Technology & The Weakening Of Our Ability To Focus

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One of the crucial mental faculties that we possess is the ability to direct, control, and sustain our attention. It is what Daniel Goleman in his book, Focus calls "the hidden driver of excellence." While Winifred Gallagher in her book, Rapt describing it as:

. . .your life – who you are, what you think, feel and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on...If you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents, but a work of art.
Winifred Gallagher

Focusing on the right things is crucial, our ability to focus is like a muscle; exercise it well and its strength will grow, abuse it and it will wither.

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What is happening currently though, is that the majority of us are continually violating our focus muscle, the largest culprit of all these being the excessive use of modern technologies. In this case smartphones, social media, and the internet. And this is happening with many of us not being even aware.

Whenever we choose to pursue a cognitively demanding goal, our success on the goal is dependent on how we deal with what is called goal interference. As psychologist Larry Rosen and neuroscientist Adam Gazzley explain in their publication, The Distracted Mind:

Goal interference occurs when you reach a decision to accomplish a specific goal...and something takes place to hinder the successful completion of that goal. The interference can either be generated internally, presenting as thoughts within your mind, or generated externally, by sensory stimuli such as a restaurant chatter, beeps, vibrations, or flashing visual displays.

Goal interference has always been something humans have had to deal with, but with the rise of modern technologies, there has been the creation of a situation where we now have to deal with far more distractions than ever before.

The most harmful impact of technological interference being the weakening of our quality of performance and our mental faculties required for sustained focus, this resulting from the fact that our brain cannot multi-task.

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Especially for cognitively demanding tasks, trying to multi-task leads to the shift of attention from one task to the other, which is represented to the brain by an alternation between the different neural networks which control these different actions - a process known as neural network shifting.

Frequent neural shifting especially such as the one caused by the interference from modern technologies comes at a significant cost. As Rosen and Gazzley explain:

This failure of our brain to truly multitask at a neural level represents a major limitation in our ability to manage our goals. The process of neural network switching is associated with a decrease in accuracy, often for both tasks, and a time delay compared to doing one task at a time. . . You can think of these costs as the price you pay for trying to do more than one thing at a time.

What saddens me the most is that many of us still remain oblivious of the effects these technologies are having on us, I mean don't get me wrong, technology has led to the realization of better ways of doing very many things, but technologies such as social media networks are doing more damage than good.

Using a passage in the book, Deep Work written by Cal Newport to conclude:

These [social media] services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They are just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they are a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper. Or maybe social media tools are at the core of your existence. You won’t know either way until you sample life without them.
Cal Newport

@peeterx