This article was taken from the February 2013 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.
A phone heralds the arrival of a text message with a fabulous buzzing. The computer dings when an email has hit your inbox. Your Facebook page pops up a new red alert. Your Twitter feed does whatever it is that Twitter feeds do, drawing your mind to any number of stories and announcements in the course of a second. What is it you were saying again? Or thinking or working on?
In a world as loud as ours, it's hard not to get distracted.
Although the problem is far from new -- even the Benedictine monks complained of not being able to focus -- the modern environment plays into our brain's predilection for mind-wandering in uncanny fashion. Neurologist Marcus Raichle has spent most of his career looking at our brain's so-called resting state -- and what he has discovered is that, in that default state, the last thing our minds are doing is resting. Instead, they remain suspended in a state of ever-ready engagement, a baseline activation that constantly gathers information from the environment, flitting from stimulus to stimulus to see which might be important enough to warrant our attention. In other words, our minds are made to wander.
Nothing plays into that propensity more than our predilection for multitasking. It's as if the modern world has realised how best to capture our brain's constant willingness to engage in whatever salient thing comes along. But not only is such constant attentional wandering counterproductive -- recent studies have shown that heavy media multitaskers are actually worse at the very thing they should be good at, task switching -- it also makes us unhappy. An engaged mind is a happy mind; a wandering one, not so much. In feeding the multitasking frenzy, not only are we less productive, but we become less satisfied.
What to do? How to manage it all and still be at our best, our most alert and engaged? The answer comes from an unlikely-seeming source: Sherlock Holmes. Early on in the Holmes stories, the detective distinguishes the process of seeing from that of observing: he and Watson might experience the exact same stimuli, but they don't actually process them in the same fashion. Where Watson just sees, without actually engaging his attention in any meaningful fashion, Holmes observes: he chooses, mindfully and deliberately, where to direct his attention -- or not, as the case may be. Watson lets the default network do whatever it is that it does; Holmes has trained it to respond to very specific stimuli, in very specific fashion.
The result? Watson doesn't actually take note of much of anything in his environment, not the flow of his thoughts nor the way that a pretty face or a sunny day might be affecting his thinking. Instead, he floats superficially from stimulus to stimulus, letting each input passively affect his brain with little knowledge on his part of what is happening or why. Holmes, on the other hand, knows exactly what the multiple demands on his attention are, and consciously chooses to attend to some stimuli and not to others. He knows exactly what is affecting him, and how, and is able to recall where he was looking, what he was thinking, what he was experiencing, and what it all means.
The difference between Holmes and Watson is that of mindfulness versus mindlessness, engagement versus disengagement. Watson's path is the natural one, the one our brain takes if we are passive.
Holmes's is the more effortful -- the active decision to engage with certain elements of the environment and not with others. Our untrained brain is Watsonian. It sees, but does not observe. It registers, but does not process. It multitasks, without getting the richness of experience in any of the single tasks that makes up its multitasking.
Successful thought is about more than taking in and processing information. It is also about learning to pay attention, choosing what to pay attention to and how deeply to pay attention to it. The world won't quieten down. If anything, it will get louder. But maybe we can learn to quiet ourselves down instead, controlling our attention and our environment instead of letting it control us.
Maria Konnikova is a writer based in New York. Her first book, Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Canongate), is published this month
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
