The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul

228 Pages·2013·1.85 MB·English

by  Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

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The Sandwalk, the walking path installed by Charles Darwin at Down House, from a 1929 photograph (©
The British Library Board, 010822.de.81)
INTRODUCTION
TWO MONKEYS
O
n the western edge of the ancient city of Kyoto, Japan, on the slope of Mount
Arashiyama (literally “Stormy Mountain”), stands the Iwatayama Monkey Park.
The park has winding paths and fine views of Kyoto, but the main attraction is
the tribe of about a hundred and forty macaques who live there. The monkeys of
Iwatayama are famously gregarious, playful, and, occasionally, crafty. Like all
members of the Macaca genus, they combine sociability and intelligence. They
play with their kin, watch one another’s young, learn new skills from one
another, and even have distinctive group habits.
Some develop a mania for bathing, snowball-making, washing food, fishing,
or using seawater as a seasoning. Iwatayama macaques are known for flossing
and for playing with stones. This has led some scientists to argue that macaques
have a culture, something we’ve traditionally thought of as distinctly human.
They’re also humanlike in their natural curiosity and cunning: one second,
you’re watching one do something cute, and the next second, his friends are
making off with the bag of food you bought at the park’s entrance.
They’re like humans in one other way. For all their smarts, nothing keeps
their attention for very long. The mountainside gives them a fantastic view of
one of the world’s most historic cities, but it doesn’t impress them. They keep up
a constant chatter, a running monologue of inconsequence. The macaques are
living examples of the Buddhist concept of the monkey mind, one of my favorite
metaphors for the everyday, undisciplined, jittery mind. As Tibetan Buddhist
teacher Chögyam Trungpa explains, the monkey mind is crazy: It “leaps about
and never stays in one place. It is completely restless.”
The monkey mind’s constant activity reflects a deep restlessness: monkeys
can’t sit still because their minds never stop. Likewise, most of the time, the
human mind delivers up a constant stream of consciousness. Even in quiet
moments, minds are prone to wandering. Add a constant buzz of electronics, the
flash of a new message landing in your in-box, the ping of voicemail, and your
mind is as manic as a monkey after a triple espresso. The monkey mind is
attracted to today’s infinite and ever-changing buffet of information choices and
devices. It thrives on overload, is drawn to shiny and blinky things, and doesn’t
distinguish between good and bad technologies or choices.
The concept of the monkey mind appears throughout Buddhist teachings—
one small indicator of the fact that the mind and its relationship to the world
have been studied deeply for thousands of years. Every religion has
contemplative practices, calls to use silence and solitude to quiet the mind. In
John Drury’s introductory note to the Anglican Matins and Evensong, he exhorts
worshippers “to be patient and relaxed enough to allow a long tradition to have
its say” and “allow our own thoughts and feelings to become closer to us than
life outside admits.” Only then can one fully enter “the cool and ancient order of
the services which gives a space and a frame, as well as cues, for reflections on
our regrets and hopes and gratitudes.” Catholic monastics treat meditation as
preparing the mind to receive God’s wisdom; the busy mind cannot hear the
divine. In Buddhism, though, mental discipline is more an end in itself, rather
than just a means to an end. The everyday mind is like churning water; learn to
make it still, like the mirror-flat surface of a calm lake, Buddhists say, and its
reflection will show you everything.
A few miles away from Iwatayama, a robotics laboratory at Kyoto University
houses a robot controlled by another monkey, a rhesus named Idoya. Incredibly,
Idoya isn’t in Japan; she lives in North Carolina, in a neuroscience laboratory at
Duke University, and her brain is connected to the robot via the Internet. The
laboratory is run by neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, who, to make things just a
bit more global, was born and educated in Brazil. Nicolelis has been studying the
brain and how the brain changes as it learns executive functions; he’s also
developed a specialty in what scientists call brain-computer interface (BCI)
technologies. Today you can buy primitive brain-wave readers that can control
video games, and scientists are mapping brain functions and testing the brain’s
ability to control complex objects through BCIs. Eventually, they hope, BCIs
will be used to route brain signals around damaged nerves, restoring body
control to people with spinal-cord injuries or neurodegenerative disorders.
Idoya is the latest in a series of monkeys Nicolelis has worked with. Over the
previous decade, he and his team demonstrated that a monkey with electrodes
implanted in its brain could operate joysticks or robotic arms with its mind.
Brain scans showed something remarkable: the neurons in the monkey’s
frontoparietal lobe—the section that controlled the animal’s arms—fired when
the monkey operated a robot arm. In other words, the monkey’s brain stopped
treating the robot arm as a tool, as something that it used but that was clearly
separate from itself. The brain remapped its picture of the monkey’s body to
incorporate the robot arm. At the neural level, the distinction between the
monkey’s arms and the robot arm blurred. As far as the monkey’s brain was
concerned, monkey arms and robot arm were all part of the same body. Nicolelis
and his colleagues in Japan implanted electrodes in the section of Idoya’s brain
that regulated walking; they then taught her to walk on a treadmill and studied
how her brain’s neurons fired as she walked. When she obeyed commands to
speed up or slow down, she was rewarded with food. They then put a video
monitor in front of the treadmill. Instead of showing The View or CNBC,
however, the screen showed Idoya a live video feed of CB-1, the human-size
robot in Kyoto. (CB-1 itself is a prodigy. Equipped with four video cameras,
gyroscopic stabilizers, and hands that can grasp objects, it can hold a bat, swing
at baseballs, and learn manual tasks by imitating humans.)
When Idoya started walking while looking at the Kyoto robot on the monitor,
the electrodes in her brain picked up the signals generated by the neurons that
control locomotion. The signals were transmitted over the Internet to CB-1,
which, following those same signals, stepped with her. The better she controlled
the robot, the more treats she got. After an hour of Idoya walking and munching
Cheerios, the scientists switched off her treadmill. Still focused on the screen,
the monkey stopped walking—but she kept CB-1 on course, and for the next
several minutes, she continued to make it walk. Once again, Nicolelis’s team had
shown that a primate brain could learn to directly control robots—and, in the
process, that brain would start to treat the robot as an extension of its own body.
Brain scans showed that Idoya’s brain performed exactly the same way whether
she was using her own flesh-and-fur legs or the electronic-and-plastic ones. As
far as her brain was concerned, there was no longer any difference between the
two.
Idoya and the monkeys of Iwatayama represent two different sides of the
human mind, two contrasting relationships with information technology, and two
futures. The chattering monkey is the untutored, undisciplined reactive mind, the
mind that loves stimulation but doesn’t hold a thought. The cyborg monkey
represents a mind that isn’t overwhelmed by technology, because it no longer
experiences the technologies it uses as separate from itself, as requiring
conscious effort and attention. A mix of deliberate practice, tinkering and
experimenting, and neural rewiring have created an extended mind in which
brain, body, and tools are entangled and work together effortlessly.
For too long, we’ve left the chattering monkey in charge of our technologies,
and then we wonder why things go bad. We want to be like the cyborg monkey
(albeit not as hairy and without the electrodes). We want that same capability to
use complicated technologies without thinking about them, without experiencing
them as burdens and distractions. We want our technologies to extend our minds
and augment our abilities, not break up our minds.
Such control is within our reach. Rather than being forced into a state of
perpetual distraction, with all the unhappiness and discontent such a state
creates, we can approach information technologies in a way that is mindful and
nearly effortless and that contributes to our ability to focus, be creative, and be
happy.
It’s an approach I call contemplative computing.
The term sounds oxymoronic. What could be less contemplative than today’s
technology-intensive environment? What could possibly be less conducive to a
clear, meditative state than interactions with computers, cell phones, Facebook,
and Twitter?
Contemplative computing isn’t enabled by a technological breakthrough or
scientific discovery. You don’t buy it. You do it. It’s based on a blend of new
science and philosophy, some very old techniques for managing your attention
and mind, and a lot of experience with how people use (or are used by)
information technologies. It shows you how your mind and body interact with
computers and how your attention and creativity are influenced by technology. It
gives you the tools to redesign your relationships with devices and the Internet,
to make them work better for you. It’s a promise that you can construct a
healthier, more balanced relationship with information technology.
To get a sense of how that can happen, let’s look at what digital life is like for
many of us—and then at what it could be like.
Imagine a Monday morning. You reach over to the nightstand, grab your
smartphone, and switch off the alarm. You rub your eyes with one hand and open
the phone’s e-mail program with the other. You’re not really awake; you do it
automatically. You watch the icon spin as the phone connects to your e-mail
server.
Nineteen messages in your in-box. Most are automatically generated
newsletters, coupons, daily deals, or social-media updates; six are from
colleagues up even earlier than you. You answer one, start another, and realize
you’re not sure what to say, so you flip over to the Web browser and check the
news. You’ll finish the message later. European bankers arguing over the terms
of the latest bailout… another NASDAQ flash crash… roundup of blog posts
commenting on the suicide of a cast member of a reality-TV show…. Suddenly
you realize it’s been twenty minutes. Gotta get up.
On the train to work, you look out the window and see a driver holding his
phone and steering wheel in the same hand as he uses the phone to navigate, and
another person steering with one hand and texting with the other. It makes
driving while talking on your cell phone seem downright cautious. The police
should give out more tickets to distracted drivers, you think, but as more cruisers
are equipped with laptops, more police are getting distracted too.
Work turns out to be one of those days: these coworkers need numbers, those
colleagues need your feedback; can you help with this problem, explain these
options, talk to this person? It’s one thing when there’s lots of input directed
toward one goal, but this multitasking is something else entirely. You’re used to
dealing with a constant stream of interruptions, but today, even your
interruptions get interrupted. It’s hard to say no, and it’s hard to get back on task.
After each interruption, you need a couple minutes to remember what you were
doing, to gather your thoughts and start again.
By late afternoon, you’re finally ready to print out your work. You hit Print,
and an error message appears: You need to update your printer driver. When you
click Okay, a minute goes by, and then there’s another message: The latest driver
isn’t compatible with the old version of your operating system. You or your IT
department need to update that too. Half an hour later, you restart your computer
and finally print out your work. The experience is frustrating, but it’s not at all
unusual. According to a 2010 Harris interactive poll (sponsored by tech giant
Intel), computer users spend an average of forty-three minutes every day—five
hours a week, or eleven days a year—waiting for computers to start up, shut
down, load software, open files, connect to the Internet.
On your way to meet a friend for a drink after work, you pass by people who
are focused on their cell phones and have trouble tearing their attention away
from their screens. You feel your phone buzzing in your pants pocket, but when
you reach to answer it, there’s no phone there. You check your other pockets,
worried that you’ve lost it. The last time it happened, you felt like part of your
brain had been shut off. But it’s a false alarm: it’s in your jacket.
During drinks, you and your friend each get the occasional text. Conversation
flows and trails off as you each look at your phone, nearly finish a thought as