Preface
1. Friedman, Lexus and the Olive Tree, 41.
2. See the article on the course that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Parry, “You’re Distracted.”
1. Falling in the Fountain
1. Try searching on the phrase “woman falls in fountain at mall.” Several versions of the video are available online, as well as several incidents in which people fall into a pool or fountain.
2. Jobs, “Find What You Love.”
3. Richtel, “Driven to Distraction”; Richtel, A Deadly Wandering; Richtel, “Texting While Driving.”
3. Attention, Emotions, and the Body
1. James, The Principles of Psychology, 403–404. Studies of attention and popular introductions to the subject have multiplied in recent years. Daniel Goleman’s recent book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, is a readable introduction to the topic. I refer to his account several times in this chapter, sometimes supplementing his remarks with further studies.
2. In a review article for neuroscientists, “Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation” (163), Lutz et al. distinguish between focused attention (“the focusing of attention on a chosen object”) and open monitoring (the “nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment”).
3. Discussion of the top-down and bottom-up systems can be found in Goleman, Focus, 24–38.
4. Ibid., 40.
5. “Under most conditions,” says David Meyer, a psychologist who studies attention at the University of Michigan, “the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. . . . But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.” Quoted in Paul, “You’ll Never Learn!” A good description of the orienting, alerting, and conflict-resolution functions can be found in Jha, Krompinger, and Baime, “Mindfulness Training Modifies Subsystems,” 110.
6. There are also strong suggestions that multitasking negatively affects learning and memory. See the summary in Paul, “You’ll Never Learn!” of recent research on multitasking as it applies to student learning. Clay Shirky, the New York University media scholar, in a blog post explaining why he has banned digital devices from the classroom, writes: “We’ve known for some time that multitasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students.” Shirky, too, cites some of the relevant research. Shirky, “Why I Just Asked.”
7. Sapolsky, “Stress, Stress-Related Disease,” 609. An excellent introduction to the science of stress is The End of Stress by Bruce McEwen and Elizabeth Norton Lasley.
8. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence; Goleman, Social Intelligence.
9. Proponents of “embodied cognition” in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics argue that the body is crucial for understanding the nature of mind and cognition. Wilson and Foglia, “Embodied Cognition.” Popular accounts describing the complex interrelationship between mind and body include Blakeslee and Blakeslee, Mind of Its Own.
10. Levine, Get Up.
11. Reynolds, “How Exercise Could Lead”; Laird and Strout, “Emotional Behaviors,” 54–64.
12. Linda Stone, “Just Breathe.”
13. Much of this work lies at the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and clinical practice. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction programs (MBSR), developed more than thirty years ago, have demonstrated that mindfulness meditation, yoga, and body awareness can improve people’s ability to deal with stress and illness, in some cases even speeding up physical healing. Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living. The scientific literature on the value of meditation as a form of attention training and emotion regulation has been exploding in recent years. For an overview see Ricard, Lutz, and Davidson, “Mind of the Meditator,” 39–45.
14. James, The Principles of Psychology, 424.
4. Exercise 1
1. Yates, Control Through Communication, 96.
2. The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018. An article in the Harvard Business Review suggests that half of workers’ time is spent managing email. Gill, “E-Mail: Not Dead, Evolving.” A survey conducted by the Harris Poll suggests that the amount of time workers spend managing their email is closer to 14 percent. Harris Poll, “The State of Enterprise Work.” Regardless, for those the Pew Research Center calls “office-based workers” (including professionals, managers, and clerical workers), the amount of time spent on email is considerable. Purcell and Rainie, “Email and the Internet.”
3. Manjoo, “Google Wants Inbox.”
6. Exercise 3
1. Wallis, Impacts of Media Multitasking, 3, 4.
2. González and Mark, “‘Constant, Constant, Multi-Tasking Craziness,’” 113–120; Thompson, “Meet the Life Hackers.”
3. Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts, Generation M2.
4. Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, 61.
5. Strayer and Watson, “Supertaskers and the Multitasking Brain.”
6. The Stanford report distinguishes three kinds of “media multitasking”: “(a) between medium and face-to-face interaction; (b) between two or more media; and (c) within a single medium.” Wallis, Impacts of Media Multitasking, 8. For a different approach, see Salvucci and Taatgen, The Multitasking Mind, 8–11, which locates multitasking on a continuum from concurrent to sequential activities.
7. A variety of digital tools are now appearing that allow users to monitor their activities and their biological state, and serious “self-trackers” now meet at conferences on the “Quantified Self.” I haven’t tried to bring any of these tracking tools into my teaching. In practice, I find that the recording technologies I ask my students to install (which thus far have been available at no cost) provide enough information for people to make sophisticated observations of their own multitasking behavior.
8. Levy, “Levy’s Web site,” davidmlevy.net.
9. Ophir, Nass, and Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media,” 15583–15587.
10. Solomon, “Eyal Ophir on the Science.”
1. Cohen, One Who Is Not Busy.
2. Levy et al., “Effects of Mindfulness Meditation.” Interested readers can find the full results in the published paper, which is available on my Web site, Levy, “Levy’s Web site,” davidmlevy.net.
3. Gloria Mark’s 2008 study suggests that interruptions increase the stress of work. Mark, Gudith, and Klocke, “Cost of Interrupted Work.”
8. Exercise 5
1. “Sabbath Manifesto,” http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/. See also Cooper, Fast Media, Media Fast.
2. Hunnicutt, “Jewish Sabbath Movement”; Hunnicutt, Work Without End.
3. Whybrow, American Mania. For years, I have been exploring the acceleration of life and the role that our information technologies play in this process. Readers wanting to know more about how I understand our more-faster-better culture and the challenges it presents can consult Levy, “No Time to Think,” the journal article and the video.
4. Eyal, Hooked.
9. Honing Our Digital Craft
1. Ingold, “Walking the Plank.” Ingold actually divides craftwork into four stages: getting ready, setting out, carrying on, finishing off. I’ve chosen to collapse the first two into a single stage.
2. Schwartz, Paradox of Choice, 2.
3. McEwen, End of Stress, 150–151.
4. Ibid., 152.
5. Research indicates that not all forms of rest are equally effective. Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who has developed Attention Restoration Theory, has shown that exposure to nature is a particularly effective means of recovering our concentration when our attention muscle has fatigued. Kaplan, “Meditation, Restoration.” Thus it is important to consider not just when to rest, but how.
6. Segal, Williams, and Teasdale, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, 74.
7. Greenhalgh, “Progress of Captain Ludd.”
10. Broadening and Deepening the Conversation
1. See the op-ed piece colleagues at Georgetown University and I wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2011. Levy et al., “No Cellphone? No Internet?”
2. Carr, “Does the Internet Make You Dumber?” Shirky, “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” Carr, Shallows; Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
3. reSTART, “Our Mission.”
4. Carey, “A Shocker: Partisan Thought.”
5. Shirky, “Why I Just Asked.”
Appendix C
1. Center for Contemplative Mind, http://www.contemplativemind.org/.
2. Association for Mindfulness in Education, http://www.mindfuleducation.org/; Mindfulness in Education Network, http://www.mindfuled.org/.
Appendix D
1. Pang, Digital Distraction; Rheingold, Net Smart; Calvo and Peters, Positive Computing; Gordhamer, Wisdom 2.0, 31.
2. Tan, Search Inside Yourself; Search Inside Yourself, http://siyli.org/;Wisdom 2.0 Conference, http://www.wisdom2summit.com; Eaton, “Apps for Meditation.”
Appendix E
1. “Internet Gaming Disorder,” http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/Internet%20Gaming%20Disorder%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf.
2. Pies, “Should DSM-V Designate”; Winkler et al., “Treatment of Internet Addiction.”
3. Starcevic, “Is Internet Addiction a Useful Concept?” 16, 17.
4. Winkler et al., “Treatment of Internet Addiction,” 318.