This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
We are what we attend to. What we pay attention to drives our behaviour and affects how we feel. We often pay attention to what wethink will make us happy, such as new gadgets, rather than to those stimuli that actually do make us happy, such as old friends. This prevents us from having the happiest experiences in life that we can.
We've all heard about attention deficit disorder. But the modern world is making us all victims of attention distraction disorder.
It is so easy to become addicted to checking emails, Twitter and the Facebook updates of your virtual friends. We just can't seem to help ourselves. In a recent Psychological Science study, when a sample of 205 people was asked seven times a day if they had been able to resist using media when they wanted to, they were unsuccessful nearly half of the time -- a higher failure rate than for all other activities, including drinking coffee, smoking and sex.
Attention distraction disorder is changing our minds and our lives. The brains of heavy internet users shrink, as they do in people who have addictions to cocaine and heroin. Medical doctors have written about digital dementia, irreversible deficits in brain development and memory loss among children who spend a lot of time on electronic devices such as laptops and mobile phones. Technology distracts us even when we're not using it. Perhaps you have experienced what researchers now call phantom vibration syndrome; imagining the sensation of your phone vibrating, only to pick it up and realise that it wasn't doing anything at all.
Technology also encourages us to multitask. Reading something online that is embedded with links makes us more likely to be confused about what we are reading compared to reading printed text -- even when we don't click on the links. If you were asked to complete a sudoku puzzle and a word search, the evidence suggests that you would finish much faster if you did one then the other, rather than flit back and forth between them.
The best medicine for attention distraction disorder is simply to turn off our phones and go offline from time to time. Players of the phone-stacking game (also known as "don't be a dick during meals") agree with me. Before the meal, everyone puts their phone in a pile on the table. Whoever picks up their phone first has to pay the bill. There are even apps to help you stop using apps, such as Freedom, which blocks you from being online.
Our attention is a scarce resource. It is no accident that we use the term "pay attention" in everyday language: when you attend to one stimulus, you pay by not being able to attend to another. It seems that we are generally happier when we pay attention to what we are doing and who we are doing it with: when we are in the flow of an experience. Distraction is an attention thief and it makes you less happy -- find ways of breaking free from the addiction of virtual interaction. You have nothing to lose but your chains of emails, and everything to gain from feeling happier for longer.
Paul Dolan is a professor of behavioural science at the LSE, and author of Happiness by Design.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
