomplished while “multitasking” with other media, including TV and music.

• • • • •

I experienced my first intuition of Tolstoy’s larger phraseology around page fifty-eight. Princess Anna Mikhailovna is subtly begging for money from a countess so that she may pay for her son’s military uniform.

Anna Mikhailovna was already embracing her
and weeping. The countess was also weeping. They wept because they were friends; and because they were kind; and because they, who had been friends since childhood, were concerned with such a mean subject—money; and because their youth was gone.

In the larger context of war preparations and complex aristocratic maneuvering, I find the sudden vain mention of their vanished youth startling and beautiful (a little comic, too). And this passage has the effect of plunging me into the book properly. For a page or two I am rapt, utterly lost. And then my phone goes off; the miniature absence, and the happiness it gave me, is ended. I want to read, but I stop. I know the distractions are unproductive and I fly to them all the same.

• • • • •

Humans are not the only animals who behave in unproductive and irrational ways—and it may be easier to observe the arbitrary nature of our behavior if we look to another species first. Consider the three-spined stickleback fish. The stickleback is a two-inch-long bottom-feeder that lives throughout the northern hemisphere. From late April into July, sticklebacks make their way to shallow mating grounds, where the males, as in most mating grounds, get aggressive with one another. Male sticklebacks develop a bright red throat and underbelly during mating season; the coloring is a product of carotenoids found in the fish’s diet, so a bright red male, having sourced plenty of food for himself, can be seen by females as a desirable mate, and he can also be seen by other males as serious competition—the reddest male sticklebacks elicit more aggression from other males. The Nobel Prize–winning ethnologist Niko Tinbergen found, however, that male sticklebacks actually attack whatever piece of material in their environment is reddest. (Place a red ball in a stickleback mating ground and the boys go crazy.) They respond purely to the stimulus of the color itself and not to the fish behind the red. A neural network in the male stickleback’s head is triggered by the sign stimulus, the color red, and produces instinctive aggression on the spot.

What, I’m now left to wonder, is
my
red? What kind of stimulus derails my attention against my will; what ingrained tendencies do technologies capitalize on each time they lead me away from the self I hope to fashion? And are they fixed actions, after all? Or are these patterns that I can change?

In the wild, some species have evolved to take advantage of the fixed action patterns of other creatures. The North American cowbird, for example, will lay its eggs in another species’ nest, and its young are later fed thanks to the parental instinct of the host bird. Is it possible our more successful technologies have reached a point where they are expert exploiters of our own automatic behavior? The Internet’s constantly flashing, amorphous display is an orienting response’s dreamboat, after all.

• • • • •

Another week has passed—my
War and Peace
struggle continues. I’ve realized now that the subject of my distraction is far more likely to be something I need to
look
at than something I need to
do
. There have always been activities—dishes, gardening, sex, shopping—that derail whatever purpose we’ve assigned to ourselves on a given day. What’s different now is the addition of so much content that we passively consume.

Only this morning I watched a boy break down crying on
X Factor,
then regain his courage and belt out a half-decent rendition of Beyoncé’s “Listen”; next I looked up the original Beyoncé video and played it twice while reading the first few paragraphs of a story about the humanity of child soldiers; then I switched to a Nina Simone playlist prepared for me by Songza, which played while I flipped through a slide show of American soldiers seeing their dogs for the first time in years; and so on, ad nauseam. Until I shook myself out of this funk and tried to remember what I’d sat down to work on in the first place.

I’m a little like a character from one of Tolstoy’s other novels in this respect. In
Anna Karenina,
a few pages are devoted to his heroine’s attempt to read an English novel while traveling by train. She asks her maid for a lamp, hooks it onto the arm of her seat, takes out a knife to cut open the pages, and settles in. But the world around her begs her not to leave it.

At first she could not read
. For a while the bustle of people moving about disturbed her, and when the train had finally started it was impossible not to listen to the noises; then there was the snow, beating against the window on her left . . . and the sight of the guard, who passed through the carriage.

Eventually, the clamor around her adopts a sameness—“the same jolting and knocking, the same beating of the snow on the window-pane, the same rapid changes from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat . . . at last Anna began to read and to follow what she read.” Anna begins to read not because her environment has stopped shifting, but because it is the same quality of shift, and her brain can now ignore it.

Anna read and understood
, but it was unpleasant to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself.

So, with me; the frisson of the Internet eventually blurs into a dull white roar, and I can return to my book again, sated. And so with me, my mind is jacked up by then to the point where staring at black lines feels ridiculous; there is so much living to live. I’m up and bouncing around after a few pages, realigning books on the shelf, dusting the blinds.

If I’m going to break from our culture of distraction, I’m going to need practical advice, not just depressing statistics. To that end, I switch gears and decide to stop talking to scientists for a while; I need to talk to someone who deals with attention and productivity in the so-called real world. Someone with a big smile and tailored suits such as organizational guru Peter Bregman. He runs a global consulting firm that gets CEOs to unleash the potential of their workers, and he’s also the author of the acclaimed business book
18 Minutes,
which counsels readers to take a minute out of every work hour (plus five minutes at the start and end of the day) to do nothing but set an intention.

Bregman told me he sets his watch to beep every hour as a reminder that it’s time to right his course again. This sort of advice—so simple, so obvious—is the kind I usually delete from my memory banks immediately, telling myself that my problems are more complicated than that. (Besides, weren’t those watch beeps actually distractions in themselves?) But when I spoke with him, it became clear that his ideas actually
were
a complete departure from the place I’d drifted into. And that disturbed me even more: I saw that I’d swerved so far from what I knew to be sensible behavior.

Aside from the intention setting, Bregman counsels no more than three e-mail check-ins a day. This notion of batch processing was anathema to someone like me, used to checking my in-box so constantly, particularly when my work feels stuck. “It’s incredibly inefficient to switch back and forth,” said Bregman, echoing every scientist I’d spoken to on multitasking. “Besides, e-mail is, actually, just about the least efficient mode of conversation you can have. And what we know about multitasking is that, frankly, you can’t. You just derail.”

“I just always feel I’m missing something important,” I said.

“And that’s precisely why we lose hours every day—that fear.” And sure, fear seems a good emotion to describe my state of distraction—that anxious fear that I
ought
to be doing something else (or that my life ought to have
arrived
somewhere else by now). Bregman argues that it’s people who can get ahead of that fear who end up excelling in the business world that he spends his own days in. “I think everyone is more distractible today than we used to be. It’s a very hard thing to fix. And as people become more distracted, we know they’re actually doing less, getting less done. Your efforts just
leak out
. And those who aren’t—aren’t
leaking
—are going to be the most successful.”