Are we losing our ability to concentrate?

[Kuya]

First of all, i, coincidentally, have some school work to do which i've not been doing cause i've been finding as many reasons as possible not to do it, like reading this article!

Why can't we concentrate? | Salon Books

April 29, 2009 | Here's a fail-safe topic when making conversation with everyone from cab drivers to grad students to cousins in the construction trade: Mention the fact that you're finding it harder and harder to concentrate lately. The complaint appears to be universal, yet everyone blames it on some personal factor: having a baby, starting a new job, turning 50, having to use a Blackberry for work, getting on Facebook, and so on. Even more pervasive than Betty Friedan's famous "problem that has no name," this creeping distractibility and the technology that presumably causes it has inspired such cris de coeur as Nicholas Carr's much-discussed "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" essay for the Atlantic Monthly and diatribes like "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future," a book published last year by Mark Bauerlein.

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy," he wrote. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." For my own part, I now find it challenging to sit still on my sofa through the length of a feature film. The urge to, for example, jump up and check the IMDB filmography of a supporting actor is well-nigh irresistible, and once I'm at the computer, why not check e-mail? Most of the time, I'll wind up pausing the DVD player before the end of the movie and telling myself I'll watch the rest tomorrow.

Each of us knows many more people and facts than our counterparts of 100 years ago; it's just that the importance of those people and facts remains somewhat uncertain. Knowing a little bit about Lindsay Lohan and Simon Cowell (two people I recognize despite having no active interest in either one) can't really be equated with knowing a bit about Marie Curie or Lord Mountbatten. We have more information, but it isn't necessarily more valuable information.

There are excellent reasons for this. In the conditions under which humanity evolved, threats had the greatest salience; individuals who spotted and eluded dangers before they went chasing after rewards tended to live long enough to pass on their traits to future generations. As a result, we inherited from our distant ancestors the tendency to pay greater attention to the unpleasant and troublesome elements of our surroundings, even when those elements have evolved from real menaces, like a crocodile in the reeds, to largely insignificant ones like nasty anonymous postings in a Web discussion.

Likewise, our interest is grabbed by movement, bright colors, loud noises and novelty -- all qualities associated with potential meals or threats in a natural setting; we are hard-wired to like the shiny. The attention we bring to bear on less exciting objects and activities, where the payoff may be long-term rather than immediate, requires a conscious choice. This is the kind of attention that opens into complex, nuanced and creative thought, but it tends to get swamped by the more urgent demands of the reactive system unless we exert ourselves to overcome our instincts. The reflective system flourishes best when the environment is relatively free of bells and whistles screaming "Delicious fruit up here!" or "Large animal approaching over there!"

If you're like most people, you will keep checking for new e-mail despite the unresolved messages that await in your inbox. The already-read messages may even deal with urgent matters like an impatient question from your boss or appealing subjects like possible vacation rentals, yet there's something lackluster about them compared to what might be wending its way to you over the Internet right this minute.

The fact that sensationalism sells is hardly news, but less well-known is the fact that a constant diet of reactive-system stimuli has the potential to alter our very brains. The plasticity of the brain, scientists concur, is much greater than was once thought. New brain-imaging technologies have demonstrated that people consistently called upon to use one aspect of their mental toolbox -- the famously well-oriented London cabbies, for example -- show enhanced blood flow to and development of those parts of the brain devoted to, say, spatial cognition.

As long as we remain only dimly aware of the dueling attention systems within us, the reactive will continue to win out over the reflective. We'll focus on discussion-board trolls,(I'm not a troll, btw!) dancing refinancing ads, Hollywood gossip and tweets rather than on that enlightening but lengthy article about the economy or the novel or film that has the potential to ravish our souls. Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold! Over time, our brains will adapt themselves to these activities and find it more and more difficult to switch gears.

Ridiculously true in my case, i remember how i used to be able to focus on things easily, but now sometimes i rent a movie and i don't even make an effort to watch it (i did this with Sin City). Other times i rent a game and i don't even care to finish it, i even bought Last Remnant and have not played it in months, not really for lack of time. I can hardly focus on my studies and reading material and considering that i study psychology, it is a major nuisance. I used to think that i was just being really lazy and had to focus more, but then i started noticing that almost everybody i talk to in the Uni has practically the same inability to focus on school work and just procrastinates like there's no tomorrow.

Do you guys think you fall into this procrastinator generation, or are you an exception? What do you think makes us so incapable of finishing things or even starting them?

[zoobernut]

I got halfway through all the quotes and then skipped to the bottom...

[Neoburai]

read the title, hummm this could be interesting
click
tl;dr
wait 5 sec...
...fuck

[SDSD]

Not really old news, but not new either.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

And another great link, http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf.

Personally, I take great pains to read for at least an hour a day. No music, no tv, no background noise. Just me and a book or a magazine. It might be a paper by PI assigned, or one of my math textbooks, FourFourTwo if I'm lazy, but it keeps me sharp.

[Kuya]

I got halfway through all the quotes and then skipped to the bottom...

Funny enough, i only realized that would happen after the fact, so i bolded the most interesting parts. ENJOY

[Akiyama]

Funny enough, i only realized that would happen after the fact, so i bolded the most interesting parts. ENJOY

Losing* Kuya. It's losing. I don't know how to "loose" concentration, but I do think we may be losing it. With so much shit that can go on around us, it'd be hard to concentrate on one thing. For instance, I have TV in the background, music on the computer, I'm doing some hand-written righting in a notebook, and I'm posting this all at the same time. It's hard for me to concentrate one one thing at a time, so yeah. I do think with the amount of things that you could do at the same time, it could cause a lack of concentration.

[Shalyn]

Is 'loosing' a play on words here? Hehe..
Anyway I do find it hard to concentrate, and it used to be just with things that I really wasn't interested in, but even now with things that I am I just can't sit and relax. Since I was really young I have been an avid reader, and now I find it hard to even pick up a book. I chalked it up to too many years in uni as an English specialist (way too many books), but since getting my laptop it's even harder to get anything non-internet related done. If I can use it I'll sit there and randomly check things while I'm working. If I don't use it or it isn't around, I'm constantly thinking of things I should do when next I'm on... and then forget to do them XD

[Shenrien]

read the title, hummm this could be interesting
click
tl;dr
wait 5 sec...
...fuck

^ this

[Dimmauk]

Funny enough, i only realized that would happen after the fact, so i bolded the most interesting parts. ENJOY

Bolding has no effect on my A.D.D.

[Tomk]

I would like to pose the exact opposite. The internet is the only place for original content of any type. Movies are rehashed shit, TV and books... rehashed shit. We've been there and done that. If anything the diversity of the entertainment on the internet plays well with the current vacuum of interesting content.

[Jefe]

I'd assume you meant "losing"? Quick, to the spam forum and make a spin off thread!

[0ni0n]

Adderall XR

[zoobernut]

Dammit! I had a huge long relevant post written out and stupid FF crashed and I lost it all.

In short I was going to say that my concentration level really depends on the situation and what I am trying to concentrate on. I can still concentrate very well I just usually choose not to because most stuff is boring to me.

[Kuya]

Need a mod to fix that title eventually, and as for the topic, i also find that i can't always concentrate on porn, sometimes i just skip along till i find really interesting parts.

[0ni0n]

By the way, i am curious, anyone on the forum has ADD?

[Phla]

I can't concentrate in school and end up playing games on my laptop or sleeping, but i believe that is more along the lines of senioritis then a problem with my concentration. though, kuya, i agree with what you posted... a lot of people just give up on thinking about things halfway nowadays (see: taking those plane pictures in NYC, way to go government!). a lot of people who i know can't honestly sit down and concentrate - a lot of the time this can be seen with people watching tv or something, its semi-rare for me and my friends to actually sit down and fully watch a show without thinking "hmm, this is boring, wonder what else is on.." and changing the channel over and over....

...and shit i forgot where i was going with this, oh well.

[Epical]

Fixed the title for you. =P

[zoobernut]

I don't think I have ever actually watched a porno... I just skip to certain parts.

It is weird sometimes my concentration is too high like when I am reading a book that I like I completely shut out my awareness of the outside world.

People can come up to me and have full conversations with me and I will answer and everything but I will have no recollection of it, I only remember reading the book.

That happens with anything that I am super concentrating on.

Other times my mind will not focus and I jump from thing to thing and my mind wanders through topics in a very non-sequitur way.

[Brien]

It depends on the circumstance, I can easily read an interesting book or article, but for instance, I have made it through have my note cards of studying, and something inside me tells me to refresh the bg page and randomly click on interesting threads, thus a lack of concentration.

[Tomk]

Human's general knowledge base is larger than it ever has been. We don't have the intellectual luxury of concentrating on small mundane things anymore and if we did, the relative value of the mundane has been significantly decreased by the greater knowledge base.

I respect that the "old timers" of my profession could learn specific tasks at a much higher level than I have the luxury of today, but they could because that was all that was known at the time.

This is an evolution of the brain, not a retardation.