Our Changing Brains

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr calls the Internet “a technology of forgetfulness” and describes how, thanks to the plasticity of our neural pathways, our brains are literally being rewired by digital distraction:
 

The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering.

 
Though we are reading a ton on our devices and screens—we actually read a novel’s worth of words every day—it is not the sort of continuous, sustained, concentrated reading conducive to reflective thinking. Maryanne Wolf argues: “There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests.”
 
Google offers quick answers to any query we might have. But wisdom is not about getting to answers as fast as possible. It’s more often about the journey, the bigger picture, the questions and complications along the way.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Involuntary Attention

Commentators who spend a lot of time fretting about the modern-day “crisis of distraction” rarely seem to grasp the full implications of this. For example, you hear it said that attention is a “finite resource,” and finite it certainly is: according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy Wilson, we’re capable of consciously attending to about 0.0004 percent of the information bombarding our brains at any given moment.
 
But to describe attention as a “resource” is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.
 
The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a trap. When you aim for this degree of control over your attention, you’re making the mistake of addressing one truth about human limitation—your limited time, and the consequent need to use it well—by denying another truth about human limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible. In any case, it would be highly undesirable to be able to do exactly as you wished with your attention. If outside forces couldn’t commandeer at least some of it against your will, you’d be unable to step out of the path of oncoming buses, or hear that your baby was in distress. Nor are the benefits confined to emergencies; the same phenomenon is what allows your attention to be seized by a beautiful sunset, or your eye to be caught by a stranger’s across a room.
 
Neuroscientists call this “bottom-up” or involuntary attention, and we’d struggle to stay alive without it. Yet the capacity to exert some influence over the other part of your attention—the “top-down” or voluntary kind—can make the whole difference between a well-lived life and a hellish one.
 
All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy,” of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

The Folly of Distractibility

In Proverbs, the opposite of wisdom is often personified in a character known as “the forbidden woman.” A woman of “smooth words” (Prov. 2:16–17) whose lips “drip honey” (5:3), she is “loud,” “seductive,” and “sits at the door of her house,” “calling to those who pass by” (9:13–15). A. W. Tozer describes her as “moral folly personified” who “works by the power of suggestion.” 

In today’s world, we see the “forbidden woman” at work through “watch this next!” algorithms that lure us into constant distraction by putting “suggestions” into our minds. Here’s Tozer:
 

Many are brainwashed from nine o’clock in the morning or earlier until the last eyelid flutters shut at night because of the power of suggestion. These people are uncommitted. They go through life uncommitted, not sure in which direction they are going.

The antidote to dangerous distractibility is purpose, focus, and intention. Proverbs 4:25 says, “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.” This is wisdom in contrast to the unwise woman of folly, who “does not ponder the path of life; her ways wander, and she does not know it” (Prov. 5:6).
 
When you go online, ask yourself what you are going online to do. Is there a specific goal? When you open YouTube, is it to watch a specific thing? When you reach for your phone as you wait in line or walk from one place to another, is it for a purpose or just out of habit? When we aren’t going somewhere, we’ll go anywhere—and the “anywheres” of the Internet are rarely good for us. 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

An Unwise Age

Our world has more and more information, but less and less wisdom. More data; less clarity. More stimulation; less synthesis. More distraction; less stillness. More pontificating; less pondering. More opinion; less research. More speaking; less listening. More to look at; less to see. More amusements; less joy. There is more, but we are less. And we all feel it.
 
Our eyes are strained, brains overstimulated, and souls weary. We’re living in an epistemological crisis. It’s hard to know if anything can be reliably known. We are resigned to a new normal where the choice seems to be: trust everything or trust nothing. Or maybe the choice is: trust nothing or trust only in yourself—a seemingly logical strategy, but one that sadly only inflames our epistemological sickness.
 
Generation Z, or iGen as psychologist Jean Twenge has dubbed them, are living their lives through phones. And they are not happier. With lives characterized by ever-present screen time, texting, and social media, iGen has subsequently been defined by rising rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, sleeplessness, and suicidal ideation.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021